CONTRACT PURCHASING CASE STUDY

Storeroom Buyer Position

A Fortune 500 company retained Purchasing Services Co. (PSC) to operate their Storeroom buyer desk during a major transition. They promoted the existing Storeroom buyer and wanted to use this opportunity to eliminate the position.

The company wanted to move the purchasing responsibility for the 8,000 items stocked in the Storeroom into the other buying offices, which would allow them to reduce the overall buying staff at the facility. However, the promotion of the existing buyer took place during one of their busiest periods, and the commodity buying offices were not able to take on this new responsibility for several months.

Compounding the problem, a large percentage of the item descriptions were out-of-date. This would have caused additional work for the new buying offices while they were learning to buy for the Storeroom.

PSC functioned as the Storeroom buyer during this transition. We worked out of our facility using a modem to retrieve information from their computer system and a runner to transfer computer reports and files between the facilities. We revised necessary item descriptions,  generated bid lists, and competitively bid and issued purchase agreements for the items involved.

As the process continued, we grouped the items for the new buyers and transferred all the information we gathered to our customer concerning sources, prices, etc. This allowed them to integrate the purchase of these items into their current purchasing functions without interruption. By having us handle this function, our customer made an orderly transition to the new format. The customer promoted the incumbent without delay and made the jobs of the new Buyers easier by starting with much more accurate item descriptions in place. We gave them the time to perform the down-sizing more professionally.