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In the News | Clippings from the Week Ending 24 June 2011

  

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I thought it worth sharing some comments on a few clippings that landed on my desk over the past week.

Weird Science 
An excerpt from an interview I recently conducted with a CPO from a FTSE 100 Media company brings up the question, should you even worry about becoming more scientific about the numbers you are measuring or bringing to the table:
“Despite the fact that we protest otherwise, it is difficult (particularly with regards to bottom-line impact) to make savings meaningful. We all know there are many different ways of measuring a saving, which can be hard to tie into budgets and all the rest of it, but at the end of the day all we can do is publish a number or variants of numbers, which will give an indication of value.

But that’s only part of the story, a very blunt almost uni-dimensional value that procurement has added.

I think there’s a great phrase out there, in which you have to find ways of being useful, don’t over complicate things, just be useful - whatever that means for your customer/stakeholder. This means pushing the boundaries of what procurement is and is not.

Again we’re back to the old chestnut about procurement only being measured on savings, which you’re going to run out of ideas eventually, because savings will flatten or go into decline, and it will get harder to deliver. If all you’re known for is delivering big numbers you’re going to be in trouble at that point.
Lots of organisations publish different kinds of dashboards, measures and numbers of suppliers and supplier reductions - which is fabulous but it’s not the most exciting thing in the world. In many ways the problem is from a perception point of view, no matter what we try and publish your Joe average business executive thinks about procurement as delivering saving and I don’t think we’ll ever change that.”*

So what are you doing to make sure procurement is being seen as useful to your stakeholders?

*Note: The full interview will be published shortly on the Proxima website, be sure to sign-up to our e-newsletter to be notified when it is released.

** Read the original blog post here: Why is procurement so unscientific

‘World Procurement Day’?
This in itself is an interesting concept, but rather than continually beating our own drums and shouting about all the wonderful things that procurement has done for our respective businesses, would it not be better to figure out, collectively, how we can get procurement to the core of our respective businesses – in turn, having our stakeholders beating our drums for us?

From the same interview mentioned above, I heard that:
“at the end of the day (through my experience) people are very distrustful of individuals or functions who beat their own chests and fly their own flags too much. There is an element that clearly to get business support you have to be delivering and all the rest of it but there’s a fine line there and I’m much happier when one of the stakeholders tells others what a great job procurement have done.

But it also depends on the pace of change you have to deliver. If as a procurement leader you’re expected to deliver substantive things very fast, you probably have no alternative but to be very up-front, beating your own drum for procurement. But that’s got to change at some point in procurement’s life cycle. Procurement has just got to become part of the business, that’s when it becomes a little more subtle.”

So should we be looking to regale the achievements of procurement one day a year, basking in our own greatness?

Or should we instead focus our energy on being celebrated by our stakeholders as drivers of success within our respective organisations?

Read original blog post here: When will there be a 'World Procurement Day'?

*Note: The full interview will be published shortly on the Proxima website, be sure to sign-up to our e-newsletter to be notified when it is released.