A Well Oiled Machine With Sand In The Gears

As The Company wraps up another fiscal year, today I have a little time to look back and reflect on the past couple months.

I have this time because the flow of orders has slowed to a trickle as the drop-dead date for getting requisitions in has come and gone.

It’s nice to have a little breathing room.

Despite all the claims of a still lingering down economy and budget austerity, I sure did see a whole lot of money come blowing through the procurement organization in the last 60 days.

For the most part, the buying team conducted themselves like champions, pushing out double and in come cases triple their usual monthly production amounts.

But the trouble is that it’s not just Procurement that has to come together to make a smooth fiscal year end work.

Here are a few areas that broke down this month and caused more than the average amount of year end stress:

1) The vendor desk – The crush of fiscal year end combined with an untimely change in process caused a tremendous backup. Instead of the usual 24-hour commitment to set up a new vendor, it took more like 48 to 72 hours. One or two days can mean a lot at the end of the fiscal year.

Somehow Procurement gets blamed for this delay.

2) Receiving – The crush of fiscal year end combined with either not staffing up or not approving overtime caused shipments to back up. You know the drill, no receiving, no invoice payment. No invoice payment means whoopsie-doodle, we didn’t spend your have-to-spend it year-end money.

And yet, somehow procurement gets blamed for this.

3) IT – The crush of fiscal year end combined with not planning ahead for upgrades caused the financial and procurement system to crash on multiple occasions. And even when it didn’t crash, at times the buyer would click to release the purchase order and it would take two to three minutes to complete. Sometimes it would time out before that happened which would send the PO to the great Ethernet bit bucket in the sky. The buyer would then have to start over from scratch.

And of course, this is Procurement’s fault too.

Honestly, everything I listed is pretty much par for the course. Don’t these same issues happen every year? They do in my career which traverses many different organizations.

It’s kind of like living in a place where it snows a lot. You know that every single year without fail that the snow is coming. But every year, when it starts snowing everybody loses their mind, forgets how to apply the brakes in their car and start spinning out.

Thankfully, this bunch of Procurement Heroes have made it past the spun out on the side of the road phase and are driving down the straight and narrow again.

To continue the metaphor, we have sustained quite a few dings and scratches on the bumpers, but onward we drive.

Bring on the new fiscal year! Budgets aren’t set yet and probably won’t be for at least a month. Things should go pretty slack around here.

We’re sure ready for a little quiet time.

Image found here.