Insights & Resources

5 ways to ensure procurement stays relevant

Are you struggling to extract further savings through the application of spending consolidation and market testing? Are most of your spend categories now mature and behave predictably?

Read on for five ways to ensure your mature department remains relevant to your organisation.

1. Drive efficiencies in the procure to pay system

Procurement should be responsible for the core operating platform, or ‘procure to pay system’. The system should:

  • drive productivity
  • focus on increasing the use of e-procurement
  • provide help-desk services to business units and suppliers
  • provide management information on consumption, performance and costs of services and products
  • achieve efficiency through consolidation of processes across procurement

2. Adopt an integrated approach to contract management

Procurement should drive an integrated approach to strategic contract management, resisting business unit-specific solutions and driving enterprise-wide solutions. The objective is to:

  • standardise processes in a manner that improves consistency and reliability of services
  • extract incremental pricing benefits
  • reduce operational, regulatory, financial and reputational risks

3. Become the independent third party in contract audits

An independent contract auditor encourages the business unit and the service provider to collaborate to achieve the best possible audit outcome. Eliminating the conflict of interest of the business to review its own contract allows for dispassionate conclusions to be drawn, including about where the contract performance and compliance can be improved.

4. Be the knowledge bank for service provider management

“How do I manage my service provider with a static contract in my highly dynamic environment?” asks the business unit. Procurement needs to take control of the continuous improvement agenda.

This requires Procurement to understand which contract management approaches can be generic to fit all contracts and which need service-specific solutions. These specific solutions will incorporate strategies to trap specific service knowledge as it applies to the client. Each contract should be an incubator of ideas, for which all parties are rewarded.

5. Standardise procurement to deliver better governance

Organisations will never get on top of their contract management obligations unless they increasingly standardise their contracts. Procurement must deliver and manage the standardisation of contracts and contract structures (where appropriate) to deliver greater governance.

Summary

No longer is the threat of re-procurement credible as it won’t deliver further cost reductions. With the resources and competencies in place to allow the interpretation of data, leveraging of knowledge and driving to standardisation, sourcing departments can continuously deliver cost reductions, service benefits and risk mitigation.

The three keys to procurement driven cost reduction and performance improvement

A game changing guide for modern (next generation) procurement professionals.

Being able to influence the business on how to use all available procurement levers, not just aggregation and tendering, is critical to drive the next wave of procurement savings and benefits for your business.

Great in theory but how can we as a profession effect significant change to such a well-entrenched and established way of working?

Perhaps the first and most important step is to think differently and not be afraid to question conventional thought.

In this guide we introduce to you three game changing ways of viewing and approaching existing business problems, namely:

  1. Getting performance from suppliers is the same as getting performance from staff
  2. Tenders no longer generate savings – you have to pull all four spend levers
  3. Procurement must become a trusted internal advisory team

This is not just theory, from our research of more than 250 Australian organisations we know that turning the ship around to better source and manage suppliers leads to an increase in performance of 29 percent!

Download your copy where we turn the world of procurement on its head, challenge the status quo and share our insights for dramatic supplier performance improvement.

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