This week I attended the Procurement Leaders / Emptoris webinar on procurement transformation featuring BP Lubricants. They don't have the archived recording posted yet, but click here for a page on the event - the archive should be available soon.
At the heart of the message in this webinar is the idea that procurement transformation is a journey, not an event. Having the right mindset about it from the start will allow you to manage your own (and everyone else's) expectations. Here are my take aways from the event, but as always I would welcome everyone to listen to the event directly and join the conversation.
"Roll up your sleeves and get on with it." said Mark Edwards (BP Lubricants procurement development manager) regarding the effort required to collect and categorize spend from diverse sources. There is no sense in sugar coating it - achieving good spend visibility requires a lot of work from a lot of people. Make sure that your spend solution is one that is able to evolve or learn as you refresh the data.
Challenges to change - the heart of the transformation:
- Spend visibility
- Adoption (process and technology)
- Stakeholder (mis)alignment
- Achieving a balance between savings and innovation
Consider the difference between one-time and sustainable value/savings. Which of your efforts is actually going to hit the corporate bottom line?
Rather than procurement fighting to have a seat at "the table", earn your way in by forming relationships with the other functions. Make yourself indispensible and they will WANT you at the table. It remains a challenge not to find yourself in an adversarial relationship with the business. Prove your knowledge of process and that will get you into the category conversation.
Manage the innovation pipeline so that you have continuity between past, present, future of your categories and supply base. Find ways to make sure of the information you DON'T use: like specs and alternate bids.
Procurement needs:
- A mandate from the business
- Strategies that are aligned with the whole business value chain
- Appropriate measurement of their activity and success
- Full access to data