Automate Procurement Workflows

See how ProjecTools helps teams define and automate procurement workflows so requisitions and POs are always technically and commercially acceptable,

Automate Procurement Workflows

Global projects and a global teams present a real (and costly) problem for companies that manage engineering, legal, and commercial projects for clients. At the heart of the client relationship is quality work, but falling near to quality is the efficiency and integration a company can achieve to deliver quality. In engineering procurement construction (EPC) and construction projects, quality can be achieved without proper communication, workflows, and processes. Unfortunately this is a painful process that damages the contractor’s reputation. Which is why leading companies are automating things like procurement workflows to ensure quality is achieved without blowing the budget or looking like a bunch of clowns.

Automate Procurement Workflows

Today we’re going to talk about how to define and automate procurement workflows and what that can do for your procurement operation. We’ll also talk about what the consequences are if you don’t do that.

Let’s jump right in and take a look at some of the academic problems that procurement teams face. From an academic level, poor engineering definition or poor specificity or what you’re looking to purchase is going to pose some serious problems. Same thing with commercial definitions. Also, poor estimates lead to basically poor purchases and going over budget. Then the lack of consistent reporting. A company called Independent Project Analysis, they say that if you can’t report biweekly at discipline and PO level, you’re more likely to go over budget and over schedule. To the tune of 10% and 14% respectively.

Let’s move on to some more real world problems. Out there right now, we have a really price focused climate. It takes a really long time to move the purchase order from an engineering requisition to an actual purchase order where it’s in the supplier’s hand and they’re working on it. It’s taking too long.

PO development is way too labor intensive and this gets into more workflows. Like you don’t where the PO development is going or how to get there or have any mile stones. It’s really tough to build a solid PO for major equipment without wasting a huge amount of time and money if there aren’t the proper checks and balances – also known as automated procurement workflows. Another problem is constantly rewriting the book on how you create your requisitions and issue POs. If you don’t have repeatable process for different types of things you purchase, you’re going to have a bad time.

Then the ability to commit to standards and templates. This is kind of like constantly rewriting the book here if you are doing this, you don’t have automated procurement workflows. You want to have some standards and templates that you can apply to certain types of procurement packages to make your lives easier and move things along more quickly and produce consistent work. Another problem is siloed teams and information. If you have a workflow that integrates these siloed team and information and runs review and approval workflows to the right people. Gets the right people involved at the right time. You’re going to be sitting in a much better spot.

Then on non-integrated data and applications, that’s a real life problem everybody, at one point or another, faces. Where they’re trying to find information and they can not. These are some real life problems that procurement folks face. A lot of these can really easily be solved by having the right system that will integrate key data at the right time while automating procurement workflows.

What we’re going to talk about today is taking control of and automating procurement workflows. The first thing that we’re going to talk about is categories. You probably purchase a lot of items. Some of you may purchase very few items. You’ve got to look for commonalities in your items and develop categories and then develop workflows that make sense for the specific categories. If you’re buying a bunch of bolts, that category should be different. Or the workflow in that category should be different than if you’re buying buildings, so to speak.

Each should have a different level of engineering definition and commercial definition and different amounts of checks and controls. Some examples of where you can start out in your workflow is in engineering requisition. Things you want to ensure here and automate in this workflow is that the engineers define the pieces of equipment. Group them into line items and maybe indicate some suppliers that are technically acceptable for a requisition. Similar with requests for quote, you want to have some workflows that integrate your engineering requisitions and make sure that the required key data is there in the request for quote. Such as engineering documents and commercial terms and so forth. Before it goes out to bidders. Once the bidders get their hands on the requisition, there’s a workflow that they have to follow. Such as acknowledging a requisition, downloading the technical documents before filling in the bid and so forth.

moving away from automating procurement workflows really quickly. You also want to have some transparency as to where they’re at in their workflow when they’re bidding. Moreover, you also want to have some workflows when it comes to evaluation and award. You want to make sure that, when you do evaluate something, that everybody who needs to evaluate the package from a technical or commercial standpoint has actually looked at it and done the work. Before you award a PO or a bid. Similarly, you probably want to have some workflows that will insure that all of the data is correct before you actually convert into a PO.

