Why are Work Centers Important?
We have covered work centers before, namely what they are, and how they are part of end user experience improvements. But how does that really apply in the real world, outside overview blog posts?
Let’s look at the Buyer Work Center. In order to understand the value, we have to understand what a buyer does and their organizational function.
The role of a buyer varies, but includes:
- Contract negotiation and management
- Price negotiations
- Managing vendors or vendor relationships
- Vendor selection
- Generating purchase orders
- Managing purchasing/sourcing issues
- Update items
With those in mind, let’s look at the Buyer Dashboard. Essentially, it’s a one-stop shopping center for the purchasing buyer. As you can see, the majority of the buyer’s tasks can be executed and performed from the work center – or, alternatively, the links and reports required to perform the job function can be found at the work center. This provides vastly improved navigation and ease of use. From one main location within PeopleSoft, buyers (and other jobs/functions for other work centers) can concentrate their efforts and avoid navigation and search issues. This dramatically saves time and frees up the buyer for more value-add work – in other words, it increases personnel capacity.
So that’s a quick summary. Work centers focus on a job function and role, consolidate the main tasks and priorities of the job function and vastly improve the business flow. The screencap below helps illustrate these concepts.
(Click to enlarge)
