Procurement often uses the terms governance and compliance to describe the “law and order” part of our responsibilities. Governance establishes the rules for enterprise purchasing and spend management, while compliance measures how well distributed buyers adhere to those rules. In a perfect world, proper governance would lead to consistent compliance. In the real world, there is often only a loose connection between the two.
We’ve all heard (or used) the expression that managing some groups of people is “like herding cats”. For cat people in the reading audience, this requires little explanation. Cats do what they want, when they want, only if they want. The expression wouldn’t have caught on if it weren’t true, which means there are plenty of feline humans out there too. If you’re in procurement, I’m sure you’ve met quite a few of them.
We put a contract in place, and the “cats” buy from someone else. We establish a process, and they do whatever they like. It can be infuriating. But, if we approach our internal cats with the right attitude, they also present us with unique opportunities to improve procurement’s performance, impact and influence.
Here is some advice for those days when you find yourself unavoidably herding cats:
Executives in all functions and lines of business are driven to create shareholder value, a challenge that increasingly requires them to take calculated risks that often involve the supply chain. From a shareholder’s perspective, nothing destroys the perceived value of an investment faster than negative press, even when it is the unintended result of ‘pushing boundaries’. In some cases, the criticism may not even be due to a company’s own actions, but rather those of their suppliers (or suppliers’ suppliers).
Amazon recently announced that they will open a “traditional” grocery chain. This is in addition to their 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods and their experimentation with Amazon Go, a fully automated (i.e. cashier-less) convenience store-style market. All three will meet a similar kind of consumer need, just in a different way. This will likely result in the creation of three completely different cost models and profitability rates – not to mention three very different procurement and supply chain operations.
In the not too distant future, quick and dirty financial gains will no longer be the only value-creation lever considered to evaluate buyers and their performance. So long Savings…the new challenge facing buyers will be the multiplication and diversity of the objectives and KPIs to which they will be held accountable.
Procurement has been trying to make changes to our processes, priorities and brand identity for years. Our suppliers want us to be more open to contact and out-of-the-box ideas. Our internal stakeholders want us to move faster and to let their input play a larger role in supplier selection than RFP performance. Distributed buyers want speed, convenience and autonomy. Finance wants more savings that they can trail all the way to the bottom line, and marketing and HR mostly just want us to go away.
In this two-part series, Determine Chief Product Officer Julien Nadaud tells how one word — influence — can empower procurement strategies to literally put top value into the outcomes all parties, including suppliers, seek. In Part 1 he explored expanding supplier visibility into overall spend; in Part 2, he looks at two case studies showing why influence, value and collaboration are mutually inclusive.
In this two-part series, Determine Chief Product Officer Julien Nadaud tells how one word — influence — can empower procurement strategies to literally put top value into the outcomes all parties, including suppliers, seek. He explores three case studies that prove his point, starting with how one customer expanded its supplier’s visibility into overall spend.
The new Determine ebook, The Procurement Maturity Curve: A Four Stage Hierarchy of Value, pulls together multiple perspectives in an attempt to better understand procurement’s maturity progression from savings and compliance all the way up to supplier collaboration. To bring a European point-of-view to this topic, I had a Determine OutLoud conversation with Eléonore Roucaute, Determine’s EMEA Marketing Manager.
Three best practices you can use right now. Procurement often uses the terms governance and compliance to describe the “law and order” part of our responsibilities. Governance establishes the rules for enterprise purchasing and spend management, while compliance measures how well distributed buyers adhere to those rules. In a perfect world, proper governance would lead […]
The definition of spend management seems to be fairly obvious ⎼ it’s the management of enterprise spend, right? On the contrary, the practice of spend management involves more than just the simple tracking and monitoring of how much money is going out of an organization. Much more.
Give your organization a clear, consistent process for optimizing contract management. According to the IACCM (International Association of Contract & Commercial Management), two-thirds of participants at their conference a few years ago admitted that their companies lack a clear, consistent workflow for contracting. Some had no formal definition, while others had wide variations between countries […]
Empower managers with process improvements. Depending on where you sit in a company, budgets are either essential guardrails for organizational efficiency, an inescapable fact of life, a necessary evil, or just evil. Overhead cost control, compliance, data quality — they are on every organization’s budget management agenda, yet few have the processes and solutions in […]
