The Role of Procurement: From Chaos to Clarity
It’s time to rethink the role procurement professionals hold in organizations, and this shift is critical to reducing organizational risk and boosting resilience.
It’s time to rethink the role procurement professionals hold in organizations, and this shift is critical to reducing organizational risk and boosting resilience.
This year, business leaders are making it a priority to build resilience into their supply chains. In doing so, their relationships with suppliers are coming into view, and what’s being exposed are some significant fault lines.
But within the volatile landscape we continue to face, having supplier relationships that are strong and healthy is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a business imperative. So, what can enterprise leaders do to put things right?
Increasingly, supply chain sustainability is becoming a key corporate goal as organizations aim to minimize environmental damage and positively influence the people and communities in which they live and do business. Sustainability refers to managing the environmental, social and economic impact of a business in way that reduces harm and benefits the world.
The global supply chain has been stretched and disrupted like never before, putting a significant burden on shippers, manufacturers, retailers and consumers. Dealing with shortages of so many formerly abundant items has prompted many businesses to shift their focus to reusing merchandise and equipment.
In enterprise software and services, procurement’s use of a Request for Proposal (RFP) is meant to compare competitive product offerings against a set of requirements. The intent was to create an environment where vendors could respond with functionality, price, implementation details and unique offerings. Unfortunately, the RFP process has largely failed for several reasons. Today, the focus is on innovation and speed to market, which can rarely be achieved in a standardized RFP process that can take months to complete.
Supply chain professionals have gone from working behind-the-scenes to being in one of the most talked about industries of 2021. With limited labor, increasing disruption and surging production and shipping costs causing shortages around the globe, exploring a career in sourcing and procurement has taken on new meaning as the field becomes more critical and complex than ever before.
2021 was an immensely challenging year for procurement teams across the globe. Not only did most of the challenges of 2020 continue, but many got significantly worse. Between major supply shortages, rising commodity prices and new variants reigniting pandemic-related disruption, teams had to work extremely hard just to keep their organizations operational, let alone achieve their strategic goals.
Procurement has been an essential partner to businesses throughout the pandemic. While there are many factors that have led to its prominence, not all of them will have a long-term impact. In 2022, the tradtional function of procurement and the roles it performs will change drastically.
History repeats itself. Could we use the lessons from the first time around? At the height of ransomware attacks, people responsible for oil rigs and ships in the sea find themselves to be the next potential target. Let me explain.
Supply chain disruptions continue to drive up prices and lead to a growing shortage of goods across the U.S. and abroad.
The boom of technology implementation and its effectiveness were quickly tested by the challenges of the pandemic. While some challenges were solved successfully – collaboration via video conferences – the pandemic has stressed the structure and effectiveness of other areas.
Predicting the future may sometimes seem an impossible task, especially given the speed with which our world and the world of cybersecurity changes, but there are already signs of two major shifts coming in 2022 that you need to have on your radar.
Having sold more than $980 million in outsourcing deals in my career and having played a key role in structuring more than $22 billion in outsourcing deals across every industry and virtually every process, it seems the more things change, the more they remain the same.
I won’t add to the dizzying array of endless terms Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies develop to differentiate their offerings, but in this article I’d like to discuss some of the commonalities across all of them.
While previous industrial revolutions relied on developments in steam machines, electricity and telecommunications, the fourth industrial revolution is powered by big data, advanced manufacturing techniques, cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence. As the fourth industrial has risen, so too has the notion of Quality 4.0, a term recently coined to refer to the shifts in performance excellence we’re seeing in today’s age of digital transformation.
At a time when global talent shortages are reported at a 15-year high, one key to keeping the best employees happy and on board may lie in how well companies not only state their purpose and their values, but also prioritize carrying them out.