What you missed out on

Key takeaways

• Future-proof your team by honing next-generation capabilities that may be laying dormant. A panel on procurement talent – which included leaders from Heineken, Nokia and Proxima – identified challenging, influencing and persuading, and internal and external networking as vital future skills.

• Be deliberate and proactive in building diversity into your team. Research indicates diversity and inclusion fosters happier and higher-performing teams.

• Develop role specialisations within your teams to encourage a long-term focus. Len DeCandia, CPO at J&J, said specialisation may give staff a greater sense of accountability and purpose, encouraging excellent execution.

Key takeaways

• Focus on the longevity of stakeholder relationships and pick your battles wisely. Rather than debate mismatched savings figures, BT group CPO Hari Sundaresan sets and rewards his buyers on targets that may not align with those recognised by finance.

• Crowdsource answers to your biggest problems from business partners; staff throughout the business often have the answers to procurement’s challenges. Leaders such as Siemens CPO Klaus Staubitzer have used employee forums to share ideas and accelerate digitalisation.

• Invest in technology and empower staff to challenge the function’s business partners. Insights derived from spend analytics tools enable procurement professionals to ask strategic questions such as: “Does this help to grow the business or could we spend money more wisely?”

Key takeaways

• Establish a formal governance process by which to clean, process and format data but accept it will never be 100% accurate. This will enable the function to quickly use and act on the information.

• Develop a clear six- or 12-month plan for how your digital processes and activities will fit into the existing corporate strategy. This will help secure support and resources to enable these activities without the distraction and complexity of long-term roadmapping.

• Focus on describing the benefits of digital solutions that augment procurement teams to neutralise their fear of replacement. This will help staff embrace the digitalisation process faster.

Key takeaways

• Advertise the versatility of procurement roles and demonstrate how spending time in the function can help fast-track career development. This makes procurement stand out as a viable career destination – a true general manager of business.

• Prioritise investing in technology to automate high-volume, low-value tasks. Enabling staff to spend more time on higher-value activities will ultimately enable procurement to deliver greater business impact.

• Rotate staff to build their business acumen, widen the talent pool and develop the consultative skills procurement professionals require to be strategic business partners. Although many functions have struggled to achieve this, Maersk has demonstrated it is possible.

Key takeaways

• Use data to encourage accountability and drive behavioural change. EY has developed dashboards for staff that highlight compliance with travel policies and present CO2 emissions from journeys so it can reduce travel costs, increase transparency and improve sustainability.

• Leverage your supply network to access data or sources of innovation when budgets are constrained. Adam Baird, senior EMEA procurement manager at S&P Global, says it is possible to leverage the innovations of suppliers that are working with other customers on exciting projects.

• Prioritise procurement digitalisation projects that benefit both procurement and the wider business. Marco Romano, procurement data and analytics officer at IBM, says he disregards projects that do not deliver outcomes for both.

Key takeaways

• Encourage stakeholder engagement by ensuring purchasing processes do not slow time-to-market or stand in the way of innovation. Although cost savings are important, stakeholders may consider R&D support or supplier-enabled innovation to be of greater value.

• At the start of any project, meet with stakeholders to discuss the details and decide on budgets and expected outcomes. This will ensure procurement staff have a greater understanding of the business’s objectives – both at a category and a functional level.

• Category managers and buyers must have the courage to challenge stakeholders and question whether what they ask for is truly what they need. Instead, procurement professionals should offer alternatives based on their market intelligence.

Key takeaways

• Design your function in a way that enables alignment with the organisation – either by mirroring the structure of the business or creating a clearly defined business-partnering role. Vattenfall, for example, has delivered cross-functional synergies and successful collaboration by reorganising the procurement team to align with business units and embedding procurement specialists.

Key takeaways

• Advanced technology offers procurement teams an opportunity to make decisions quickly and efficiently – freeing staff to build stronger, more valuable relationships with stakeholders and suppliers. Teams investing in technology-enabled risk management programmes, for example, are driving engagement with stakeholders and offering new forms of value through supply chain transparency, brand protection or cost avoidance.

Key takeaways

• Adjust your function’s mindset and culture to ensure supplier relationship management (SRM) produces results. Harm Veerkamp, founder of AIE Company, said successful supplier partnerships require open engagement, curiosity, a focus on reciprocal value creation, and an even balance of power between the parties.