Home Improvement Retailer Builds Transparent Procurement Workflow

The Challenge

With over 17 million customer transactions each week—across more than 1,700 retail locations—store managers for this home improvement retailer are busy making sure the customer experience is top notch and operations run smoothly. But assuring that employees had the supplies they needed to do their jobs wasn't keeping up. Ordering, tracking, receiving, and stocking items like coffee for the breakroom or cleaning supplies had become increasingly difficult for day-to-day operations. Because the purchasing process was so convoluted, a senior manager of strategic sourcing at this home improvement retailer told BuyerQuest that his department would have orders escalated each day for the simplest items such as safety jackets or lightbulbs. "Every day, all day, there were fire drills." To buy what was needed to run each store, purchasers had to navigate 90 different punchouts and individual catalogs. You would need to know the specific SKU number of an item before making any purchase. "You would try to find it via search or SKU, but the results were always inconsistent." Once items were ordered through internal procurement systems, they often ended up being delivered late (50% of the time) or incorrectly. Because this process consumed so much time, store managers resorted to using their p-cards instead—often going to non-approved websites or suppliers because of convenience. And since p-cards were not connected to the ERP system, it became nearly impossible for finance to accurately track, report, and forecast spending.