I was overjoyed to see a recent piece in Procurement Leaders that said “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance”. Because, in spend management, where most professionals don’t have at least a decade of experience in every category they have to manage (and often don’t have all the tools and technologies they should have to help them), a lack of training ultimately results in a lack of critical skills and best practices that end up costing many large organizations millions of dollars annually. This is because the potential cost reductions are just left on the table by procurement professionals who didn’t have the skills to identify and negotiate them.
Furthermore, with many courses, and even certifications, available today for just a few thousand dollars, not providing your staff with training at least semi-annually is just ridiculous. (See the training and on-demand resource guides on the resource site for some examples.) Not only is the cost less than 10% of your average salary for a mid-to-high end procurement professional, but it’s less than 1% of the savings that person can generate off of one high-end procurement alone. If it helps them shave another 200K, or more, off a multi-million dollar procurement … it’s paid for itself twenty to one hundred times over. That’s a greater ROI than even industry leading spend analysis and decision optimization can deliver. (Furthermore, only trained professionals can maximize the ROI from these tools.)
So train your people TODAY. And maybe, just maybe, this recession will be the best thing that ever happened to you as your skilled and educated staff helps your organization blow your competition away.