If you’re a new occasional reader, you might think that one of the doctor‘s primary goals is to just rip big analyst firms and publications apart when they publish ridiculous results (based on ridiculous surveys) or ill-conceived articles with little to no good Procurement content (if we’re lucky), or wrong content (if we’re not) that, as far as the doctor is concerned, would have been just as good if they unleashed an intern with no knowledge of procurement on Chat-GPT (and you all know what the doctor thinks of that!).

However, that’s just because, as Procurement is hitting the limelight (as a result of all the supply chain disasters we’ve been facing that they have been expected to deal with), coverage has increased significantly (to capitalize on the hot topic), and most of it is, frankly, NOT that good. However, every now and again there is a truly tremendous article published under the radar, and when the doctor finds one of those, he’s very happy to bring your attention to it. Especially when it’s written by a practitioner who obviously gets it.

In her article on From Tactical to Strategic: Transforming Legacy Procurement, the author reminds us that the majority of large scale transformations fail, that a major challenge for older companies is that they have no comprehensive view into global spend, that e-Procurement systems offer many fixes, but also that if they are not optimized for your specific business needs, you could be missing out on opportunities for better supplier partnerships and cost leadership.

This does not mean that you should build your own (overly) customized system, or insist that the systems support your current processes (before determining if those processes are better than the processes supported out-of-the-box by the new systems that have been developed based on typical best practices of the industries the vendor serves), but that the solution has to be appropriate to your industry and support some customization where you need it for specific products, services, or processes that make your business unique (but only those — don’t reinvent the wheel already there where you’re the same as everyone else).

The author then goes on to outline a three-phase approach to identifying, selecting, implementing, and, most importantly, maximizing adoption of the platform — which is an ultimate key to success.

the doctor highly recommends you read this article on going From Tactical to Strategic: Transforming Legacy Procurement.