Procurement Data Optimization Initiative

As Finance Strategic Transformation moves steadily toward its January 2021 go-live date, Procurement and Business Intelligence will be jointly pursuing a continuous improvement project to complement the new financial system. 

The purpose of the project is to create a data model that will allow reliable reporting for both strategic and ad hoc needs. Procurement’s Shannon Wampler has been embedded into the Business Intelligence team and will devote her time and effort toward this project for the next six months, working Procurement staff to address the current issues that make gathering data burdensome and time-consuming. 

The overhauled data model will help identify the team's reporting needs in advance of Workday Financials, and most importantly, will allow Procurement staff to make strategic, data-driven decisions to serve their customers. 

The Procurement Data Optimization Initiative will:

• Develop a common understanding of Procurement terms, metrics, statuses, and dates in order to ensure consistent data reporting.
• Standardize access to reports and metrics from a single location
• Produce two sets of information for each Procurement team, including reports, dashboards, metrics, KPIs, visualizations, and so on, that will
• Allow those teams to improve efficiency, identify instances requiring attention, and gain insight about their organizational processes in general.
• Serve the needs of multiple audiences and provide ways to explore the data and analyze the result of queries, track progress toward goals, and forecast future scenarios.
• Collect data needs and reporting requirements for Workday Financials.

Wampler will work closely with Jenn Glassman, Director of Procurement and Supplier Diversity Services, and Mark Anderson, Director of Business Intelligence and new BI team member, Brad Kurtz.

“For some time, we have known that it takes a lot of effort to get the information our team needs,” Wampler says, adding, “one of our aims is to come up with a standardized set of data that will allow us to have common metrics and reporting.”

“This project will get everyone in Procurement on the same page,” Wampler says.