At ProjecTools, we do actually have a procurement application here, and I’m going to show you basically all those automated procurement workflows we talked about in the context of ProjecTools application. Even if you don’t use ProjecTools, or you don’t want to use ProjecTools, it’s still going to be useful to pay attention because we’ll show you basically what to look for and you can be able to articulate what you are looking for. In procurement workflows to another software vendor to consultants and so forth.

We think we have the best solution here, because we standardized the procurement framework templates, lists and categories. We have workflow that insure packages are complete and correct before they progress onto the next step. Those are configurable in the system. Workflows that get timely feedback from the right people. Then there’s accountability and visibility in the application, so things get done.

Let’s take a look. I’m going to show you ProjecTools application and we’re going to see how ProjecTools uses standardized templates, lists, and categories and workflows, workflows, workflows and accountability to get things done. The first thing I want to show you all is purchasing setup.

When you go through your setup process, you want to be able to define things, like global lists and templates. I’ll just show you a couple here. Let’s take a look at the global categories and workflow. I mentioned categories a couple times before. This is the screen in ProjecTools, this is like really the money shot here. Where you can build all of your workflows by category. You can see here that if you’re buying major equipment, you have to get engineers involved. You have to get commercial teams involved, and they have to do routings for review and approval and go through all of the steps before they issue POs. However, if you’re just doing services, you might not need engineering here. You just might need a lot of commercial work.

If you’re buying something very easy, like bowls or staplers for the office. Obviously a ridiculous thing, but … Staplers, right? You can pick up a quick PO, over here, just at the RFP section. Basically add your commercial notes in here and then issue a PO to your supplier or your vendor.

This is a good way to … This is like the industry standard here for developing workflows by category. Each requisition gets the right amount of attention. The next thing I want to show you is global approval lists. When you have workflows the system can generally check some things and say, “Hey, there’s no data in this particular field.” You probably got to go check on that, since this is this type of procurement category. However, for a more thorough check, ProjecTools is going to basically facilitate the review and approval progress. You can incorporate your managers, maybe even your clients, into the review process. Put their stamp of approval on your requisitions before they go out to bid or before their issue goes to PO.

Here’s where you can define the defaults here and make sure that the right people are going to have that stamp of approval to apply to your requisitions and POs. Now, I also wanted to show you the global center bid form. This is not really related to workflows, but if you have a standard bid form, you can build that out. Your suppliers, they can see basically the same thing every time they log in and that gives a lot of consistency from their end. Which they appreciate and they probably need. That works better for you guys because you can get very consistent bids back from all of your suppliers. For each requisition or even all of your bids can look very similar when they come back to you.

Cool, so let’s jump into the project set up here. Another thing that you want to make standard or a lot of people want to make standard is the commercial documents. Just your terms and conditions sheet for doing business with you. Also approve of suppliers is definitely a part of a workflow. If they’re not on the approve supplier list, they can not participate in procurement for specific things. That is definitely part of the workflow. Then standard line items.

If you have different types of equipment, you can define standard line items. A lot of things will have warranties, maintenance, technical documents, etc. Rather than adding these in for every single procurement package, you can just apply the global standard line items to the project standard line items or the category specific line items and basically save a lot of typing and prevent any fat fingering. You can progress things more quickly through your procurement workflow.

All right, so let’s get out of here and get into the meat and potatoes. Over here, we’re in the requisition manager. This is where people or your buyers would basically initiate requests for quote. Here’s that screen and then manage the requisitions as they get built out. Let’s take a look at a specific one. All right. I’m going to direct your attention here to the top. See this red box here? This tells me where I’m at in my workflow. I’ve added enough general information, enough planning and so forth than I can issue a routing. Which is basically sending it out for review and approval. We go to the routing. I can see that’s been sent to a couple people. Marcus [Felds 00:11:58], the reviewer. Eric Morey, myself, is a reviewer. Then this thing’s due back at some date.

