April 12, 2024

  

There are a number of goals I have this year- both professional and personal. I think it may be instructive to write a thousand words about each one of them. Let me start with a professional goal. I need to implement in my shop a new software or platform which is broad known as e-procurement. It is not part of a standard ERP product like SAP but sits above it. Broadly speaking, it is designed to systematize all the process steps within the Procurement process that are not already systematized. Currently a Purchase Requisition is generated in SAP – and following this a flurry of activity ensues to convert that PR to a Purchase Order- which is also done in SAP. These intermediate steps currently are done via emails, phone calls and other ad-hoc engagements with internal stakeholders, suppliers and even auditors. As such it is almost impossible to track or measure how well these activities are being done and if the work load is properly balanced.

In procurement, one of the challenges, if not the fundamental one, is ensuring there is no foulplay. Foulplay can manifest in many ways. A preferred vendor may be selected unfairly. A vendor may receive payment when the work is not yet done. A vendor may receive an order for something that he is not approved for- but it has just been slipped in amongst many small other orders all of which are legitimate. The same vendors may keep getting selected for no good reason. These are some broad ideas, but when you get into details, these ideas have a very large number of ways they can manifest themselves- or rather NOT manifest themselves. If you communicate with a system, it makes it much harder to subvert a process- although there are still creative ways to do so. What can be said is that it will reduce the volume of foulplay. This is one of the goals for me. One can ask the question, does this mean that corruption is rampant today in the company- and can I expose anyone who is indulging in such behaviour for some personal gain? And I think the question is not that relevant. It would be if I were a politician though. In fact, I was listening to an interesting interview of a chap called Anil Swarup. A very senior bureaucrat in the Indian government who had served the PMO’s office both in the current regime and the previous one. In the previous regime, he mentioned, that there was open corruption but no one seemed to care. In the current regime, there is more hounding of criminals in government than there are criminals. Each situation is only so because of political reasons. In the previous dispensation, the corruption was overlooked because it would be difficult not to without bringing the whole house down, so rampant and far-reaching was it. The current dispensation is mainly interested in digging up dirt against political opponents using the presence of corruption as a lever.  So event they don’t really want corruption to suddenly end, because they would have no levers of influence left with these opponents. The only area to focus on is to invest in systems and processes and make them as automated as possible. This is a non-political instrument to fight corruption. It impacts everyone, on all sides of any political spectrum. And so this what they eventually did-or atleast are in the process of doing. The same with my company. I cannot say with any certainty if we have corrupt practices or corrupt people. All I intend to do is to put something in place that makes it harder to be corrupt.

Another challenge is enable efficiency. For every Purchase requisition that needs to end up in a Purchase order, there needs to be a streamlining such that the transaction is completed in the least possible time and at the most optimal technical and commercial framework. Also post creating the Purchase Order, the vendor still has to perform the service or provide the materials to our satisfaction and get paid. This can never be optimized  manually in a large organization since a human being can only follow up on so many emails without getting completely lost. Eventually such situations devolve into a heap of opaque strands of operational activity each intersected with others like spaghetti. The only way to move anything from this is by shouting loudest and looking for the correct needle in the haystack. This is certainly the case for my current company- atleast in matters of indirect procurement. I intend to solve this using e-procurement. A second-order benefit of this is the potential freeing up of labour capacity. These can then be redeployed to other pressing projects which otherwise would require a manpower increase. The trick is to not even mention this last part in broad and public engagements – because this will surely instill fear in the team of a potential job loss. This type of fear can do wonders to destroy progress. The folks at the coalface will find any number of reasons not to make the implementation successful. In fact, fear is the only thing that we all need to be free of. The rest falls into place doesn’t it?

If I manage the above two objectives and a smooth implementation, I would consider myself whole. However, if I were to be greedier in my ambition, I would also like to ensure one other objective. Firstly, I would like to find a way to cleanse various current data in our systems and then secondly, find a way to keep the data clean for future. It is not solvable by e-procurement but I am positioning this as a pre-requisite for the implementation of e-procurement. From my experience, if we are able to do this, we are already at top-quartile. Even a behemoth like Shell is rubbish at this- yet it has every high-tech software implemented a hundred times over.  To be fair, this type of data cleansing is a lot more complex in large organisations than small. It is a Singapore versus India problem.  But just because it is easier to do in Singapore, does not mean it is not important or relevant in India.