… and when the doctor saw yet another obvious headline that was something he would have expected to see two decades ago, he was quite tempted to click past it as he’s already seen forty plus regurgitations of the same message over the past two decades. However, the subheading was something new … “CIO’s should engage with their procurement colleagues to understand how they could benefit from more sophisticated IT purchasing“. Many an article touts the value of Procurement, especially in tough times, and many more tout the value of IT Procurement (with a modern emphasis on SaaS), but not many tout the importance of collaboration, especially in tough markets. So seeing this subheading at the top of a recent article on The Stack was welcome.

The reality is that if organizations want to get through these tough times, every department that has to buy needs to work with Procurement, and we mean work, not just use. It will require a mix of category expertise, market expertise, process expertise, and procurement platform expertise to be successful. Procurement can bring the procurement platform, process, and some of the generic market expertise, but it will need the category experts in the various parts of the business to bring the expertise on supplier capability and the category expertise it is missing.

IT Procurement is not easy. A modern organization has to procure:

• SaaS solutions — where you have no idea what you should be paying (without a SaaS market specialist, who can only get you within a range)
• cloud computing / rack-space — to run your back office, store your documents, build your custom cloud offerings — and you have little idea how much you should really be paying here either (without a specialist, as all you know is the public quotes)
• office computing equipment (laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc.) — and while you get plenty of “market intelligence” on public sites like Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, etc.), how accurate is it when you sometimes see $400 discounts on a $1000 machine … you need to know the specs, the warranty, etc. and how they compare to similar machines … and how much better an i7 is compared to an i5, and if you even need an i7 when all the machine is going to do is access SaaS solutions and run Microsoft Office

And IT is not the only category where the right mix of Procurement know-how and category expertise from the end-user is needed. Most categories in engineering, back-office, maintenance, pharma, etc. require a lot of specialist expertise.

But with the right expertise, success is guaranteed. Prices might go up (that’s what happens during inflationary times), but Procurement can keep those increases to a minimum, and at a point less than what the competition is seeing. And that’s the worst case. In the best case, inflation has not yet hit the category and good processes and practices actually reduce the cost. And in both cases, the supply will be stable, secure, and of at least standard quality. So use Procurement Processes and Practices. They can only help.