Many organisations have a slow down through festive seasons as many people head off on holidays and the volume of work often slows. So if you’re lucky enough to be working during a quite time, what procurement tasks can you do to take advantage of the extra flexibility and set yourself up for when the pace picks up again?
When going to market for the provision of new goods or services, we are aiming to get the best deal we can and often in the shortest possible time, but are these two objectives mutually exclusive? Can you expect the best outcomes when you minimise the vendors response time? Does the market engagement model you currently use to engage the market often result in catching the suppliers unprepared and unable to provide a good response?
I’ve seen a lot of guides and presentations outlining, sometimes in great detail, what it takes to write a good criteria for an invitation document, but who can remember all of that. In reality, you can break it down into three areas of consideration. What do I want supplied; How will I know a supplier has it; How will I assess their responses.
A critical function of any contracts and procurement process management solution is to generate a unique identifier for each process and contract. I cannot stress enough how important it is to allocate an identifier to a process and to use it for all communications regarding the process and the contract, both internally and externally. Why? Because loss of clarity in communications can result in regrettable errors. In addition to that, if you are managing more than a couple of processes and contracts, tremendous efficiency is gained when you include a direct relationship between a communication, document, record and a process or contract. Often the ID’s are generated manually by looking at the last number used and adding one, but this can result in duplications through accidentally re-entering the same number and potential inconsistencies through data entry errors. You may mean to type CAT-112 and instead you type CAT-121. Nine numbers have been skipped, which can be confusing, and you may have actually recorded CAT-112 on all your documents and folders. So in this blog we’ll look at a method in our Advanced Excel Contracts Manager to automatically generate and ID using Excel and a bit of VBA.
The array variable provides an opportunity to significantly boost the performance of Excel in processing large data sets and they are surprisingly easy to use. In a recent project, I implemented an array variable and allowed the code run nearly 10 times faster. If you need to manipulate large data sets and your code is running slower than you would like, take a look at this solution.
I was presented with an excellent challenge by one of my clients a couple of weeks back. They had established a contractual arrangement with twenty providers that contained an effective suite of KPIs for measuring and managing performance, but sadly lacked the ability to capture and report on those KPIs. Next they developed a nifty Excel workbook for the vendors to complete and provide their data, but the workbook was made up of seventeen different worksheets and each was in a different layout designed to make data entry easy. It did not make reporting easy though and the is where I come in.
Competitive dialogue is an approach to market that is somewhat akin to parallel negotiation, but instead of hashing out the finer points of the final contract, the aim is to have the market refine the specification before it is published to invite final offers. It utilises the additional parameters of shared intellectual property and a collaborative process in a controlled environment that retains competitive tension through to the signing of the final contract. First written into European procurement regulations in 2006, the methodology has become a preferred method of market engagement for complex projects in the UK and it is now written into the procurement policies in New Zealand, but it is largely unheard of in Australia. The process is designed for the strictly regulated public sector procurement environment of Europe, but is there something to be learned for other environments?
I have found that generally ten concurrent procurement projects of varying complexity per practitioner is about the upper limit of being able to ensure enough focus is placed on each job. Right now though, with the combination of team members being on leave and the new year projects kicking off, I find myself with closer to 30 concurrent jobs. As I was attempting to review a complex plan, I could see the Outlook popups fading in and out in an almost constant stream. I likened it to sitting in a boat under a waterfall trying to bail it out with a thimble. So what tactics can we use to manage these periods of intense overload?
Spreadsheets are a powerful and commonly used tool in procurement. Whether used to track what contracts we have, calculate cost, score evaluations or tracking projects. However, few Excel workbooks in procurement really leverage the full power and possibilities of Excel. With just a basic knowledge of the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language, you can turn your Excel workbook, into an Excel Application with functionality you never considered possible in a spreadsheet. This is the first in a series of blogs covering the development and use of an Excel Application to build a Advanced Excel Contracts Manager for managing Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM).