If you read (or listened to) our event update on Monday, you know one of the events I was looking at seemed to be a re-run of a CPO Agenda webinar run last month. “Strategic Sourcing – Quick Wins to Boost this Year’s Savings Total” by ISM and CapGemini was anything but a repeat. Different speakers, different format, different message – but every bit as worth attending.

The primary speaker was Torbjörn Thorsén (I believe he goes by “Toby” but I wanted to know how to insert an “umlaut” so you get to read the full version), who is in Product Strategy Innovation for CapGemini Procurement Services. He is clearly incredibly well read and familiar with solution providers large and small.  If you are interested in viewing this webinar or downloading the slides, both are available from ISM’s website.

The core of his message is that when trying to increase savings, procurement’s focus should be on contract compliance rather than spend under management. We all know that negotiated savings and realized savings are not the same; there is always leakage, or lost savings. Unless you focus on compliance, the fact that spend is declared “under management” means very little. Just because a contract has been signed does not also mean that anyone is actively managing that spend. The fall out in terms of technology is that emphasis should be on spend analysis and contract management solutions rather than eprocurement.

If you only have 5 minutes to spend on this webinar...

Listen to minutes 14-19 (slide 10) where Toby covers the skill sets required for procurement success. As he says very clearly, “Business skills are more highly sought after than procurement skills.”

I will give that a minute to sink in.

“Business skills are more highly sought after than procurement skills.” Examples of the business skills he is referring to are the ability to influence colleagues and communicate with executives and change management capabilities.

He also references Ardent Partners research from this past summer (see the additional reading listed below) that asked procurement professionals to rate their own proficiency in a number of skills that include both general business and procurement specific abilities. Even in self evaluation, procurement professionals rates themselves as below average in general business skills such as:

• Data analysis
• Cash management
• Managing supplier risk
• Managing supplier performance
• Driving business value
• Business consulting skills

So the place to start is to recognize where your own weaknesses are and then identify where you need to focus your attention in order to achieve maximum impact.

If you are interested in additional reading, here are two of the reports referenced in the presentation that tie back to the subjects I have described above:

Driving High Performance Procurement Initiatives, Zycus (September 2011)

Innovative Ideas for the Decade Ahead, Ardent Partners (July 2011)