I can tell by this red box here and then this red approval that approval has not been granted. It hasn’t been progressed past that step. I want to show you what that would look like. After you release procurement package for review and approval, whoever is reviewing or approving would find that particular task in their task manager. Here’s the RFQ approval, we can see that is that heat exchange and responsible buyer’s mark is filled. He’s probably going to need to take a look at this. We can see that I’ve acknowledged this. We can see that he’s acknowledged this and that he can see some instructions to bidder. He can review those. He can review all of the technical documents associated with this particular requisition. He can see all of the line items. Make sure all of them make sense and are correct. He can also see the application summary and make sure that all this is formatted correctly.

Finally, he can see who is going to be bidding on this particular requisition. Depending on what he sees in this task here, he can enter some comments and then give it a task status. He can say it’s pending, haven’t done it yet, rejected. Try again, basically. Or he can approve it and make some comments and approve it as noted.

After that, it would basically flow back here and you’d say that it’s approved, basically, as noted. Then the buyer can click the approved here and then progress this thing on out through the workflow, which is issuing the requisition of bidders and evaluating the bid and completing the RFQ process and so forth.

That, in itself, is pretty spectacular workflow. Let’s dive a little bit deeper into issue here. Okay, so after we’ve sent this out to our bidders, we can keep track of what they’ve been doing. Especially if we use our online supplier page tool. Which runs suppliers through their own workflow, but here’s how we can track with our workflow.

I can see that all three of my bidders have acknowledged … One of my bidders has acknowledged receipt of this particular bid and they said that they were going to give me a quote back by whatever date that is. I can manage extensions in here and so forth. It’s a good way to have some visibility into your supplier’s process. If they do enter no bids, they have to enter a reason, so you can go and fix the problem and get them back on the bid list. As far as requisitions, when you get a purchase order, there’s some workflows here involved as well. We took a look at those earlier on the workflow by category screen and how to build that out.

All right, so I kept it quick this week and I showed you guys how to make standardized lists, templates, and categories, etc. You can build your workflow around in including those things. I showed you a lot of workflows, review and approval, workflows for progressing things and workflows for making sure all of the data is there and complete. Before it gets handed over to another group. I’ve also showed you some accountability and visibility. You can see who’s doing what in your procurement process, so you can track that process and make sure things get done.

There are more workflows and definitely more things, more aspects to procurement. If you want to get any deeper in this, go fill in a demo form on our website and we’ll give you a personalized demo and answer your questions in a one on one setting.

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Supplier Management for oil gas and construction

Supplier Management for O&G, EPC, and Capital Construction

Suppliers fill a hugely important role in O&G, EPC, Architecture, and Construction projects and supplier performance can affect profitability, schedule, and quality. So the stakes are high in terms of supplier management.

Since it is so important to make sure suppliers perform and deliver on-time with high quality deliverables, buyers and procurement groups should use three key strategies in their supplier management approach.

In the meeting, we will discuss the three strategies and how to implement them, which ultimately will improve accountability, quality, timeliness, and profitability.

Transmittal Management Demo Transcript

Welcome to ProjecTools Supplier Management for oil and gas and construction etcetera. That etcetera on there is any company that has a supply chain where they have to issue bids and manage requisitions and collect bids back from suppliers and manage PO’s or transmit technical documents. There’s a lot of industries that can benefit from the supplier management demo, not just oil and gas construction. Let’s get started here. Let’s talk about some ideas around supplier management that are really helpful and really make a difference for buyers, engineering groups, managers, project managers, etcetera.

