Office Supplies -- Best Business Practice

We are looking at punch out but for now we use Stapleslink. The endusers order everything on the Staples web site. The orders are approved by a buyer in Purchasing. No PO's are created. Staples delivers supplies to the receiving dock clearly labeled with the deliver-to department. Supplies are then delivered to the departments along with any nonstock/stock. Staples sends AP the invoice monthly in a spreadsheet with all the necessary fields to use MS Addins to upload the invoice detail.

Paul,
I think the "best practices" you might be looking for is a joint decision between Finance and Purchasing. As a healthcare organization, the purchasing of standard office supplies is necessary, but not a core competency. From that perspective, is it important to actually procure office supplies through your ERP? I am not trying to sway you to an answer, I adamantly straddle the fence on this issue...

On the one hand, with punchout you should be able to run through the full gamut of EDI transactions with very little manual intervention. The part number/SKU, UOM and price will all come directly from the vendor, so receiving, matching and payment should all process with no problem.

On the other hand, why bother? I think all of the larger office supply vendors offer a web-based purchasing program. You should be able to negotiate your delivery terms (direct to the requester or deliver to a warehouse/transit point). The supplier can then send a summary bill on a periodic basis to be paid direct by AP.

If you are thinking that summary billing removes some of the checks and balances of an order-based process, you would be right and wrong. In the punchout world, the supplier is providing all of the information used to create the requisition, so your normal checks (against the ERP-stored vendor agreement) do not occur. In both situations, you are going to have to audit the transactions after the fact. And here is where the agreement between Finane and Purchasing is important. Where do you want look for the information necessary to audit your office supply purchases?

I hope this helps,

We just have our RQC users locked into ordering from templates. If they need something added to their template, they call a higher place person to get it negotiated and added.

We also use Staples but we have Staples deliver to the end user. We have limits on what the users can order and who does the ordering.

Thank you to everyone for their feedback\ideas. I am also on the fence as to WHY do we need to run these type of transactions through Lawson; the effort really is not worth the value, if any, the entire process creates. Punch-out would definitely reduce the amount of effort put forth, but i'm still not completely sold.

Thanks Red, you and I are on the same page