I hope that you have enjoyed the article, “How To Create Procurement Reports, Part I.”

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In that article, I began to describe some things that you may want to consider including on your procurement department reports.  As a procurement leader, I think that you have to think of the procurement report in terms of the psychology behind it.

Let’s discuss that psychology in a little more detail…

The procurement report is a tool to formalize the priority of things to be done.  Let’s face it, there are a lot of things that a procurement team does as well as a lot of things that a procurement team can do.

But that doesn’t mean that management needs to know about all of those things.  They only need to know about what is important.

And what is most important should be the tasks that take up the most time of the procurement team.  By having to report progress on a subset of all of the things they do, a well-structured procurement report will ensure that the procurement team focuses on what they have to report on instead of allowing unimportant things to distract them from higher priorities.

The words “no update” should be embarrassing for a procurement team member to write on a procurement report.  That means that a high priority task was ignored for something else.  And if that “something else” was a low priority task, there’s something wrong.

I’ll have more commentary right here after Part II is released.