Art of Procurement

The commonly-cited disconnect between procurement and finance all comes down to one central question: where did the money go? As hard as procurement works to negotiate and track different types of savings, they always seem to evaporate or be reallocated for other projects. In the best cases, this gets the enterprise more value for their dollar, but in the worst cases can lead to reduced credibilit...

Last week, I had the opportunity to facilitate a webinar last week with procurement consulting firm Efficio, titled Driving Greater Procurement Performance from Complex Direct Spend and Factory Indirects.  In the webinar, I was joined by two of their US-based principal consultants, Arthur Mattouch and Waldo Saville.  During the webinar, Arthur and Waldo shared three case studies demonstrating the...

What do childcare, ducks, and power have to do with negotiations? In today's episode, host Philip Ideson shares three negotiation tips taken from his experience as a procurement practitioner and entrepreneur. 

As we enter the summer, I'm going to spend some time answering some of your most frequently asked questions.  These pod's are going to be bite-sized, so I'd love to hear your feedback on whether you like the shorter podcasts or not.  One of the topics that I get asked the most about is negotiations.  So for the next couple of weeks, I'm going to share some insights based on my own experience. This...

If procurement is going to attract the 'best of the best' to join our ranks, no matter what their background, then at some point we can expect to work alongside someone with no experience in procurement. Whether such a move is successful is likely to be dependent on the individual transferring in as well as the overall culture of the organization. I interviewed Liam Moniz, Manager of Procurement S...

Whether you are a consultant or a practitioner, it seems like the grass is always greener on the other side. Consultants are constantly on the road, work late hours and are subject to high expectations from their management team and the point people on each customer account. Practitioners find themselves at the mercy of consulting teams they didn't personally decide to hire, lack the influence nat...

Today I am joined on the show by my good friend, procurement executive recruiter Iain McKenna.  Iain is Founder and Managing Director of the executive search firm Sourcing Solved. Our conversation is split into a couple of different parts: In the first half of our interview, we discuss the hiring process, and specifically if our reliance on AI - such as keyword searching on CV's and resumes - seve...

Many procurement organizations pay lip service to innovation, but few are taking the steps required to make it a reality. Part of this has to do with the difficulty overcoming the paralysis of the unknown and part of it has to do with a willingness on procurement's part to risk failure. Ironically, facing the unknown and pushing past the fear of failure makes it far more likely that disruptive inn...

If you've been in the workplace – any kind of workplace at all – for longer than six months, chances are good you've experienced poor management at least once. Sadly, being in the workplace for years or even decades doesn't come with the same odds of encountering even one great manager. Why is that? Why are great managers so rare? I'm joined today by David Deacon, career HR executive and the autho...

Whether we are responsible for Procurement and our stakeholder is the c-suite, or we are developing a Category Strategy and our stakeholders are the business users. Alignment continues to be one of the greatest challenges for procurement. Ultimately, it becomes the differentiator that determines whether you are perceived as being a trusted advisor or a back office function. Indeed, it is not possi...

I'm joined today by Anthony Clervi, President and CEO of UNA, a group purchasing organization (or GPO). He joined us last month for an AoP Live session that proposed an alternative approach to 'automating' procurement – one that doesn't involve robots and doesn't cost a dime. As the opening quote suggests, our preconceived notions can often prevent us from leveraging the full range of options avai...

The only guarantee that comes with a transformation journey is that there will be 'twists and turns' along the way. And since no organization can escape the unexpected, how procurement leaders makers handle those twists and turns becomes a critical differentiator and success factor. While I was at ProcureCon Indirect East, I interviewed Dave Quillin, Manager of Procurement at Alliant Credit Union...

Everything procurement delivers – from savings to risk mitigation to value – is predicated on having access to clean, trustworthy data. If this foundation does not exist or if it is shaky, then buyers don't know how much the company is spending with a given supplier, let alone how they can improve the efficiency or impact of a given spend category. While I was at the Ivalua NOW event in Paris, I i...

When procurement talks about transformation, we are usually referring to the critical changes we need to make to our own talent, processes and technology. But does the opportunity exist for procurement to transform the business as a whole? Evidence from the team at VSP Global suggests that it does. I interviewed two members of the VSP Global team, Nathan Haydn-Myer, Manager of Procurement Operatio...

It is impossible to have a forward-looking discussion about procurement without digital transformation and automation coming up. That said, figuring out what their inclusion means on a company-by-company basis will differ drastically – creating a unique challenge for every CPO who decides to lead their organization on a digital journey. I'm joined today by Kris Koneru, the Business Practice Head o...

Saying that someone has or embodies the 'spirit of entrepreneurship' implies a lot of different drives and qualities. There is the willingness to take calculated risks, the need for self-accountability, contagious levels of energy and creativity, and a true understanding of the top to bottom impact of business decisions. Procurement can absolutely benefit from professionals with an entrepreneurial...

When you get right down to it, innovation is just solving a business need in an entirely new way. In order to do that, however, you and your team have to really understand the business and its customers. The most strategic suppliers – usually a select few – play an important role in the process of innovation, which creates an opportunity for procurement to guide their technical value potential to...

Everyone wants to be seen as an innovator, and procurement leaders are no exception. The problem with this desire is that, much like procurement transformation, the definition of innovation can be hard to pin down. We all know it when we see it, but setting out in the morning with "innovation" at the top of your to-do list can be paralyzing… unless you have a master plan. I interviewed Nancy Nicol...

When we hear about 'fintech' providers, most of us immediately think of a quickly shifting ad diverse landscape of startups – highly innovative companies, some of which are here today and gone tomorrow. If partnering with a fintech is even on your company's radar screen, how can procurement develop a reasonable strategy for such an unpredictable industry? I'm joined today by Andy Atkins, a profess...

In this episode, AOP Host Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner (AOP Content Director and Owner of Buyers Meeting Point) discuss their major take-aways from March's news, industry topics and podcast interviews. In March, Louis Bastone (Indirect Category Manager at ASML) talked about making the move into procurement from another function or later in one's professional career. Sammeli Sammalkorpi (co-found...

In a era when we emphasize the importance of 'soft skills' in the face of the hardest business challenges, the human element is impossible to ignore. While most of us tend to focus on developing our own interpersonal skills (or the absence of desired interpersonal skills in others), an equally important element is behavior. What are people doing and why? If we can understand behavior, we are in a...

Automation can only be as good as we program it to be. If we want innovative, industry-leading support from emerging technologies, we need to be informed about the potential applications of AI and machine learning. I'm joined today by Sammeli Sammalkorpi, Co-founder of Sievo, in a discussion that was driven by the engaged audience that joined us for February's AOP Live session. We gathered questio...

We often discuss the impact that procurement talent has on current results and the role it will play in determining how our function evolves in the future. The procurement community is vibrant, diverse and defined, but we need to remember that some of our best future team members are currently either in college or working in other functions. How we represent ourselves to them will determine how so...

In this episode, AOP Host Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner (AOP Content Director and Owner of Buyers Meeting Point) discuss their major take-aways from February's news, industry topics and podcast interviews. In February, Andrew Daley (Edbury Daley) described the importance of conquering risk aversion when we scope out and fill open positions. Jens Hentschel (FIVIS Partnership) reminded us of the da...

The Accounts Payable team play a key role in the success of procurement.  The data that they extract from supplier invoices determines the accuracy of our spend analytics (and therefore our strategic insights) and the capture of the cost savings we claim (and thus procurement's ROI).   Today's guest on the show is Matt Clark, President and COO of Corcentric.  Corcentric's research shows that, desp...