In my company, and I suspect most other large companies the “buying stuff” procedure is  cumbersome, detailed, and not very effective. At least in my company the process is focused on  financial needs and controls. The sad story is that the same control mechanisms that are put in place  to control a purchase, is the same that prevent the process to be efficient. The need for control led to  professional buyers in the company, buyers that no longer had any knowledge of what was bought,  only how.

It was easy to identify issues with the current approach, e.g. there was no link between the order and  whether the order was received or was as expected, as it was the professional buyer that was asked  if the gods were received. In a complex time and material project this would be an impossible task to  answer for the professional buyer. Similar when buying services as “application operation”. Did we  get it? Did we buy the right thing? When you don’t know what you are buying, there is no  improvement process either.

Having identified the challenge, the next step was to bring senior management on-board. The tool  for this was visualization. The current process was drawn on a whiteboard using pictures, figures,  paper copies, sticky notes and whiteboard markers, and then the different use cases was played on  top of the process, revealing the lack of control in all of them. In the end senior management agreed,  there was no real control, and that something had to be done.

The main strength of the overlaying Use Case walkthrough of the process visualizations was of curse  to visualize the short comings of the existing process. However, the process also gave a solid  foundation into focusing on the what to change. The senior management were able to communicate  what was important and what was not, and new roles and responsibilities were tried out “on the fly”.  Some were discarded, and some kept.

In the end the workshop based on the visualization gave two main improvements to the process.  First of all, a role called requestor was identified. The requestor is the person who actually has a  need. The requestor is defining the item to purchase, and is also the recipient of the item. This role  took over some of the responsibility from buyer (from sourcing), first among them the responsibility  of receiving the goods and determine if it is actually received. Secondly we were able to build a  forecast, predicting incoming invoices simply by changing simple parameters as max value on an  order, instead of estimated values (which were not honoured).

Also other approaches were tried out to test changes. Templates and reports were created in order  to guide and help in the process. Reports that proved helpful were continued, a few that did not  change the way of work were discontinued.

Overall the visualization was organized as a workshop with senior management. The problem  statement was accepted prior to the workshop, and the visualization tools with the overlay of Use  cases was selected as a communication tool. The process allowed senior management to understand  the issue, guide in problem solving and the project team to get first-hand experience in priorities.

If I were to run the same process again, I would keep the main structure, but set up a second  workshop where more Use Cases and possible solutions were tested against the process.

