Delphi's Global Supply Management (GSM) organization administers the purchasing activities of the entire company, including everything from office supplies to manufacturing equipment to raw materials.
As a large manufacturing firm, "lean" is part of the culture. The GSM team faced several challenges in part due to the growth of the organization. Several acquisitions had occurred and each purchasing team around the globe used different systems to support their process of fulfilling purchase requests. Ultimately all the teams fed data to the global ERP system, but because varying systems were used to do this, the process that each team used was slightly different and this made it difficult for the company to fully leverage their purchasing power.
Process improvements made by one team would also not be realized by the rest of the organization. Their enterprise ERP system lacked the ability fill this role. They needed to consolidate on one process and one system to drive it.
GSM set out to develop a standardized Purchase Request to Purchase Order (PR2PO) process and implement it across the globe. The goal was to develop an application that provided the common process and filled the gap in their enterprise ERP system. Apex worked with Delphi’s purchasing team to design and build a single common process using IBM BPM.
BPM was selected by Delphi to give visibility into the new process for tracking and performance measurement, and also because the team was confident that a solution could be implemented quickly. Apex facilitated workshops with procurement subject matter experts and ERP specialists to discuss and define the new process. In some cases this meant extended discussions to understand each others work processes in different regions before coming to an agreement on the best way to do things going forward.
The new PR2PO process application loaded PR data from the ERP system, and supporting data from Excel workbooks. Tasks were dynamically routed based on request attributes, and dashboards gave visibility to managers and teams. The process covered all of the steps required to complete the Purchase Order, including:
- Direct materials
- Indirect materials
- Contracts
- Supplier selection
- Quotes
- Bids
- Negotiation iterations
- Terms
- Internal Approvals
Meanwhile, vastly improved visibility of the status of a request was available to requestors, buyers, regional managers and GSM.
The project team was a truly collaborative effort between the GSM team, the regional managers, and the process owner. Many of the operations team members embraced the BPM process and got hands-on building process models and UIs. BPM was an early enabler of citizen developers! The team employed accelerator toolkits developed by Apex, reducing time-to-value.
The PR2PO solution integrated with the ERP system to close the gaps, allowing purchasing teams to fulfill requests globally with a consistent process, reduce lead-times, and give everyone improved visibility.
