Somewhere in Maharashtra there was a man named Suresh.
He was having a small setup of providing BPO services for procurement with limited number of employees.
While his business was doing good, he was not satisfied with billing done to his customers and wanted to increase it since his business was stabilizing.
One day he went to his best friend Akash with a sad face, his friend asked him what happened friend, you look so upset? Suresh expressed his problem and said, I am not happy with my business output and want to increase the efficiency of my business by 40% in the next 8 months so that monthly billing can be increased with same staff.
Akash was very intelligent and decided to help his friend. He asked Suresh to come after 15 days with all the data and feedback from staff.
After 15 days both met with all the data and staff feedback. Akash carefully studied data and found some major issues in his business like
- High Time consumed in getting offer from vendors
- Hundreds of Ariba notification mails which made difficult for buyers to pick up the relevant mails
- Restrictions of view making difficult for other buyer to work others cases and dependency on one buyer and was facing the basic issue of shared service concept
- No system tool to log, track, escalate issues with proper aging
- No way to find out and check productivity of buyer
- Buyers not having report to see the pending cases with aging
- Majority of the regular vendors not properly trained to use the Ariba tool for offer submission
- No training material available for stakeholder including vendors
After this Aksah smiled and said, my friend don't worry, I have measured and analyzed major issues and are controllable. We need to Implement and improve on some points and then need to control these things to get the result.
With help of Aksah, Suresh Implemented following points
- Vendor participant report which was developed to help buyers with ready data of which vendor has quoted / not quoted / declined the offer without going and checking the individual case
- Folders created in a mailbox with proper filters to segregate the important and not important mails which helped for quick actions on important mails
- Explored facilities of View rights for group buyer in Ariba in which group of buyers were able to access case of other buyers
- Ticketing tool created which helped proper recording of issues with responsibility matrix and aging which has helped a lot to resolve the issues of buyers in the most effective way
- Created productivity report to map the productivity of each buyer on daily basis which has ease to find out every buyer’s o/p specially for below average performers
- WIP report developed with a clear bucketing system to know case pending at which stage, with whom and with aging
- Forming team who can train the vendors with webinar inviting the bunch of vendors and resolving all their issues and 90% active vendors are trained on Ariba
- Developed user friendly Audio and video training material for all the stakeholders including vendors to refer in case they stuck anywhere while using Ariba tool
After 8 months Suresh met Akash with the big smile and said 'Thank you my friend, after implementing your suggestions my business efficiency has increased by 53% and my billing has increased significantly with and I am able to manage my business even with less staff'.
Lessons Learned
- Winners don't do different things; they do things differently
- If your enemy is very strong, attack him part by part from all directions. Corner it, to checkmate him finally
- Be slow in building a blueprint for strategy and be fast in executing your strategy