You’ve heard the phrase “back to basics” countless times. And it’s an incredibly misleading message: That basics somehow equates with “regressing.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Honing your basic skills and knowledge is about improving, moving forward, excelling. Ask any top musician, athlete or craftsperson — basics make you better.
Attend any procurement conference, read any procurement blog, download any procurement whitepaper these days and what are you likely to see and hear? AI! Blockchain! Machine learning! Chatbots! Emerging technology is undoubtedly exciting, and it is no wonder that it captures our attention and imagination. But does it have any actionable value for the majority of procurement organizations today?
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:
The NBA finals are upon us. Is it luck? Or have the Raptors and the Warriors made it this far by building a framework for success; utilizing each player’s strengths and abilities to give them a competitive edge above the rest? We say it’s a framework for success – which is exactly what it takes for a supplier management strategy to work, too. From covering the basic fundamentals to ensuring you’re prepared for any and every potential supplier risk, maximizing the competitive advantage you can achieve with the right approach to supplier management helps the entire organization win.
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).
Supplier management encompasses the entire end-to-end procurement process. Getting the most out of our external supply partnerships requires consistent investment in supplier qualification and onboarding, supplier information management, supplier relationship management, and supplier risk and performance management.
We don’t know about you, but when we think of April – we think Spring. The birds chirping, flowers blooming, green grass, incessant rain (yuck), and summer in our sights! Spring is a time for growth and for change; a beautiful transformation, if you will. This month’s resources stayed true to theme – focusing on the transformation and future of procurement, source-to-pay insights, and even our own evolution as Determine began its new chapter as a Corcentric company. DetermiNews gives you a jump start on spring cleaning your business processes for the sunny days ahead.
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 a recent webinar, Sophie Pope and Ollie Young, a Senior Solutions Engineer at Determine, addressed The 5 Ways a S2P Platform Helps Create More Value for Your Organization. They discussed the differences between source-to-pay point solutions, platforms, and what they called ‘Frankenstein’ platforms. Yikes!
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.
You’ve heard the phrase “back to basics” countless times. And it’s an incredibly misleading message: That basics somehow equates with “regressing.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Honing your basic skills and knowledge is about improving, moving forward, excelling. Ask any top musician, athlete or craftsperson — basics make you better.
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 […]
