Many organisations have a slow down through festive seasons as many people head off on holidays and the volume of work often slows. So if you're lucky enough to be working during a quite time, what procurement tasks can you do to take advantage of the extra flexibility and set yourself up for when the pace picks up again?
As a key component of their goal of making it easier and more efficient for suppliers and agencies to do business with each other, in February this year the Procurement Transformation Division launched a new set of goods and services procurement invitation and contractual frameworks for use by all Government Agencies. If you are a supplier to or a buyer for the Queensland State Government and you haven't familiarised yourself with them yet, then it is high time you did. So what is new and what do we need to know about this new framework?
I was presented with an excellent challenge by one of my clients a couple of weeks back. They had established a contractual arrangement with twenty providers that contained an effective suite of KPIs for measuring and managing performance, but sadly lacked the ability to capture and report on those KPIs. Next they developed a nifty Excel workbook for the vendors to complete and provide their data, but the workbook was made up of seventeen different worksheets and each was in a different layout designed to make data entry easy. It did not make reporting easy though and the is where I come in.
Spreadsheets are a powerful and commonly used tool in procurement. Whether used to track what contracts we have, calculate cost, score evaluations or tracking projects. However, few Excel workbooks in procurement really leverage the full power and possibilities of Excel. With just a basic knowledge of the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language, you can turn your Excel workbook, into an Excel Application with functionality you never considered possible in a spreadsheet. This is the first in a series of blogs covering the development and use of an Excel Application to build a Advanced Excel Contracts Manager for managing Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM).
A critical component in building a powerful contract life cycle management application in Excel is to determine what data you want to capture and then taking steps to ensure data quality is maintained. It is always a balance between usability and the need to build meaningful reporting. While using a standard format spreadsheet quickly becomes arduous when there are more than 15 fields of data, the Advanced XL Contract Manager provides functionality that makes capturing a hundred fields efficient and easy. There are the obvious fields such as the contract number, title, description, start and expiry dates. But there are a few fields you may not have thought of. In this blog, we'll start with defining the Contract fields and validation methods to make sure our data stays clean.