5 MIN READ
Manage and automate FF&E procurement at scale with Fohlio. Schedule a demo or book a consultation with one of our account managers to explore these features today. Join us on Thursday, October 7, 2021 as we sit down with some of the top procurement professionals in the AEC industry. Travis Reese and Heather Parker discuss how their procurement workflows have thrived despite the pandemic.
As the procurement manager for Goebel Design Group, Travis Reese’s day revolves around price checks for designs, placing orders, tracking them, and staying within the created budget. In addition to procurement tasks, he also puts together installation packets — and sometimes even supervises the actual installations.
“We do a lot of senior care facilities, both capex and new builds,” Travis says. “We’ll be working on between 8 and 10 projects at any given time, and we’ll normally get a data dump for all our projects 2-3 times a year.”
Sifting through the massive amount of data can be a chore; and that’s not even counting all the product information blanks that have to be filled in, plus keeping track of all the changes.
Filling in Pricing and Lead Time Information
When asking for quotes and lead times, Travis does it all in one fell swoop — instead of emailing back and forth every time. “If it’s a project where we have 12-15 items with a supplier, I will use a Fohlio report: I’ll just type in the supplier name under ‘supplier,’ select all the items, send it to them, and say, fill this out, please.”
Automating Purchase Order Generation
Before switching to Fohlio, Travis’s team was still using analogue methods to produce purchase orders. “Literally hard copies. So between Excel and Google Sheets, I had to create a couple different versions of spreadsheets. The boxes would turn green if we had submitted a PO or if we had an invoice,” Travis recalls. But the problem was, “Every time I had to make a PO, I had to enter all that data.”
Which is where Fohlio was a big help. “The PO system with the database attached is so good. In the past, I couldn’t take any data from a spreadsheet and put it into anything other than another spreadsheet,” Travis says.
Now, he simply reuses all the information the design team adds into the system.
Team Collaboration
Something else we also thought very much worth mentioning was how Travis and his team work together: It’s a brilliant example of how collaboration at the beginning makes the whole workflow so much smoother.
“What I’ll do with my designers is, I show them how I create POs; so that when they extract information using the web clipper, they’ll know exactly what I need in order to make the layout correct for the PO.”
Learn more: 11 Ways to Manage FF&E Specification and Procurement Costs
Sign up for the webinar here. Manage and automate FF&E procurement at scale with Fohlio. Schedule a demo or book a consultation with one of our account managers to explore these features today.
