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Direct contact between supplier and end user and not procurement department is not positive approach - in my opinion, any contact between supplier and end user department should be routed through procurement department. Such interactions may be necessary for better understanding of client specifications, clarifications before placing order, so that it is followed immediately with a clear design document submitted by supplier at the quoted price
It all depending upon the need, in some cases could be allowed with soft checks /controls but every action should be under the agreed and established SOPs.
of course , purchasing is very important process to add your profit
Well, It depends because its necessary for the organization if they want to procure something I guess its not a negative sign. Similarly, depending on the scale of your project, there could be a very wide range of potential solutions and approaches to the business need and a number of ways of researching the market and selecting a supplier Such kind of policies make their work in right direction.
Direct contact between supplier and user by passing procurement staff is not desirable.
It creates unnecessary bias towards particulars supplier(s), suppliers may push their own product specification to the user and it may reduce effective competition.
If the user wants to know what is available in the market, user may ask the procurement department for required literature or brochure and then draft spec. and send to procurement department for action.
I don't prefer such contact between the suppliers and the users unless there is a technical issue to be discussed with the user
By passing procuremnt is not a possitive approach but there are some regular orders for which the user department cant wait for purchase approval and teh value of stock is small, therefore some organization allow direct contact in some specific catagories of items, with small monetary value.
In some special cases, the answer would be "yes". These would refer to the gathering of technical specifications or mechanical properties. However, when it comes down to the procurement process, this should be left to the procurement staff.
According to type of business, there are many policies in procurement, one of them is Vendor's management or Vendor's relation, I agree with that policy if you are selling a services like credit cards or shipping activities ... etc, but in items I don't like at all because it will makes some thing of self competency and may the user understand something by mistake as he is not familiar with other business tasks.
Such policy basically differs from organization to organization. I think it is very important to have direct contact with the supplier and user. The benefit of such contacts are-
1. The supplier can understand the core requirement of the user
2. The user can get exactly what he wants
3. Supplier-customer relationship improves
4. Both parties can share same requirements with procurement staff which helps them in placing orders as per end user requirements to the supplier.
The negotiation part should solely depends on the procurement staff but the requirements can be shared with suppliers directly by end user.
For easy understanding i would like to share the real time example in this case. In GlaxoSmithKline (gsk) Bangladesh Limited, the material schedulers, production officers, and other dept.'s end user directly communicate with suppliers about their requirements. Upon their basic understanding the respective dept's personnel share the purchase requisition with the procurement dept. Based on the purchase requisition, the procurement dept. invites for quotation. With comparative statement, he identifies the lowest quoted suppliers against the requirement. Then he (procurement staff) solely negotiate with suppliers about products prices and maintaining quality.
