András Nagy: CPS - Procurement support

Clarity  Today’s interviewee is András Nagy. Under his guidance, a flexible procurement support application has been developed for comprehensive procurement management. Procurement task tracking has been placed on a platform that significantly accelerates and refines work.

András In designing the application, we tried to support procurement tasks efficiently. Our aim was to cover all the activities that are directly related to the procurement and to provide a tool to make everyday work easier and smoother.

Clarity  How did you come up with the idea of building the CPS system?

András In our experience, the legal and operational environment of the procurement is quite complex: the processes are complex; many regulatory agencies are in place; a great number of documentations need to be handled; and the administration is significant. The controlling (legal, financial, managerial, etc.) must be provided from planning to contracting, various data services must be provided and usually, there is very little available IT support. A Procurement Buyer has to manage the tasks, supervisors and deadlines, for which we wish to provide a tool.

Clarity  What are the benefits of the new system?

András In the procurement, the introduction of CPS can increase:

- plannability

- standardised operation

- economy

- effectiveness

- control

- up-to-date information

Procurement processes involve representatives of various fields. For them, the benefits described above are presented in different ways, e.g.: regulated operation and legal control are important for the legal area provided by CPS workflow. Procurement information related to planning, collateral examination, commitment and monitoring of economy are critical for finance. Various reports and dashboards provide support for them besides the controlling opportunity built into the process. Finally, it is a kind of management tool for the Procurement Buyer for executing a wide range of tasks.

Clarity  You have chosen the Effector, which is a very popular low-coding platform nowadays. Why did you choose this one?

András An important aspect was that the knowledge needed to develop on the platform could be learned easily. It gives us and the client the opportunity to avoid the supplier deadlock. The advantage of the low-coding is that the product can be produced faster and its maintenance is more economical in general. This has been confirmed by our experience: needs can be assessed and specified quickly based on the ‘prefabricated’ functions in CPS – it can be accomplished within one month in case of one module. We can develop and customize a ready-to-release module for the client within some 1-1.5 month and the cost of the change request is lower than for custom-developed systems.

Clarity  What procurement processes are supported by CPS?

András Procurement planning; the approval of procurement needs within the organization; execution of call for bids tasks related to procurement and public procurement procedures; and approval of contract and contract modification requests. We have developed different CPS modules through these major processes and activities – the Plan, the Demand Management, the Procedure and the Contract modules. It is important to highlight that besides the processes we have also put a strong emphasis on making transparent, easy to search registers in the system, for example, the contract register is a significant element of our solution.

Clarity  Why would you recommend it to customers, how does it make the procurement processes easier for them?

András Because the following, otherwise quite common, questions will be easier to answer if they do come up:

• Where are the documents of this case?
• Who has the task? Why is it still his/hers?
• Where is the ‘…’ procurement?
• We have already had a similar contract, haven’t we?
• What was our contract with this partner before?
• Who comes after the ‘…’ department according to the rules?

And, of course, because we believe that the application provides effective support.

Clarity  Thank you András for the interview!

For further questions, please do not hesitate to contact András via cps@clarity.hu