When you have supplier driven project such as oil and gas construction and so forth, having a great supply chain is going to improve the quality of your assets that your building or making, or producing or selling. Part of supplier management is having an effective supply chain and that means effective communication. Where you’re going to start with that is integrating these suppliers into your process. Whatever that looks like for your company, you should think about ways to do it. If you have a lot of engineering and design work, that means integrating the suppliers into the review and approval work flows so you can get their markups earlier in the process rather than later after you’ve issued a PO to working through any issues before they become huge issues and change orders. You can avoid change orders by integrating suppliers in your system. You can also avoid a lot of slips too.

Another thing to think about surrounding supplier management is commercial and technical queries. As you go back and forth, you want to have an integrated approach to managing queries. That doesn’t mean frequent emails back and forth. That means like a totally segmented communication media that will collect all of these queries that go back and forth and segment them per purchased equipment. Having emails going back and forth that reference five different requisitions or PO’s, that’s not very easy to manage and things get confusing. Mistakes get made and then change orders and delays and penalties and poor quality happens. You want to avoid all that if your aim is improving supplier management.

Let’s take a look into some of the problems with supplier management. We’ve kind of talked about the ideal world where your suppliers are integrated into your process and your system and your philosophy, but what are the problems that present themselves as barriers to make that happen? A lot of companies us paper based or electronic systems, relying on pen, paper and manual processes for supplier management. That’s tough because you can’t search for things electronically and it just takes a lot of time. You have to hire couriers to deliver things. That’s totally how people did it 30 years ago. You’d probably think that at least, but some people actually still do that today – and it is a supplier management nightmare. If you can take anything away from this and you’re still doing that, it’s quit using the paper-based supplier management system, get an electronic system that allows you to transmit things instantly and search for items that have gone back and forth. That’s seriously the bare minimum supplier management approach.

he other problems with supplier management is that suppliers give us the runaround. Good or bad, it is what it is. Your suppliers will try and cover their tracks and anything negative that happens throughout interactions or throughout our process, they’re going to try and make it your fault so they don’t get penalized. If you don’t have a good supplier management system to track the communication and what they’re doing and how they’re contributing to the process, and how they plug in, you open yourself up to getting the runaround.

Another supplier management problem is numbering confusion or vision confusion, etcetera. This is just general confusion stuff that a lot of folks go through because they don’t integrate suppliers into whatever sort of system that they use to manage requisitions and documents and so forth. Revision confusion, this is really tougher on suppliers. If they don’t have the latest revision, they don’t know what they’re supplying you, they don’t know what they’re building, et cetera. That’s going to result in change orders and poor quality, or even scraping the whole piece of equipment, or whatever you’re purchasing because it does not work for the application. This is another case of bad supplier management that I see all the time. It has been the norm for so many years that the downsides to this problematic approach to supplier management goes unnoticed.

Among the most painful supplier management problems are that even folks using an application that is supposed to solve supplier management problems can’t really get feedback on drawings, terms, et cetera. They can’t corral a correspondence or get standardized bids back. They can’t make easy comparisons among supplier’s bids in competitive bid situation. You want to have apples to apples bids so you can compare them easily. Finally, the last supplier management problem is it’s very difficult to find a system that will track all of the supplier participation. What they’re doing, give you some visibility into the progress that they’re making and things that they’re doing and make it reportable. When you face all these problems, you don’t have an integrated supplier network. Your supply chain is operating purely based on chance and the good will of your suppliers. Let’s take a look at some things you can do to fix this and break the problematic supplier management practices. This is not earth shattering stuff. It’s all actually pretty easy to implement. Let’s go take a look at some of these real world things.

The best solution to solving these problems is getting suppliers and subs working in your system. This should be pretty obvious. If you don’t have a supplier management system or an application to manage these things, go get one. There’s a lot of really good ones out there. We have one. I’m going to show it to you here in a little bit and how we manage all this. Number two, you want to get suppliers and subs working as a part of your team. You want to integrate them in everything that you reasonably can. If it makes sense to include them on a review and approval, do it. Treat them like part of the team. Ask them for their opinions. If they supply something to you, chance are that the supply it to somebody else. They really know that area and they have expertise, in a detailed level of expertise that you guys might not have. It’s really good to pick their brain systematically.

