I hope that you have enjoyed the article “Procurement Strategy Do’s & Don’ts, Part II.”

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This article was the second article based on my podcast with Coupa’s Ravi Thakur. That podcast was so packed with good information, not even two articles and a separate blog post could cover it all in writing. In this blog post, I’ll share another excerpt from the podcast but, to get the rest of the good content that I won’t be writing about, you’re just going to have to listen to the information-packed podcast itself!

So, without further ado, here are three components of a successful procurement strategy according to Mr. Thakur:

Silent enforcement – This is really where employees of today’s generation, they don’t expect to see procurement policies per se. They just want these policies to be there as they’re going through creating requisitions or as they are going through buying the goods and services that they need in order to do their job.
Leveraging smart strategies – One of the things that we always focus on with our clients is enforcing and making sure that they have smart procurement strategies as it relates to allowing their employees to do their job as quickly as they can without being hindered with the process.
Technologies that people are not trying to avoid – If you go and you look at what an employee does when they go home at night, they’re on Facebook, they’re on Google. But they’re using consumer technologies. They expect to use the same thing within their day-to-day job. And once they don’t see that, or if they’re working on tools or systems that don’t offer the same types of flexibility or usability, they’re going to start avoiding using those tools. And what happens when you avoid those tools, is those procurement policies that you worked so hard to put into place, they just go away. Companies aren’t able to sustain those procurement policies and the value that you provide as a CPO, as an example, goes down because you’re not able to enforce anything through your organization.

I would sum it all up with this bottom line: People will seek out the path of least resistance so, as a procurement leader, you want the path of least resistance to also be the path of most compliance.
Categories: Procurement

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Published On: March 26th, 2012Comments Off on 3 Procurement Strategy Components

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