A recent publication from The Hackett Group for Procurement Executives addresses How Procurement Organizations Are Reinventing the Stakeholder Experience that looked at world class procurement organizations, which continue to outperform their peer group by a wide margin (by up to 5M in cost savings for a typical company), and found a surprising result.

We’ve known for quite some time that world class Procurement organizations, also known as The Hackett Group Top 8%, outperform their peers. We’ve known that some of these generate savings up to 41% higher than other (laggard) organizations. But we did not know that almost twice as many world class organizations (83% vs. 44%) have dedicated resources that act as liaisons between Procurement and the rest of the business.

As the authors state, raising stakeholder satisfaction levels builds trust and helps procurement gain the organizational permission to take on higher-value work. This is confirmed by the Hackett Group’s database of thousands of benchmarks across hundreds of performance studies which found that organizations that continue to invest in activities that elevate their role to that of a trusted advisor are taken more seriously, especially when they communicate that activity appropriately to the other departments in the organization. Furthermore, when these Procurement organizations are seen as a valued business partner, they generally report 68% higher savings! (This comes by way of an average cost reduction of 3.5% vs. 2.1% and an average cost avoidance of 1.2% vs 0.7%.)

Simply put, world class Procurement organizations have climbed to the top of the hierarchy of supply (which the doctor and the maverick discussed in their piece on Availability and Delivery), having mastered supply assurance, cost reduction, and demand management. They listen and engage the internal customer, understand the customer’s needs, manage the relationship, offer them a superior service experience, and get better results. They follow all of the best practices the doctor and the maverick have been, and will be, discussing^* over on the spendmatters.com/cpo site, and are seeing the return.

^* The Agenda series has been broken up into three series:

• the Conundrum^# series

  which discusses the outside-in issues putting pressure on, and shaping, Procurement

• the Agenda series

  which discusses the most pressing objectives on the CPO’s plate that are required to respond to the outside-in issues

• the Value Drivers series

  which discusses the primary actions that a CPO can take to realize the objectives on their journey to master the hierarchy of supply

^# the doctor‘s terminology