The third thing is move the interface of suppliers into a single system as some work flows. I mentioned email before and even couriers, send letters and so forth. Don’t do any of that. Pick that application, integrate them into your software system and then make sure all of the interactions happen within that system. Even one step further, segment all of that interaction based on the requisition or the PO that the correspondence is about. Number four, you want to have accountability and visibility so things get done. This is pretty obvious with an email based system where you’re just shooting emails back and forth, or phone calls, or couriers, there’s a lot of time lapse there. The suppliers are sending you what they think you want to see in an email. They can build this façade of things that are going perfectly, but if they’re working in your system as a team member, you can really see the progress that they’re making and the things that they’re doing. You’re not going to have some sort of Wizard of Oz situation with the guy behind the mirror, who’s not actually anything special.

Now I want to take you in to look at ProjecTools application. The first thing I want to show you is ProjecTools Supplier Manager. This is just basically a directory. Let’s take a look at one particular supplier. We allow you to manage a bunch of information about the suppliers here. You have their basic info, their regions, the services they offer, commercial codes, PO descriptions that they’re approved to handle, manufactures that they work with and contacts within the companies themselves. Let’s take a look at this. You can have the individual contact’s address. You can make them user logins. I’m going to show you the interface that they see and how they interact with your company here in a minute.

You can see the open tasks that they have that haven’t been done. You can see when they’re due, so you can really maintain some accountability in here. We can see that this supplier data Transmittal hasn’t been responded to in two years here, but the other one, they’re on track with this requisition. You can also see requisitions that are assigned to this particular contact and PO’s and so forth. You want to have a nice system like this where you can have some sort of rating system as well, to judge your suppliers on. Rating and ranking your suppliers based on an empirical system.

Basically just use your supplier management scoring system and then convert useful datapoints into a score and put it in here. You can also keep track of whether this supplier’s qualified or not qualified. This is good supplier management, especially if you have unqualified people that keep trying to bid on your stuff. You can quickly go and see that they’re not qualified for whatever reason so you don’t have to waste a bunch of time trying to see if they meet the mark. You’ve already done the work, why do it twice?

The next thing I want to show you is the supplier side of supplier management, what your suppliers see and how they interact with your projects and your data and so forth. This is that supplier we looked at and those are the few things we say this task is late from two years ago. This one’s on time. I’ve built a requisition and the back end on the buyer’s side. I issued it out to this particular supplier for them to bid on it. Let’s take a look at what that looks like. Right away, we can see there’s a bunch of information and when this thing’s due. That’s important. We can also see that there’s an acknowledgment, so if the supplier opens it up, they can acknowledge it formally. The acknowledgment flows back to the buyer. They can see all the notes to bidder, instructions to bidder. This is a simple PO, so it doesn’t add any of that. They can access the technical documents here, they can download them. They can see any of the document histories of the new revs for this. They’ll see that here. This is a pretty automated thing, same thing with commercial documents. When your suppliers have crystal clear instructions and an intuitive way to interact with bids and such – supplier management will be exponentially smoother. When issues come up – you can come back with “Mr. Supplier, log in to the system and read the instructions.”

Finally, we get down here to the bidder intention. After, note, after they’ve acknowledged it and downloaded the technical documents will all them to issue an intention so they can either say yeah, or no. After they submit that RFQ intentions, they can go down here and start working on the bid sheet. It’s a work flow here. We want to make sure that yes they got it and yes they downloaded all the documents, yes they’re going to bid on it before they actually start filling out the bid. It’s a good process and a work flow and that makes sure your suppliers are doing these things in the correct order. Even in a sealed bid situation, the buyers can go in and see what kind of progress the suppliers making on a bid without seeing details, like prices. Finally, when the bidder’s done here, they just submit this bid and it goes back to the buyers. If it’s a closed bid it’ll just sit in the que, closed and somewhat hidden until all the bids are in.

