Purchasing: Top 3 Home Working Challenges

Since Covid-19, home working has become the new normal. However, this shift from the exceptional to every day is not without consequences for the Purchasing department. Here are the three main challenges we have faced during this health crisis:

Moving away from physical invoices

Working together remotely

Staying on track.

Challenge 1: moving away from physical invoices

Even before Covid-19, the end of physical invoicing was already on the cards, because of:

The rise in digital processing of supplier invoices
A fall in disputes and the general reliability of using digital invoices

Now there is a third reason for moving away from physical invoicing: with the purchasing team working from home, using physical invoicing has become very impractical!

Moving away from physical invoicing has allowed us to adopt the following invoicing flow:

Electronic transmission
Validation
Processing and settlement

Challenge 2: working together remotely

Homeworking is more than just remotely completing tasks. We have needed to adapt to a home working model that still allows us to work as a team.

Homeworking prevents a team from catching up by each other’s desk, or have a quick chat by the coffee machine: useful for both team morale and cohesion.

Adapting to working from home means finding new ways to compensate. We have put new guidelines into play, to keep ourselves working as an effective team:

Managing remote decisions quickly and decisively.
Experimenting with new video conferencing tools for team meetings.

Challenge 3: staying on track

The third lesson is less about the challenges of working from home than delivering the same high level of service, even during this crisis. Indeed, Purchasing has had to adapt to an entirely new situation:

An intense pressure to keep an uninterrupted supply chain and control its course.
A large number of changing contacts, due to onsite reorganisation.

Purchasing has had to quickly learn to put flexibility at the heart of our service. At the same time, the team has continued to maintain and advance its business priorities: