6 Ways Your Purchasing Process Will Drive You Crazy

Some­times the sys­tem just gets in the way. Here are 6 sce­nar­ios you will only under­stand if your workplace has one of those infu­ri­at­ing pur­chas­ing processes.

1. 1) When you make a pur­chase order for a prod­uct you need but pur­chas­ing decides to order some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent.

Yes it was cheaper, but it was also com­pletely use­less for this project.

2. 2) When you want to order a prod­uct or ser­vice to help you make your job eas­ier and you real­ize what you actu­ally need is a ser­vice to make your company’s pur­chas­ing process easier.

You have to fol­low the pur­chas­ing process pro­to­col! All you have to do is pre­pare a RFP. Then fill out a bud­get adjust­ment report and have it signed by 3 dif­fer­ent approvers you don't have access to. Then estab­lish your pro­pos­als and bids and cre­ate a pur­chase order that you will need to get signed by the 3 pre­vi­ous approvers.

It's really no wonder they put the word chase in purchase

3. 3) When you make an order request to assist you with a tight dead­line and your order arrives after your project is completed.

At least you can use your tools as a giant paper­weight to help you keep all your paper­work under control.

4. 4) When you finally have some extra bud­get and want to upgrade your orga­ni­za­tion by mod­ern­iz­ing your equip­ment but you can’t sub­mit a pur­chase order because your list of items aren't on the list of approved goods.

Well you can't order any­thing that came out after 2008 because we haven't had the chance to update our list of approved goods yet. How about instead of one new thing you order 2 of the older models?

P.S. You will still have to fol­low your pur­chas­ing process pro­to­col and sub­mit a RFP, file a bud­get real­lo­ca­tion report etc. (see Num­ber 2)

5. 5) When you go to file expenses you accrued on a busi­ness trip but real­ize you lost all the receipts.

We can see that you spent $524.87 on your credit card for busi­ness related expenses but because you didn’t fill out the request for expense form, tape all your receipts to a sin­gle piece of paper, and mail it to the pur­chas­ing depart­ment for ver­i­fi­ca­tion we’re afraid there’s noth­ing we can do.

6. 6) When your boss per­son­ally decides to nego­ti­ate with the ERP ven­dor to ‘secure the best deal’ and comes back with an amazingly low price.

What isn't men­tioned is that they bought obso­lete hard­ware and soft­ware that actu­ally makes it more dif­fi­cult to do your job.

We couldn’t get every­thing that you asked for but at least what we got was cheaper than any of us expected! Just make it work, otherwise we would have wasted company money...