Lean Purchasing responds to the need of companies to gain in agility and reaction capacity to optimize their expenses and be more competitive.
Lean Purchasing is inspired by lean management, applied to the Purchasing Department. It is a methodology that consists in identifying the expenses that do not add value, permanently reviewing the value chain and concentrating all the resources in the high added value actions for the company and its clients.
This philosophy is based on two pillars:
Buy what is necessary: consumption control, the obligation of means becomes obligation of results, professionalized monitoring of the contracts execution, adaptation to the real needs of internal users and customers.
Buy better: dynamic simplification of processes, standardization, redefinition of objectives in terms of cost, implementation of production plans and the best services (deadlines, compliance with them, etc), alignment with the restrictions between suppliers and the needs of the company’s value chain.
An enhancer of improvement and transformation of the purchasing processes
What are the benefits of Lean Purchasing?
- Improvement of the performance and productivity of the Purchasing DepartmenT
- More value for the final customer
- Improvement of the quality of products and services
- Improvement of overall productivity
- More agility to take advantage of the innovation of the suppliers and to detect the inefficiencies of the company
- More consistency and efficiency in the Purchasing Department
- Creation of synergies between the different departments of the company
What are the Lean Purchasing tools?
There are different tools for this methodology: the first one is the VSM, (Value Stream Mapping), mapping of the value chain is a visual tool of Lean Manufacturing that allows to identify all the activities in the purchasing management, in order to find opportunities of improvement that have an impact on the entire value chain and not only on isolated processes. Once this first step is completed, it is convenient to complete the result obtained with a Kaizen methodology in which, depending on the opportunities and strategic priorities, we will sequence the different transformation projects.
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