For the procurement process, the first step is to start learning and accumulating supplier information. It would be better if this step can be completed in the ERP system. You can organize the basic information of the supplier’s products, contact information, stocking cycle, online store links, etc. In this way, you will soon get a considerable number of supplier databases. With such a database, it will be much smoother when you need to carry out subsequent product price comparisons, product development, and emergency replenishment of out-of-stock inventory.
Especially the product stocking cycle, this data is indispensable for suppliers with stable procurement. The order cycle can be adjusted according to the supplier’s arrival time to keep the inventory healthy to the greatest extent.
The second step is to control the procurement process. After a certain amount of orders, the workload of the Wish procurement team will be relatively large, because many new products will begin to generate orders one after another. The types may be more complicated, but the quantity is not large, so the procurement orders will increase. At this stage, if the process cannot be used well to manage procurement affairs, it will lead to long-term out-of-stock and lack of quality inspection time after arrival. Therefore, in addition to monitoring the daily work of the procurement team, it is also necessary to make corresponding work allocations in the financial cashier and logistics warehousing links. The work efficiency of the purchasing team can be controlled with simple statistics.
For the work process, different sizes of enterprises need to consider different directions, so no template is provided here. For the start-up Wish team, controlling the arrival time is the first priority, saving costs is the second priority, and accumulating supplier resources is the third priority, striving for operational efficiency. Other departments can cooperate with the work of the purchasing department in these three directions.
The third step is to control the quality and cost of purchased products. Here, you can use months (or weeks) as units, focusing on statistics on the cost changes of product SKUs that account for about 80% of sales, and summarizing the main RMA issues of products from the sales department.
After the data is counted, you can take the more prominent ones for special analysis. This statistics is very simple, but it is important to persist in every cycle. By the end of the year, you will find that it will bring considerable benefits to the company.