Many organizations have limited or poorly designed project procurement processes. This often leads to selecting the vendor/product that does not fully meet project needs. The result is a project that fails or faces some serious challenges. What can be done to help rectify a situation like this?
It all starts with a solid repeatable process and an understanding of historical and future purchases. Often times, organizations will have a process they try to fit every vendor, good or service they purchase into or an antiquated process or system developed years ago.
Rock Pine Partners often starts not by looking at the current processes, but by helping clients analyze past and expected future purchases and categorizing them into key classifications and sub categories based on common attributes. This taxonomy approach often yields very different purchase streams with very different goals, requirements and expertise required to make purchasing decisions. The next step frequently is the development of core processes that apply to all or some of the purchase streams and an understanding of where unique purchase streams start and end as well as a plan to best address both the similar and different purchase stream processes.
That's just the start, the real impact begins when the processes are implemented using the latest tools and techniques, monitored and adjusted over time for maximum impact. At a project level the positive impacts frequently seen are an increase in quality, lower cost and shortened schedules all due to the fact that the right vendors, products and services were selected.
Project procurement processes are often overlooked in an organization and they shouldn't be, their impact influences almost every area of an organization.
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