the doctor really should stop reading the “news” and “best practice” articles the internet pushes his way because most of them are rubbish and just make him angry, but then again, if he didn’t get angry, what would he have to write about?

One of the articles recently was about how procurement can push efficiency and sustainability into the organization. The sustainability advice of “look for eco labels or EPA ID or products with recycled content” was pretty abysmal (because, duh!), but the efficiency recommendation of “create an e-marketplace to give your buyers an online catalog of goods and services” was just appalling.

That’s only efficient for organization end-users charged with restocking the supply cabinet in the office or keeping the MRO stock levels high enough to guarantee the production lines keep going when the store room gets low. That’s not injecting ANY efficiency into the Procurement process.

When you consider even the most basic strategic procurement process, you have to:

Identify the Need

and efficiency here is an intake management solution that allows you to collaborate with the end-users / end-sellers to make sure you’re procuring the right products for them to ply

Identify the Potential Suppliers

and efficiency here is a solution for supplier discovery, evaluation, and onboarding

Identify the Evaluation Requirements

and efficiency here is an orchestration solution that allows procurement to integrate all of the requirements from the users, the business, and the organizational goals

Evaluate the Bids

and efficiency here is an RFX solution with integrated analytics

Negotiate and Sign the Contract

and efficiency here is a contract lifecycle management that at least supports the contract negotiation process with complete document (and version) tracking and preferably also includes support for initial contract creation from award, key issue tracking, and e-signature integration

Determine the Appropriate Ordering Strategy

and efficiency here is determining whether the best fulfillment is regular shipments (if the factory uses X thousand units a month), auto-reorders on inventory level triggers (if the usage is/sales are irregular, but the product can be pulled quickly), or (managed) catalog-based orders as needed

3+-Way Match (against an invoice)

and efficiency here is a solution that makes it easy to ensure the invoice matches the goods receipt that matches the PO (at a minimum, and you also want to make sure the PO matches the contract etc.)

Efficiency is injecting efficiency into this process, not just setting up a marketplace!