Get your requirements right before procuring

On the lengthy procurement thread, anything could happen. At almost any stage, the whole process could crumble due to a series of factors. That is always a frustrating turn of events. But there is no other stage that causes more frustration in terms of time and financial resources lost than the first stage itself, which is the identification of requirements.
“Imagine procuring an item only to discover moments later that you did not even need it. Could there be any worse way to waste time and money?” Raymond Jude Ssenyondo, a procurement officer at Rafiki Developers Limited, rhetorically asks. This is the reason he believes a fair amount of attention should be accorded to needs identification to avoid what he terms as a possible procurement disaster.

Determining requirement
For Ssenyondo, a sure way to ascertain what kind of item needs to be procured starts with the basic step of identifying and understanding the need at hand itself. This could be done by a trusted person in the department that needs the item. Such person should be helped by a technical expert in case the nature of the need calls for it, for instance, the acquisition of a new type of security lights for the company.

“That is for the case of such smaller items. But where the procurement involves the acquisition of a major item, let’s say the main transformer for the premises or a specialised truck; you may need to set up a sizeable team of experts that should deliberate before qualifying an item as the true requirement,” Mr Ssenyondo says.
Such teams should be multidisciplinary to address the different questions that should be answered. This will help facilitate in-depth understanding of the need and thus the requirement. The team’s duty will not only be limited to the ascertainment of need and requirement, they must go further to quoteS whether the required item can be provided in house or sourced externally, plus, if outsourced, what is the procurement lead-time?

“A budget should also be drawn by the people entrusted with requirement determination, budgetary constraints highlighted along with the method best suited to be soliciting this type of requirement and the type of contract that would be most appropriate. All these are pertinent issues for the entrusted team,”Mr Ssenyondo says.

Planning in procurement

Procurement planning is the process of deciding what to buy, when and from what source. During the procurement planning process the procurement method is assigned and the expectations for fulfillment of procurement requirements determined.