Avoid communication breakdown
Effective communication can save costs, reduce lead time and help smooth the workflow.

Procurement professionals should look to harness themselves with effective communication. A finely tuned communication system can boost the general productivity of a manufacturing or procurement process while making cost savings, especially important in these recessionary times.

In a manufacturing environment, some of the highly-dynamic activities involved would be last-minute customers' engineering change order, production reschedule, order cancellation and customer's complaints to name a few. Often this is a domino reaction effecting almost all departments from sales to program administration, to purchasing, to planning, to engineering, to quality control, to production and shipping department.

Inmagine if a loose communication system exists through these processes, how do you think it will affect the company's over-all productivity and revenue? Figures may vary, but one thing is certain: poor communication can be very expensive. It could be a result of an incurred loss, unnecessary spending or wastage of resources. Every dollar counts, especially during an economic slowdown.

To achieve effectiveness and/or efficiency in communication, organisations may need to consider using some tools or technologies that can guide and assist them through.

The emergence of the Intranet and Internet are providing organisations with entirely new business models for proactively managing demand internally, while collaborating externally with key suppliers.

Gone are the days where procurement officers are busy sending their request for quotation (RFQ) or request for information (RFI) via the telex or fax machines. Most of the information workflow goes out or comes in via the electronic mails. The amount of information for example, during a major project bidding or RFQ exercise could cause information overload in the executives' email inbox. Just imagine how many other emails are targeting to your inbox. There are features in Outlook that can be used to manage these pieces of information. The e-calendar allows you to plan an entire week at a time. The e-taskbar, on the other hand, is aimed at monitoring the quotation work or any request in progress, and provides better clarity of the task-in-process as to ensure timely submission of RFQs.

As e-business matures, enterprises are increasingly looking to utilise Internet technologies as a means of making cost savings and of optimising processes and general productivity. As enterprises make this shift, procurement is emerging as a key business process that can be transformed via e-business. Prospects and customers will expect to get their information via email or website in a timely manner. Both internally and externally, more and more communications and projects are coordinated either via emails or shared calendar. Managing the in-floods of emails and projects coordination using the calendar and taskbar is an effective tool to:

• Control workload
• Reduce non value added roles through propoer delegation
• Reduce cycle-time
• Manage project deadlines
• Anticipate potential bottleneck
• Increase information flow
• Smoothen the supply chain process

Effective communication is essential to manufacturing or procurement process, to every organisation. It is not something which is merely a nice to have, it is a lifeblood. Employees who listen and respond to each other are undoubtedly working towards becoming what comprise the next generation workplace - efficient, effective and productive.

 Published on ProcurementAsia March 2009