THE FOUR STAGES OF DEVELOPING A PURCHASING FOCUS
PURCHASING INTEGRATED WITH THE REST OF THE BUSINESS
- Make sure incoming materials and the actual raw material stock holding are of the smallest possible size, without affecting operational performance.
- Adopt a ship to shopfloor strategy, in other words as soon as a part hits the goods inwards area and passes any inspection stage it is consumed on to the shopfloor as soon as possible.
- The purchasing function would help establish the minimum and maximum stock holdings of any given parts.
- Receive part Just-In-Time to be consumed.
- Frequent deliveries to within a few hours of the production cycle.
- Use a Kanban system to signal for more supplies.
- Where parts of a Kanban nature ensure they are delivered direct to the shopfloor.
- The purchasing function establishes the contracts to ensure delivery, performance and inspection data are adhered to.
- Make sure the vendors inspect the parts fully and give appropriate conformance certification, it means your inspectors have less things to inspect.
- Use the vendor conformance certification to give feedback to suppliers on the quality of service.
- Make sure the vendors are responsible for providing corrective action reports.
- It would be up to the purchasing function to monitor suppliers.
- Reduce the number of suppliers.
- Discuss future requirements on master production schedule with suppliers.
- Introduce blanket orders based on leveled schedules for constant orders, the regular repeaters and the irregular order.
- Target a reduction in the cost of any bought out items/services with suppliers.
- Ensuring quality and delivery standards.
- Integration with suppliers for placing commercial contracts.
- Movement of material from supplier to the buyer premises.
- The contract may be based on purchasing negotiating a call off contract where the supplier holds a certain amount of material in their stores based on a blanket order from the buyer who then calls off the amount of material as and when required.
- Material movement can be based upon a Kanban, levelled schedules, etc.
- Logistics need to co-operate with the purchasing section to establish the most suitable stock movement strategies.
- Understand strengths and deficiencies of suppliers.
- Establish common rules as a basis for discussion related to planning, control, attitude, handling, tooling, quality, etc.
- Well trained purchasing employees would be used integrate the buyer-supplier relationships more closely.