The next thing I’m going to show you here is purchase orders. Obviously, this demo supplier gets a lot of action here. Let’s go take a look at this PO here. After you’ve issued a PO to a supplier, they can go in and do some things. They can view PO, via the relevant context, either of data requirements that we’re going to need back from them for the PO. The cool thing here is they can submit supplier data directly from the application and it flows to our document management module. It really removes a lot of steps. If the supplier has to email something to your document controller, there’s that initial email from them. The document controller has to go log everything. Inevitably, something’s wrong. They didn’t attach something, or they attached the wrong file, or the wrong revision or they didn’t name it correctly. This takes care of all that. They just go in and they add files from their little application here.

The other thing worth noting here is the request response system, this is for technical and commercial queries. They can initiate them on the supplier side and then they can respond to the queries if they get them. If they’re responding to them they’ll show on the home page as a task. Speaking of tasks, take a look at this transmittal. This is a task that’s been sent out to this particular supplier. They’ve basically just been copied. We sent a document to a client for either delivery or review and approval. We copied them on it saying, “Hey, your documents been sent out to our client.” They’ll get any feedback that the client’s come up with as well. You can also issue a review and approval task so they can actively participate in it rather than just getting copied on correspondence. Even if they don’t use your type of files they can use the integrated mark up and review tool to actually participate even if they don’t have the same cad software. Suppliers generally like that because some of that stuff’s real expensive.

All right, so I’m going to log out of here and I’m going to go and show you what it looks like on the buyers side. I’m going to find my requisition here that we’ve been looking at, the one that was issued out to the bidder we just took a look at. After this thing’s been issued to the bidders we can come in here and we can see some different things. We can see that they’ve been issued online, that a couple of these folks have acknowledged it. Oil Fields Supply, which is the one bidder we were logged in as, they have not acknowledged R of Q. We can go in here, we can drill down the information a little bit. We can see that they acknowledged it and if they’ve indicated a bid or no bid and when they said they’re going to get a quote back to us by. We can see any extensions that we’ve done here. We can see if they have asked for extensions or if we’ve just given it to everybody. Over here in the history we can see that I’ve just extended the bids arbitrarily, just to show you what’s going on and how to use the tool.

Finally we can save the bids actually have been submitted and we can mark them as received. After we’ve done that we can take a look at the actual bids themselves. Basically what I’ve showed you here is ProjecTools gets suppliers and subs working in your system. Suppliers and subs, they can really work as part of the team. They can be integrated using your application, which makes them feel more a part of a team and allows you to leverage their skills, their detailed skills more effectively then you can with emails, phone calls and smoke signals, whatever you’re using now. You can really focus them on the things that are going to help you out rather then letting them run wild and give you the runaround possibly.

You’ll notice that we’ve moved all of the interface with this particular supplier into a single system and then there’s some work flows to it. They have to move in a single, predetermined order to get things done. We can kind of report back on that without seeing sensitive things like prices until we’re meant to see it. There’s also accountability, this ability built in so you can report on things. You can run late action reports and see who’s not getting reviews back to you, who’s not submitting their supplier data on time. Just things like that, where you’d have to just know in your head or look at a schedule and be like, “Hey, do we have x document from the vendor or the supplier?” Then go in and look at those individual basis. ProjecTools gives you the ability to click a button and then it’ll just tell you everything.

That’s really the benefit of having a system that integrates everybody and has accountability and disability built in because you can get things done. You can get them done quickly. You can get them done right. Your qualities better. You don’t get penalties. You’re delivering on time and everybody knows what’s going on and everybody’s happy. The end result there is you’re going to get repeat business from your clients because they know that your supply chain is good and you have your stuff together and you can get things done.