Often, people also take the easier pathway. Sometimes this is a negative choice which indicates a lack of will power; for example when a person bends to temptation or negative peer pressure.
 

But the tendency of people to select the Path of Least Resistance can be a positive factor when applied to supply-chain performance. In that case, choice of the easier path shows wisdom in prioritizing one's effort. The intelligent design of sourcing, contracting, procurement and settlement processes can capture our internal customers' desire to take the Path of Least Resistance.

During the last 12 months (in addition to training many public and corporate groups as well as guiding several ongoing cost-reduction projects), my colleagues and I have conducted several 360^o Supply Management Efficiency Reviews for clients in the Technology, Energy, Financial Services, and Governmental sectors. Each of those efficiency reviews found that some of the greatest opportunities to improve the client organization's P2P performance would result from providing their employees an easier pathway to take.
 

This article will discuss three tips for ways the principle of "least resistance" can be used to improve SCM performance...
 

First Tip - Put yourself into the shoes of your customer departments. Is it easier for them to work with, or to bypass, your procurement group? Some department heads may subscribe to the principle that it is "It's easier to get forgiveness than to ask for permission." These are the people who go around the procurement group and have a supplier ship the product, and later get the invoice approved by "some executive" in their chain of command. Or they ask the supplier to submit a proposal and later ask the sourcing group to "please get a contract put in place" (i.e. "papering the deal").

Several years ago, one of my colleagues and I assessed the procurement, contracting, and payables operations of a Blue Shield health insurance company. As we were interviewing the firm's payables group director to understand enterprise-wide operational compliance to the procurement policy, we learned that company policy allowed an "exception" to the procurement rules to be approved by any senior vice president. The accounts payables group sent an email warning of non-compliance to each offender, along with a PDF copy of the company's procedures..."to discourage them from doing it again".  

We asked the payables director how many times this occurred, and she did not have an answer. So we set up a tracking system to determine the number of warnings the payables group sent out...which totaled 97 incidents of non-compliance during the following two weeks (for those with calculators, that's 2,562 times a year when offenders were slapped on the wrist). Obviously, it was "easier" for departments to bypass the procurement process in this company. Only by making an improved procurement process "the path of less resistance" has this procurement group been able to begin changing the behavior of their internal customers.

Second Tip - Try processing a purchase order transaction yourself through your organization's P2P system. Was the system selected and configured by some finance team to capture every imaginable accounting detail...or is it formatted to support a logical business process? Is it an "Amazon-like" experience...or does a cumbersome ERP system require users to navigate through multiple screens to enter every line-item? Are SKU's illustrated by clear photographs and understandable descriptions...or do users have to guess at the identity of products?

If the procurement system is a pain for you to work with; don't be surprised when your internal customers figure out other ways to get what they need. In the 2014 eProcurement Wave Report⁽¹⁾, Forrester Research says, "...many complain to Forrester about low adoption of their current eProcurement platform...[around] 50%."

Even if a good eProcurement (or eSourcing, Contracts Management, etc.) tool has been selected by an organization, poor choices about the configuration of the tool can make it unfriendly to procurement's internal customers. Trying out the system yourself can open your eyes to needed changes. As Forrester Research says in the same report⁽¹⁾, "Make the right way easy and the wrong way hard".

Third Tip - Take your procurement policy and procedure manual home over a weekend and read it through. Is it understandable for the average employee to comprehend? Or was it written only to be understood by someone who has worked in the procurement profession?

For example, does the policy explain why competitive bidding is a preferred methodology, or does it merely insist that bidding must occur? Does the document describe ten violations of the bidding policy rather than positioning the internal customer to work with procurement to follow the right process?

Merely having policies and procedures does not create a "path of least resistance". Trying to understanding overly-complex policies may, in fact, be a cumbersome process for our internal customers.
 

When Strategic Procurement Solutions helps clients to develop (or improve) policy and procedure manuals, we often recommend the creation of two sets of documents. The first is an easy-reading guidelines document for the customer departments who need to navigate through the process with the help of the procurement group. The second is a more-detailed desktop version only for the procurement group which provides thorough instructions for each aspect of the acquisition process.

It's sometimes easy to think that the internal customer needs to have every detail about the acquisition process, but that's wrong. Many procurement policies are sort of like using a nuclear bomb to kill a fly.

Creating an "easier path" through the procurement process will gain us higher participation and satisfaction from our internal customers. The groups which make the procurement process easier for their customers to use will achieve higher adoption rates, reduced 'maverick' spending, and earlier involvement in strategic sourcing.