Primary challenge owner: City of Groningen
Secondary challenge owner(s): None
The Purchasing Department of the City of Groningen handles procurement processes for the municipal departments. Providing insight into, distributing and planning the workload of all the tenders is complex. Some of the tenders come from a contract database and are known in advance because of their repetitive nature. But other tenders are incidental, often with an ad hoc character. This makes procurement planning difficult, whereby the planning also changes regularly because of external factors.
In addition, the tenders each have their own profile (effort required in hours, complexity, political sensitivity, legality, etc.). This profile determines the priority and expertise required. As a result, it’s difficult for the Purchasing Department to estimate the (current) workload and it’s not always possible to make clear choices regarding the deployment of (external) purchasers. The current tools, such as a strip plan or week start document, don’t offer enough support. As a purchasing department, we’re looking for a solution that provides each colleague in the department with the correct information, so that we can focus more on the basis of priority and find a balance in the deployment of available and requested expertise and skills. It’s important that the solution offers room for focus on subjective (soft) and objective (hard) characteristics, far ahead, but also real time for today.
Contribute to the unambiguous understanding and management of the (required) workload, forecast and actual capacity planning for the Purchasing Department.