Processes

While working in procurement at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space in Sunnyvale, California, there were many processes in place that needed improvements. In this paper I plan to analyze how the organization I worked for improved its' processes. I will provide examples to support the processes and my own ideas for improving them.

In my organization we purchased electronics for all the programs within Lockheed Martin that were based in Sunnyvale. Some of the processes that my organization was improving on were time management, [reducing time to place an order?] reducing the supplier base and reducing requirements. "The organization assigned the purchasing function usually has several functions and responsibilities. It must acquire items that conform to the requirements specified and obtain these items in time to support manufacturing schedules, and the items must be procured at a minimum cost." (Cappels[, page]) Our organization found that too much time was being spent getting the order to our department. The parts had to go through too many people before it finally reached our organization. The engineer began the process by filling out a form and sending it to a planner who would enter it into Sunnyvales' [Sunnyvale's] own computer based program called PROMIS. PROMIS would route the information to Quality Assurance (Q.A.) to have the proper requirements (called T-codes) added to the part. These requirements called out packaging specifications, supplier quality levels, and other provisions that may be required on a specific part. Once the T-codes had been applied, PROMIS directed the part to the correct purchasing organization. Once our organization received the order in PROMIS they would then direct through PROMIS to the correct employee who handled that specific commodity. Sometimes this process would take months [wow!]; sometimes it would take days. This often interfered with scheduling and meeting deadlines, which created line shutdowns. There was no really definite way to determine how long it would take a request to get to our organization to be purchased.

One way our organization found to improve the routing process was to create "Quads" in which there would be one person from each department working together in one area attaining the same goal of procuring a part. This way if any problems occurred we had the correct person right next to us to resolve the issue. There were several times were [when? Where?] I needed to address some requirements that were placed on the order that I felt did not belong.