Trends in eSourcing II: Sourcing project management empowers modern procurement professionals

Increased competition and supplier management will only go so far to achieving the maximum possible savings of e-sourcing – and is relatively assured once best practice is nailed down with consistent templates within an application. Software needs to keep pace with the procurement profession, which is increasingly expected to contribute to overall organisational success as opposed to simply reducing costs.

The following is a prediction for the 2015 procurement industry by A.T. Kearney in their report  Follow the Procurement Leaders: Seven Ways to Lasting Results: ‘as procurement becomes more cross-functional, procurement professionals will have to have “business smarts”…so success will depend on expertise in change management, project management and stakeholder engagement’.

Sammy Rashed of Novartis Pharma, and co-author of the 2012 Beyond Recruitment survey recently identified project management as particularly important to the developing procurement role:

‘I believe there are two major reasons why project management is such an attractive path for the function:

  1. Pure procurement savings are increasingly a thing of the past. With most quick wins and low hanging fruits long gone, one can no longer expect to realise significant savings from better negotiations with vendor. To generate continued returns (let alone meet the growing expectations to drive more savings), procurement professionals need to dig deeper and seek to identify “what’s the actual problem we’re trying to solve?” This is particularly true for initiatives that involve demand or process management approaches, and require not only category knowledge but also more problem-solving skills.
  2. The reality is that most senior procurement professionals are in one way or another tasked with clear scopes and quality outputs, cost constraints and target schedules, which involve many stakeholders from different parts of the business. That’s project management. Even if some parts of the process remain transactional or tactical and tend to be simpler, the moment we move into more strategic activities, our ability to manage projects becomes critical.’

e-Sourcing Software must therefore enable procurement professionals to apply comprehensive sourcing project management in the e-procurement environment.  Managing the input of non-procurement experts (utilising models such as RACI), capturing sourcing project information in real time, maintaining ‘project memory’ and transparency: all such functions are key to successful e-sourcing in today’s online economy.

Read more:

Trends in e-sourcing I: Easy does it with usability and user adoption
Trends in e-sourcing III: Plugging the hole of indirect spend
Trends in e-sourcing IV: Affordability – making your time and money count
Trends in e-sourcing V: SEPA 2014 – matching innovation in e-payments

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