Purchasing department rant

[jsi]

I work for a large organization that has the worst purchasing department I’ve ever had to deal with.  The stories of inefficiency and plain stupidity from them are many, but the latest one totally takes the cake.  We have a large control system that is critical to our business, and it is a hot mess (another story altogether) and we need to replace the software while continuing to use the hardware. There is an individual, George, that worked with the company that wrote the original software/hardware for the control system and knows it intimately.  Since severing his relationship to the control system company George has designed and written his own software that does what we need it to do.  After 5 pilot projects to prove it works, the decision was made to replace the rest of the hot messes with George’s system.  To my knowledge there is no one else that does what George does in this very small niche control system world.

So this is where purchasing gets involved.  Because of the dollar amounts involved they have to cut the purchase requisition.  I tell them that George is the only vendor and his quote to do the work is very reasonable.  However, purchasing is all like “NO! we MUST have completion for every bid!”   Long, long story short, purchasing found a company, Widget, Inc., that George used to work for that said they could do the job.  When asked just how they were going to do that, their answer was “We will just contract with George to do the work.”   Purchasing was happy because they had “competition” and I’m  how is that competition?  There is just one George and he can quote any price he wants to Widget, Inc. and they will mark it up and George will give us his own bid. Who do you think will be the lowest bid?

Do you have stupid purchasing department stories?


Oh, George was, no surprise, the low bid.  And we missed our window of opportunity because of the purchasing delays, so the price actually went up. 

[Neilm]

Sometimes there are legal reasons for that sort of rubbish. I know the UK government has to invite tenders for pretty much all contracts.

I worked for a company where purchasing decided to enforce a minimum spend with Farnell. They picked £30 as the minimum. I ended up needing some 0603 caps for some equipment that was needed to be delivered to a potential customer, price of the components (including the MOQ) less then £1 + p&p. Price of equipment £200k.  I didn't have a company credit card so it had to go through purchasing.

One week later (despite my boss and I hassling them) they still hadn't placed the order. I ended up having to go into the weekly project meeting with a group manager and telling him that the project was going to be delayed by a week as I was missing a 5p cap. Needless to say, the policy was changed.

[daqq]

It almost sounds like you are working for a government organization...

[dmills]

The correct approach to daft and inflexible MOQ crap like that is to not buy a 5p 0603 cap (or whatever), but instead to buy one of those ring bound dev kits of many, many different values...

Alternatively, pad the order with soldering tools, reels of leaded solder (Always worth having some hidden away), spare scope probes, that dev kit you keep wanting to play with, so many things you can use to case confusion to the lawful enemy.

Ours has a particularly annoying habit of insisting on quotes for prototype boards, even when they are trivial changes from the previous prototype, I mean look guys, we all know these five boards are going to cost a grand give or take, and we all know we are going to buy them from our usual supplier, so just place the order already (this can cause two weeks of delay).

Regards, Dan.

[rollatorwieltje]

For us it became a bit of a running joke to guess how long it takes for them to replace SKF bearings with Chinesium bearings, and how long it takes for them to go back again. No, when your products operate in an environment where IP68 is only marginally acceptable, those Shenzen Specials do not work (well, not for long anyway).

One weird thing we have is that they also recently became responsible for software licenses. Which is fine, except that the procedure isn't really suited for it at the moment. Goods are paid when they are received and signed for, typically someone from the received goods department will sign the package slip/invoice, scans it and enters it in the system. But how do you do that with digital products? Yep, print the invoice, put it in the mailbox of received goods and let them scan and sign it Not really their fault per se, but it can be quite annoying, especially when you get blacklisted by suppliers because your payments take too long

[Someone]

Purchasing reels of passives when the purchasing system has to have exact quantities entered and prices in dollars and whole cents...

Call from supplier, "you just wanted reels right, why are the prices wrong", reply "sorry for the confusion, ignore all the prices and just go on quantities"

Or that same purchasing department deciding they would get a "competitive" quote by handing over the fully quoted order from our chosen supplier (having chosen them by already doing our own competitive assessment) complete with prices to their favourite suppliers to quote, the alternative suppliers quoted on a total of 2 parts out of several hundred lines, and one of those quotes was higher than our chosen option. I then get several calls over the next weeks asking why I didn't go with the cheaper option for a qty of 10 commodity CMOS logic, and insisted that the order go complete with the original supplier.