The Two-Week Procurement Audit: Identify the hidden causes of friction frustrating your team and transform procurement for good
Most procurement delays happen in the gaps between systems, where no report can see them. This two-week procurement audit walks you through 20 recent purchases, seven handoffs, and three simple measures. By the end, you will know where work stalls and which friction to fix first.
- ✓ A two-week plan for running the audit with a small team, so it fits around everyone's normal workload.
- ✓ How to pull a sample of 20 closed purchases that reflects the whole firm, including the routine orders nobody thinks to question.
- ✓ The seven handoffs every purchase passes through, from the first request to the supplier payment.
- ✓ Three measures to tally at each handoff (wait, re-key, and mismatch), with definitions strict enough that two reviewers land on the same answer.
- ✓ How to read the results as a heat map and trace each hot spot to its cause: a seam between systems, a gap in policy, or a limit on capacity.
- ✓ A free three-sheet worksheet for logging your sample, tallying each handoff, and tracking the fixes you choose.
After the audit: keep your records moving
You can run every step of this audit with the systems and spreadsheets you already have. The harder part is keeping records connected once the fixes are in place.
Pivotly links the systems your team already runs, so a value entered once syncs downstream, every value traces back to its source, and each approved change is logged. Your next procurement process audit then starts from one record, and your buyers get their hours back for sourcing.
Stop chasing status. Start fixing the handoff.