The Point
Buyers Meeting Point attends many sales AND procurement webinars/webcasts. One of the interesting things about consistently reading content from quality sources is that you start to notice trends. It is amazing how often the same topics arise at the same time in different places. We use this blog as a way to help you stay on top of the major themes in procurement and supply chain management.
Back to Basics: Strategic Sourcing Success Factors
Whenever I see something that is titled "Back to Basics" I almost groan. That is like the latest secret to loosing 20 pounds. Here it is - Fewer calories in and more calories out. Really? Like diet and exercise are anything new?
We are so swept up in the immediate, we often can't step back and refresh to look at the whole picture. So that is why it is important from time to time to return to the basics.
One of the first tasks I had in my professional procurement life was to implement spend analysis. That is a basic building block. I was amazed that we could have an issue not knowing how we spend our money. But we didn't and this was the beginning of a very successful and fruitful journey for our organization.
Another basic mentioned in the esourcing Wiki article is having the right metrics. We definitely wanted to measure how we were doing against what we hoped to accomplish. It also helped to track improvement in our processes and expertise. Metrics was also a good discussion point with our stakeholders to have meaningful exchanges on facts and not as much on hearsay.
Which of these 9 basics would you consider critical? Have you had any experience that shows there are some areas not mentioned that should be?
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