Poka Yoke in Procurement

Poke yoke is a Japanese term that means mistake proofing or error proofing.

A simple example of Poka yoke is a microwave which doesn’t start without its door fully closed thereby negating any chances of an accident.

This concept can have a great application in procurement as well. In procurement, there are a lot of touch points wherein buyer is expected to take certain actions in order to be compliant to internal processes.

Most of the buyer activities are sequential in nature implying if one activity is not completed, the other activity should not be initiated. Because of this sequential nature, Poka yoke becomes a perfect instrument for implementation.

We will look at a simple example to understand it better.

Credit check is a critical due diligence check which is done to check if supplier can be entrusted with business.

If the supplier credit check has come out negative, the system should not allow buyers to either initiate a contract or release a purchase order to the supplier. In fact, system should not even allow the buyers to float RFQ to this supplier.

Similarly, in case of negative outcomes of anti-corruption & bribery or sustainability checks, system can be provisioned to deter buyers to proceed to the next steps.

Depending on the procurement strategy or in order words, organization priorities checks can be introduced to make it a mistake proof procurement system. To start with, if not all, we can identify the critical process and target them.

We need to be careful in introducing these checks as this might increase the lead time to close any sourcing project.

This might also frustrate buyers as they would feel handcuffed in doing their jobs. We have still not started talking about the pressure from business user who want the procurement job to be finished a day before sharing the requirement ;)

But the positives it can have, can save a lot of troubles for procurement and for the organizations.

These checks can be as simple as uploading necessary files or a quick review from somebody in system in order to allow buyers to move to next step.

Systems can be made little more intelligent to gain the positives and get rid of whatever negative impact it can have on sourcing process.

The implementation of poke yoke becomes a cake walk if there is as single portal for buyers to work on. It can become an exacting job if there are different portals/websites with no linkage.

APIs (Application program interface) can be the last resort in that scenario.