I automated our purchasing list so it stopped living in one person's head.
I rebuilt our purchasing workflow on the Aspire API. Here's what I learned.TL;DR: Our purchasing workbook was a hand-maintained spreadsheet that lived or died on one person. I replaced it with a SharePoint List that populates itself from Aspire, so the purchasing team spends their time sourcing instead of transcribing.One person held it togetherEvery plant we sell has to get bought. For years that meant one person, our Purchasing Manager, reading through newly won proposals in Aspire and hand-typing every line item into an Excel workbook. Property, ticket, item, size, quantity, cost, account manager. Then tracking status on each one: sourcing, reserved, picked up, in the yard.It worked, and the person doing it was good at it. It also had every problem you'd expect:One person held the whole process. The judgment about what mattered, what to skip, what to chase: none of it was written down anywhere. Silent drift. Finished jobs stayed on the list for months. Nobody clears rows they aren't
