Excellent Procurement teams deliver and contribute better & more to overall company results, before, during and after the Covid crisis. Moving beyond functional excellence and embedding more cross-functional advanced and business relevant practices over time remains challenging. With Covid progressing and remote practices increasing, this collaborative behavior, both internally as well as with key suppliers is increasing in importance. Areas like digital, supply chain sustainability, supply chain risk management, supplier collaboration and supplier enabled innovation are typically demanding cross functional approaches. 

Positioning and ‘air time’ are key

Procurement will need to position itself and get the ‘air time’ and ‘internal sponsoring and engagement’ for these initiatives. This is not easy. For example traditional at the core of many procurement teams, category management has shown similar challenges to become and remain cross-functional and relevant in the eyes of its stakeholders. Procurement has a challenge to move forward let alone accelerate and remain relevant on the journey of Procurement Excellence.

Essentials towards procurement excellence

Some essentials on the journey to become and remain procurement excellent are:

1. Establish a culture of outside-in and an outside-in view and benchmark the function
2. Assess your own baseline. define your ambition and strategy (within the overall company context)
3. Set minimum ‘refreshed’ requirements for professional qualifications and experience
4. Assure resources are provided to reach next level in procurement excellence (people, systems, processes and tools)
5. Create a culture of excellence and the necessary change via leading by example, story-telling, example sharing and communicating (communication plan)
6. Motivate people to ‘do their job’ effectively and efficient and provide training and coaching (academy, learning tracks and assignments).
7. Encourage internal competition (awards, performance reviews, category plan reviews, lighthouse projects) and transparency on excellent practices
8. Establish a dashboard, measure and report on progress of procurement excellence
9. Continuously work on improvement and upgrading resources (people, processes, systems, tools), functional requirements, kpi dashboards based on the progress made
10. Move beyond procurement excellence and realise cross-functional excellence

Anchor procurement excellence

All the way – from a transactional purchasing team with focus on supplying the factory and savings up to a procurement organisation with focus on value delivery via supplier relationship management, innovation, driving risk and sustainability – have procurement excellence anchored in the leadership team driving and supporting these 10 steps to anchor and embed the process of procurement excellence.