Healthcare Matters

The UK’s top procurement practitioners are gathered in London this week and are attending a meeting hosted by BravoSolution, the spend analysis and strategic sourcing company. The meeting is all about “Real World Sourcing,” with a welcomed focus that effectively puts technology on the back burner for a change and suggests a renewed emphasis on the need to improve our basic communications. What a concept!

Purchasing and supply chain expert Guy Allen, and Peter Smith, Managing Director of Spend Matters UK/Europe, led the discussions. Here are the top “back to basics” takeaways from the meeting:

• Sourcing success starts with honest conversations. It is too easy to blame other departments for disregarding negotiated savings. The better strategy: communicate procurement’s cost-cutting vision company wide and engage stakeholders on their sourcing needs. Then, buyers gain real insight into why current contracts don’t meet company needs, the suppliers that departments would rather work with and how the procurement process can be improved.

• Launching a new category takes more effort and strategy than most believe. When launched properly, new categories allow procurement to make their mark by uncovering long-hidden savings and inefficiencies. Yet, too many companies rush into new category offerings without weighing business-critical considerations and external factors. To ensure success of a new category, procurement teams must consider the end-user needs, who can best manage the category and what this means for suppliers.

• New technology cannot fix what you aren’t doing properly. Too often, procurement attempts to fix inefficiencies by launching a new tool. But before any new technology is brought to the procurement team, the CPO must have a plan to engage users and drive adoption. If not, the ROI significantly suffers.

Source: Business Wire/London

We’ve talked about that last bullet (above) on several occasions, reminding ourselves that technology accelerates good business processes; it doesn’t create or replace them. But we’ve talked far less about the need for well thought-out and ongoing dialogue between SCM professionals and their stakeholders. Why not? Do we talk about it less because it’s obvious to us or because it’s overlooked?

They say that you can never learn anything more important in business than successful communication skills; that the result of bad communication is the disconnect between strategy and execution. Whether deserved or not, those among us with natural and/or well-developed communication skills go farther professionally. Regardless, all of us who invest in improving our communication skills get an excellent return.

NOTE: BravoSolution’s Real World Sourcing series continues this fall in London, and the theme will shift to proper assessment and measurement of the procurement function. Below are the remaining 2012 dates and topics:

• 5th September 2012 – Assessing the Procurement Function
• 17th October 2012 – Measuring Procurement’s Performance
• 28th November 2012 – New CPOs – the First 100 Days

To register and for more information, visit BravoSolution.co.uk.

—Tom Finn