People with "office jobs," what do you actually do?

I'm a Purchasing Agent. 9-5 cublicle job:

My job is to source (identify vendors) and purchase low-cost, high turnaround (quick delivery of) materials/equipment needed by my customers, i.e. other companies trying to run their business.

In the industry my company services (mostly U.S. and some overseas manufacturing) this could be anything from nuts and bolts and powertools, to raw materials like wood, sheet metal and plastics to computer equipment software, all the way to the everyday such as janitorial cleaning supplies and basic safety equipment.

This role exists in general so that there is a separate dedicated individual, team or department whose sole responsibility is to procure the needed supplies requested by the deparments of either the same company or different companies.

In the case of the company I work for we service other companies and exist as a seperate corporate entity wheras other companies maintain their own purchasing departments and may or may not outsource a portion of their labour to companies like us.


Day-To-Day Responsibilities of a Purchasing Agent at My Company:

Clock in at 8, clock out at 5, 1 hour lunch break, lax dress-code (jeans/t-shirt are okay), freedom to take breaks when needed and occasionally work overtime.

Throughout the day my team supervisor will walk by our cubicles and deliver a stack of printed orders to our inboxes with lines of materials requested by our customer.

Most of the materials requested on these orders are sourced (traced to one or more potential suppliers) beforehand, however it will be incumbant upon us at times to source our own materials if either our supervisor or our dedicated sourcing team is unable to do so.

My first task is to log into AS400 (an legacy purchasing system that's out-dated yet still widely used) and sign into the orders so the supervisor and other members of my team can trace them back to me if any issues arise. I then either fax or email a form called a "Request For Quote" (RFQ) which the sales reps from our sourced vendors either fill out and return back to us or reply back with a formal quotation of goods using their company form.

The returned RFQ or quote contains the price of each material and the time it will take to deliver (lead-time). When we get enough of them back we vet them for any errors (i.e. incorrect item/qty quoted) and single out the vendor who can supply the materials at the lowest cost/shortest lead time. The short way of saying all this is that we have potential vendors "bid" for our business with them.

If needed I will follow up with them for better pricing/availability, however we receive special contract pricing from most vendors so we get sizeable discounts, large enough that they get passed down to our customer which is one of the reasons our customers stay with us.

Finally I log in the pricing/delivery data for the winning bid or quotation and fax/email the vendor a copy of the purchase order (PO) to the vendor with the winning bid.

After that the vendor takes over, ships the materials to our customer and bills us for the cost of the goods which our accounting department then rebills to our customer at a slightly higher percentage than the cost to purchase. That percentage varies depending on the contract with our customer.

When the order is complete, we stamp it and at the end of the day drop off the finished pile to be scanned into our database for later access in case any issues arise with the order.

A birds-eye view of this this whole process is as follows:

1) customer sends order to us for materials

2) we purchase materials from the vendor

3) vendor bills us (sends us an invoice) for the materials and ships goods to the customer*

4) we pay the vendor for said materials (vendor makes profit)*

5) we then recharge (rebill, invoice) the customer for the same materials but at a slightly higher price than we bought (we make a profit)*

6) follow up to make sure materials get to our customers on time

(*Steps 3 - 6 can be expanded on but we'd be dipping into the responsibilities of two other roles in the company, but in breif, steps 3 - 5 are the responsibilities of the Billing Agent of our Accounting Department and Step 6 is really the responsibility of the Expeditor whose job is to follow up with vendors after the order has been placed to either try to get the materials delivered sooner than promised or at least ensures they are received on time. Although as mentioned before with sourcing, there are times when the responsibilites between my job and the Expeditor will blur as well.)


Additional Responsibilites:

In addition to the responsibilites described above, there are a whole host of other things that must be done when orders go wrong. I won't go into detail with this but some examples are either us ordering incorrect materials or our vendor shipping incorrect materials or even the vendor shipping to the wrong location which depending on the urgency of the order will require quick action to resolve.

Other examples are us loosing orders during high volume periods where your desk can look like someone took a leaf-blower to it, incorrectly entering pricing data which can affect how the customer gets billed and what we get paid and can potentially get you in a lot of trouble, and generally speaking either our management or our customers having unrealistic expectations of us in terms of what we can do to meet their needs at any given moment or under any particular circumstance.


Overall:

I would describe this job as fairly stressful at times and say it's not for everyone, but what makes the day go by is having good relationships with your co-workers, dedicated sales reps and most importantly your customers. If you can find a way to have a laugh here and there and if you have something outside of work that fulfills you in a way that your job can't it's really not that bad. You just gotta be tough and not overeact when problems come up and do your best to keep your customer happy.

/r/AskReddit Thread