Buyers (and their bosses) often come up with good ideas to make processes or relationships go more smoothly, but the changes often result in work which is ironic, since the changes were supposed to make everything more efficient.
A quick example will illustrate the point. Someone will come up with an idea that office supply spending should be analyzed more closely to determine how to implement savings. So far, so good. How to analyze it? Create spreadsheets and more spreadsheets! Suddenly, hours of time can be taken up in the creation and manipulation of spreadsheets.
If you have a corporate account with one of the big companies such as OfficeMax or Staples, then their web-based ordering systems can be used to easily create the spreadsheets. That leads me to the point that Buyers should not be creating more work for themselves. They should ask the vendor to do the work whenever possible.
Here's a fun example of that which seems so appropriate for the summer. Everyone is familiar with Dairy Queen's best selling item, The Blizzard. The comapny explains on their website under Blizzard History how they wanted the candy vendors to crush the candy before they purchased it so the individual operators would not have to spend time and resources on this task. Read about it and see which vendor first agreed and helped Dairy Queen launch The Blizzard in a massive scale.
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