It’s not just vendors that have latched onto the Marketing Madness that we addressed in last week’s article where we tried to help you decipher ten meaningless phrases that are polluting the Procurement technology landscape, but consultants and thought leaders as well. And while the marketing madmen fill us with meaningless messaging, these consultants are feeding us with dangerous delusions that we can solve our problems by simply redefining Procurement as something it is not.

Procurement is not something to be reimagined as it is not something that should even be redefined at the core. The purpose of Procurement has not changed since the first known Purchasing manual, The Handling of Railway Supplies: Their Purchase and Disposition was published back in 1887, nor should it change. It’s the process of sourcing, acquiring, and paying for the goods and services the organization needs, and doing it in a manner that ensures that the products will meet the needs, at the best price, and show up at the right time — and that as many orders as possible are “perfect” (or, more precisely, problem free).

Key aspects are thus:

• Supplier Discovery and Vetting (Risk and Compliance)
• RFP creation or Auction (Product Service Verification and Competitive Pricing)
• Award and Contract (Negotiation and Terms and Conditions)
• Catalogs, Purchase Orders, Pre-Scheduled Deliveries, Auto-Reorders (“Buying”)
• Logistics Routing, Delivery Scheduling and Monitoring (Risk Management)
• Invoice Processing and Payment (Payment Confirmation, Fraud Prevention)
• Quality Assurance and Inventory Management (Loss Minimization)

There is nothing to imagine here. And definitely NOTHING to re-imagine here. Now that supply assurance is still near an all time low (due to geopolitical instability, rampant inflation, unpredictable demand, etc.), it’s time to double down on what is critical and get it right. Not wander off to Imaginationland searching for a magical solution to tough, real-world problems.

New and improved processes might increase the chance of success (by decreasing the odds that something is missed), new technologies might increase the level of automation (and decrease the amount of manual [e-]paper pushing), but neither fundamentally change the work that must be done, the effort that must be made, and the human intelligence (HI) that must be applied to get the job done. No amount of “re-imagining” will change this. As we’ve said before, and will probably have to say again and again and again, there is no big red easy button, and no amount of imagining (or re-imagining) will create one. So, if someone tells you to re-imagine procurement. you tell them the same thing you should tell them if they spew Marketing Madness: CUT THE CR@P!