Visual Planning and KPIs in purchasing: Effective Activity Planning and Follow-Up

Sammanfattning: The purpose of the master thesis is to find a way to plan activities, visualize them and follow-up on these activities. The Visual Planning method is used at Scania Production, R&D and at Scania Purchasing. However, the method doesn‟t fit the purchasers‟ communication and coordination needs. Furthermore, a majority of purchasing activities is disrupted due to unexpected events or deviations, which may cause delays.Hence, the thesis will result in a proposal of an effective planning and follow-up method that fits the need of the purchasing environment in general and more specifically in the purchasing group SGC. The proposing solution should handle deviations, be easy to use and visualize activities on an individual and aggregated department level.To find the best solution, an internal benchmarking and a review of best practice literature was carried out during the thesis. Observations at Scania Production, R&D and purchasing department were also carried out along with external interviews.Key findings included that handling deviances have a higher priority than commercial activities such as cost saving activities. Additionally, there is no standardize way of activity planning at SGC, cost has higher than quality and delivery and the Visual Planning method does not fit Scania‟s purchasing organization due to different needs of communication and coordination.Hence, the proposal included recommendations to introduce two milestones to the planned activities, collect all performance measurements in a balanced scorecard and an improved way of handling deviations. Furthermore, recommendations regarding the Visual Planning method included that the method should be used daily, where an agenda should structure the communication and the method should be adapted to fit the group‟s need of communication and coordination.