Introducing Procurement Hub

Our mission is to make life easier for interior designers and architects, and being able to manage multiple tasks at once is a core skill needed in running a successful studio. One of the most challenging parts of any project is sourcing, quoting, purchasing and facilitating the delivery of products on behalf of clients.

Why is this so challenging for designers? A designer can easily be speaking with 30+ brands at any one time. That’s 30+ different sales reps, payment terms, purchasing terms, deliveries, and orders, across multiple projects, clients and deadlines. On the other side of the process are brands, who are dealing with dozens of designers, all with deadlines, receiving information in various formats of schedules, purchase orders, and spec sheets – and everything is urgent!

At the moment designers manage this process with spreadsheets, emails, to-do lists, Post-it Notes, and pure, white-knuckled determination. One mistake can easily cost the client (and possibly the designer) thousands of dollars.

• “There’s no easy way to share procurement details with clients. The current process involves sending them a schedule and a tracking spreadsheet containing purchase orders and invoice numbers which they have to manually cross reference. This spreadsheet is almost always out of date the minute we send it to the client”
• “Spreadsheets have no reminder functionality – it’s easy to miss order deadlines or forget to follow up on certain product orders. This causes costly project delays and unhappy clients”
• “Consolidating emails, phone calls, faxes and messages into spreadsheets is incredibly time-consuming and tedious”
• “There are so many data points to track, it can be difficult to easily identify what’s late, what’s on-time, who needs to be chased-up, and it’s really easy to miss something”

At Programa, we’re working hard to make this process smoother for both designers and brands. Today, we’re releasing Procurement Hub, which is the first of several tools we’re building that will streamline the procurement process for designers. Procurement Hub allows designers to easily manage the procurement process from within their schedules, with important information available at a glance.

Here are some examples of how designers can use Procurement Hub:

• Never miss another deadline – keeping track of your deadlines is hard, and our Procurement Hub allows designers to see all of their procurement deadlines, from all of their projects, in one place, sorted by urgency.
• Easily mark deadlines as completed – no more hunting for data to edit in multiple spreadsheets, simply mark deadlines as completed directly from the Hub.
• Manage your files – Easily attach your relevant quotes, purchase orders, and invoices directly to your products within your Schedules. These can also be easily viewed and downloaded from online shared versions of your Schedules.
• Procurement will continue to get easier – we’ll be adding automation, with synchronised quote requests, purchase orders and more.

By launching Procurement Hub we’re taking our first meaningful step towards reducing the complexity of procurement for designers, and helping reduce cognitive load, and anxiety, reducing errors and saving time. You could even consider Programa’s Procurement Hub as an extra team member, someone who’s always there to help ensure you never miss a never deadline.

Our mission is to make life easier for interior designers and architects, and being able to manage multiple things at once is a core skill needed to run a successful studio. One of the most challenging parts of any project is sourcing, quoting, purchasing and facilitating the delivery of products on behalf of clients.

Our mission is to make life easier for interior designers and architects, and being able to manage multiple tasks at once is a core skill needed in running a successful studio. One of the most challenging parts of any project is sourcing, quoting, purchasing and facilitating the delivery of products on behalf of clients.

Why is this so challenging for designers? A designer can easily be speaking with 30+ brands at any one time. That’s 30+ different sales reps, payment terms, purchasing terms, deliveries, and orders, across multiple projects, clients and deadlines. On the other side of the process are brands, who are dealing with dozens of designers, all with deadlines, receiving information in various formats of schedules, purchase orders, and spec sheets – and everything is urgent!

At the moment designers manage this process with spreadsheets, emails, to-do lists, Post-it Notes, and pure, white-knuckled determination. One mistake can easily cost the client (and possibly the designer) thousands of dollars.

• “There’s no easy way to share procurement details with clients. The current process involves sending them a schedule and a tracking spreadsheet containing purchase orders and invoice numbers which they have to manually cross reference. This spreadsheet is almost always out of date the minute we send it to the client”
• “Spreadsheets have no reminder functionality – it’s easy to miss order deadlines or forget to follow up on certain product orders. This causes costly project delays and unhappy clients”
• “Consolidating emails, phone calls, faxes and messages into spreadsheets is incredibly time-consuming and tedious”
• “There are so many data points to track, it can be difficult to easily identify what’s late, what’s on-time, who needs to be chased-up, and it’s really easy to miss something”

At Programa, we’re working hard to make this process smoother for both designers and brands. Today, we’re releasing Procurement Hub, which is the first of several tools we’re building that will streamline the procurement process for designers. Procurement Hub allows designers to easily manage the procurement process from within their schedules, with important information available at a glance.