Streamline Communication, Reduce Time and Increase Process Performance in Retail Procurement
With strict deadlines and KPI’s to fulfill, procurement activities become intensively stressful and can generate re-work and additional effort. Additionally, the impact into the warehouse management process and retail shop distribution process adds to the overall business problem. Automation of procurement can immediately eliminate re-work and additional effort, speed up resolution times and contribute positively to the target KPI’s.
KEY POINTS
Automation ensures a simplified and controlled communication and exchange between the company and third-parties. Based on logging of all entities activities, the system generates scoring, applies business rules during process activities and aids the users in the decision-making process.
Main Pains
- Extensive time and effort is required to complete the procurement process.
- A team of up to 20 employees is involved in the evaluation and negotiation of partner offers in order to complete the acquisition of required quantity and quality of goods necessary on a daily basis
- Completing the acquisition process for more than 1500 tons of products per week and distributing the product quantities on warehouses corresponding to the real needs of the retail shops takes currently more than 4 working days and therefore requires overtime and generates additional rework effort
- The process is excessively dependent on employees’ training, experience, accuracy, and attention to detail
- There is a negative impact on other business processes waiting for input from procurement results
Solution
The system automatically generates tenders and RFO at predetermined period of times or on demand. The entire tender flow steps are monitored through detailed information and system KPI’s.
Embedded business rules, pertaining to the company internal business procedures, automatically notify and aid the users in the decision-making process.
The system integrates with third-party software ensuring all relevant data is accessible immediately in 0ther impacted business processes.
Benefits
Once implemented, the solution provided significant time and cost savings because:
- The automated processing now provides timely information and process KPIs that significantly help the user in the decision process.
- process communication internally and with third parties has improved by more than 60% through the use of automation.
- Need of overtime has been reduced to zero, all activities are performed during working hours.
- Most of the exceptions, usually due to partner delays or errors, are now immediately notified and can be easily addressed within the system and in the proposed time-frame.