Continuous Improvement Corner: High Impact Purchase Order Distribution Method Clean Up

The Issue:  Issued Purchase orders were not delivered to the suppliers because there was an outdated distribution method on file. This caused department users and Central Buyers confusion, delayed delivery of items, and unproductive administrative time to track down Purchase Orders.

Actions Taken: A group of Procurement team members collaborated to find non-catalog suppliers with no distribution method. They filtered to suppliers who were active in the past FY and used the Pareto rule to identify the ones with high impact. Then, they collaborated with the Supplier Management team to send new Paymentworks invitations and clean up supplier profiles in Workday and Marketplace. ​

Findings:​ In the last FY, UVA did business with 710 suppliers that had a bad distribution method. That's 4824 Purchase Orders worth $41.6 million,  and 238 high-volume suppliers with 3697 Purchase Orders worth $36.5 million.​

Impact on UVA Users:  Created efficiency in the sourcing process for department users and Central buyers and helped the disbursement team by reducing the time to manually adjust supplier profiles. This means schools and units can have increased confidence that when their PO is approved, it is being distributed to the accurate address at the supplier.  The team continues improvement activities in terms of purchase orders in order to achieve as high a degree of accuracy as possible!

Results:  As of 8/2/2023, we have fully registered and approved 64 suppliers​ and processed 1115 Purchase Orders,  $13.9 million worth of business

Major Contributors in this project:​  Andrew Clark, Franky Kong, Susanna Huang, Sri Ranjani Murthy