By Megan Amdahl / 18 Jun 2018 / Topics: Procurement Workforce
For more than 10 years, I’ve been entrenched in financial planning, cost reduction and process improvement. And as a business leader, I view technology through the lens of optimization. In 2018, I’m placing a lot of focus on leveraging automation to achieve that.
How can we use automation to streamline processes and reduce costs? How can technology remove the busy work and help people do their jobs more efficiently so they can focus on higher-value tasks?
A great example of this occurred with an international hotel chain, a longtime client of Insight. We’ve worked with them on a number of technology projects, but when they told us their second largest hotel in the world required 12 people to handle the procurement for just that one location, I shook my head in disbelief.
The reason? They were still using legacy procurement models, creating hours of tedious, manual tasks for their employees.
This was problematic on several levels. Besides burying employees in busy work — the thought of which hurts me at my core — the manual tasks left too much room for errors. They also created complicated spend reporting with limited visibility and slowed delivery time from request to deployment.
Because of our tenured partnership with the hotel chain, they put a lot of trust in us to help them transform their traditional process into an e procurement in supply chain management experience on Insight for both hardware and software procurement.
This helped them achieve four key wins:
Those 12 people who had previously been bogged down by manually intensive tasks for procuring technology are now able to focus on bigger, higher-value projects for the company as there are now more or less people with e procurement.
But the e-procurement in supply chain management process is much more than buying products. The automation that comes through e-procurement can ripple through the many layers of an organization to provide holistic optimization.
The efficiencies the hotel chain realized from the e-procurement platform were just the tip of the iceberg. Moving to an e-procurement process with a single vendor also helped optimize configuration and deployment.
The hotel chain’s entire IT infrastructure is running through Insight — and automation is the backbone of our relationship. They rely on us for server workstation configuration, network gear switches, routers and standard asset tagging.
For example, devices are asset-tagged and run through their myInsight account, which automatically notifies the hotel the day an item ships. This way they know in advance what assets are headed to which location so they can proactively add them to their database.
Automation and e-procurement are essential tools to optimize operations and control budget. And nothing thrills me more than to see employees freed from busy work and able to apply their unique skills in a higher-value capacity — helping the business thrive.
Senior Vice President, Operations and Product Management, Insight
Megan is a finance leader with more than 10 years of diverse experience in financial planning and analysis, cost reduction, process improvement and technical accounting.
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