PeopleSoft Strategic Sourcing: Creating Project Plans for Procurement Events
One feature not yet discussed in this Strategic Sourcing blog mini-series is the ability to create project plans for procurement events within strategic sourcing. Some of the tasks that can be performed include:
- Assign duration days for each task
- Document instructions
- Define requirements for completion of each task
- Assign a resource to the task
- Optionally mark a task as a milestone
- Define predecessor tasks, which must be completed before the current task can start
The start and end dates for a task can either be defined by the user or calculated by the system. You can set precedent tasks along with entering actual start and finish dates. Also, the plan owner can monitor the progress of the plan as well as the workloads for each resource. This is cool because it enables the entire sourcing process to be tracked and monitored. How so? Plan owners can view how the expected task dates compare to the actual task dates to determine where potential issues exist in the sourcing process. You can also define key tasks as milestones during the creation of a sourcing plan. When these milestones are defined, you can review the status of the milestones to determine whether the project is on schedule. Overall, some of the basic functionality of project planning is included in order to create plans for larger sourcing events which need this level of control. It’s a smart, well-designed capability.
Sound ambiguous still? Let’s take a live look at how to create a basic sourcing event plan:
Next week we will wrap our series on Strategic Sourcing. We wish a happy and safe 4th of July to all our U.S. readers.
