Until 1996, Microsoft relied on dozens of paper forms and a wide range of custom applications for procuring goods and services. The process was slow, costly, and prone to human data-entry errors. Moreover, processing these forms was manually intensive, inefficient, and confusing for both end users and vendors. The lack of automated and standard procedures also made it difficult to create and track payables.
The process was especially cumbersome for the Microsoft® Corporate Procurement Group (CPG), which handles thousands of requests weekly for purchases under $1000 each. High-volume, low-dollar transactions represented 70 percent of Microsoft corporate procurement, but only 3 percent of the total dollars flowing through the Accounts Payable department. As a result, CSG had to dedicate several resources to processing requisitions into purchase orders (P.O.s), resolving problems, and trying to clearly articulate business rules and processes for an increasingly complex and growing business.
“It was hard to keep up,” says Clayton Fleming, CPG's director of technology. “We wanted to streamline these processes, and we did not want to put so many resources into managing low-risk P.O.s. We decided the best way to deal with this was to create a requisitioning tool that would take all the controls and validations that the requisition personnel were dealing with and push them onto the intranet.”
|
