How to Manage Procurement to Avoid Late Delivery

Late delivery of goods often has considerable impact on the buying company’s performance. This can include delays to maintenance and project programmes or the consequences of having stock-outs of important spares and consumable materials.
 
Delivery problems can be anticipated and protected against at two points in the process – before and after award of the Purchase Order.
 
This course considers the process before a Purchase Order has been awarded, when there are opportunities to improve the likelihood of timely delivery. 
 
NOTE
Our course “Expediting - more than just order chasing: How to achieve on-time delivery” covers the range of activities available to achieve on-schedule delivery after the purchase order is placed.
 
Late delivery of equipment and materials creates unnecessary costs.  And not just in the short term.  Production plans can fail, capital projects can falter and customer deliveries can be delayed.  There can also be an impact on the company’s health, safety and environmental performance.
 
The problem might be more than just choosing a poor supplier. Staff in many functions – Finance, Operations, Marketing – are often unaware that what their decisions can directly affect the chances of your company receiving goods when they’re needed.
 
The best way to ensure efficient deliveries is to align work practices across the organisation.  This course identifies key strategies that you can adopt both within and between departments, all aimed at achieving on-time arrival of the goods that are vital to your operations.


We have designed this course for middle to senior managers who can implement new working practices in their own departments and influence other company functions, including:

• Technical staff who specify requirements and help to evaluate suppliers’ bids
• Procurement staff who place and manage purchase orders
• Managers who develop plans and projects requiring materials & equipment
• Logistics staff involved in expediting supplies and arranging deliveries
• Quality & Finance managers who need to understand the causes and costs of delayed deliveries

By the End of the Course, participants will be able to:- 

• Understand the effect of decisions early in the procurement process on delivery schedules
• Identify actions they can take to improve delivery performance
• Apply a range of tools and techniques to minimise late deliveries

Topics covered will include:-

• Typical reasons for late deliveries, and examination of their root causes
• Key procurement and supply concepts, including the procurement process and different procurement strategies
• Decisions taken in various departments at each stage in the procurement process and how they affect delivery performance
• Evaluation of bidders' past delivery performance (risk analysis)
• Ensuring that the supplier's (detailed) delivery / production plan is realistic (as it forms the basis for subsequent expediting!)
• Considering the estimated costs of expediting as part of the final commercial evaluation (cheap price offset by high expediting costs!)
• Planning for on-time arrival of equipment and materials
• An overview of the expediting concept
• The need for Procurement to be involved early in the specifying process