Are you John Q. Procurement?

Yesterday, Joe Payne of Source One Management Services posted a truly interesting post about the challenges faced by a fictional MRO category lead named John Q. Procurement. You can read the original post here.

Poor John. He committed the biggest mistake conceivable in an organization with structure and processes in place: John had a good idea in response to changing conditions in the marketplace. Wanting to do his best and stay inside of those processes, he meets with a series of people in an effort to take his idea from thought to reality. He encounters quite a few delays – people who are too busy with annual planning, out doing road shows, or positions that are unfilled – before finally meeting with a group of plant buyers who generally rain on his parade with their negative view of his idea.

Being an analytical sort myself, I decided to sit down and figure out how much time John lost through delays, and which ones were due to procurement versus the general stalling from operations and other internal functions. ALL of the delays were internal to procurement. Sure, they have different titles: analytics, SRM, etc. but they are all cogs in the (broken) procurement machine.

Only Ted, the P2P manager, responded within a day and immediately got John the information he needed – even if he did have some additional ideas that roped in more people and made the effort indirectly slower and more complex.

For all the potential procurement organizations represent, how can we expect others to work with us if WE can’t work with us?

As Joe states in the post:

2013 will be looked back on as the year we officially compartmentalized strategic sourcing. Roles have been defined and job descriptions have gotten narrower, all in an effort to create specialties within our industry. While these were done in the name of efficiency and improved support of the business, the long term result is individual sourcing professionals with no relevant experience, business acumen or skillsets outside of their area of focus.

You would think it would be clear to us that we want less fragmentation rather than more, even if it does mean some neat, impressive sounding titles. If we have the expectation that our solutions will be integrated source to pay or procure to pay, shouldn’t we be expected to align as well? Imagine if a different person handled each step in the sourcing process. It would be slow, inefficient, and clumsy. It would be hard to blame anyone that went rogue and just decided to send out some spreadsheet-based bids under cover of darkness.

I’m interested in hearing about others’ experiences with compartmentalization inside of procurement – is this a challenge you have faced or are still facing? What is the answer? How do we remedy the situation or – better yet – keep it from happening in the first place?

Join the discussion by commenting here, on the Strategic Sourceror blog, or on Twitter @BuyersMeetPoint.