One of the best presentations at Ivalua Now Paris last week (which the doctor summarized in a post over on Spend Matters UK on how the conference was A Huge Success and a Testament to their growth) was Duncan Jones’ presentation on Successful Procurement Transformation that summarized a recent survey on enabling smarter procurement that clearly proved what the doctor and other leading analysts already know: most Procurement organizations believe they are considerably more advanced than they are.

The survey asked Procurement departments to rate themselves as beginner, intermediate, or advanced. The results, which, unfortunately were not unexpected, indicated that:

• 65% of respondents said they were advanced,
• 31% said they were intermediate, and
• 4% said they were beginner

When the reality is that, according to Forrester

• 16% of respondents are advanced
• 24% of respondents are intermediate
• 60% of respondents are beginne

On the Forrester scale which, by the way, is not as arduous as the scale used by the doctor (but we’ll get to that in another post). In other words, four times as many organizations said they were advanced as were actually at that level. So if you think you are advanced, there is at most a ¹/₄ chance you are advanced and at most a ²/₃ chance you are intermediate or better.

This means that you as a Procurement organization need to take a step back, get a third party evaluation, and understand the reality of where you are. It’s totally okay if you’re not as advanced as you think you are because neither are your competitors. And, in fact, if you are willing to get an honest third party assessment and use it as the foundation for improvement, you are way ahead of your competition which still has their heads in the sand like an ostrich. Because, thanks to modern platforms and well understood best practices that can be efficiently experienced by efficient consultants who have been doing it for a decade, you can master intermediate levels of performance quite quickly, and that puts you in the top 40% in a very short time-frame. And it often doesn’t take a lot of improvement to see significant savings, process improvements, or value generation. (With many more tangible improvements to come as you embark on that first 3 to 5 year transformation journey.)

The key to advancement and tremendous success in Procurement is simple:

• understand where you are
• accept where you are
• put a realistic plan in place for mid-term transformation (3-5 years) with well defined milestones along the way
• commit to change
• monitor, measure, and stay on track

Now that the best S2P suite providers can roll out enterprise implementations in a quarter, you can enable processes that lead to significant ROI in 6 to 12 months, and take it step wise from there. But it all starts with accepting the reality and committing to change. The system, the process, and your hard work will take care of the rest.

And a big thank you to Duncan to proving the reality!