Category Archives: Best Practices

If you want to stand out, don’t answer the top 10 procurement questions! Part II!

As per yesterday’s post, if you Google “top procurement question”, you get a bunch of links to articles about top procurement interview questions and how to answer them, including this Slideshare that has some decent questions and answers, but not questions the doctor would actually ask other than to see how sharp you were (at detecting hidden intent), and definitely not answers that showcase the true range of your Procurement capabilities — which is what the doctor would want to know (as he’d only interview for a senior position and only if a company wanted a true leader, which most companies, despite the talk, still don’t want — but that’s another book). In our last post, we took the first five one by one. In this post, we’ll take the last five one by one.

Question: What Do You Know About Us?

Suggested Answer What Googling that Sh*t told you.

Problem: Of course it’s important to know what the company does, what it’s (stated) values are, etc. — and any good candidate is going to know that. So how do you expect to stand out?

Real Answer: I know that you do … and that you are committed to … but I also know that this presents a number of challenges for a Procurement organization, including … What ones are you experiencing now, how are you addressing them, and what ones will this position get to tackle? With respect to … I feel I could be a big help because of my experience with …


Question: Why Do You Want To Work With Us?

Suggested Answer Honest answer that addresses the organization’s values and vision.

Problem: Every candidate and their aloof disinterested cats can bullsh!t a 100% acceptable response to this question and it often plays little into day to day responsibilities where the rubber meets the road.

Real Answer: I love your value and vision and the products you make, but most importantly I love the work that I expect I will be doing on a daily basis. I can’t wait to apply my skills in X, learn more about Y, and tackle new territory in Z. There’s just so much to do that I feel this is just a starter role and I can have a career at your company, and maybe even your job someday when you are promoted to COO or CEO (as all good CPOs should be).


Question: Why Should We Hire You?

Suggested Answer An answer that links your skills, experience, education, and personality to the job itself.

Problem: Again, every candidate and their aloof disinterested cats can bullsh!t a 100% acceptable response to this question and it often plays little into day to day responsibilities.

Real Answer: An answer that links your skills, experience, education, and personality to the job AND showcases the innovation you can bring.


Question: What Kind of Salary Do You Need?

Suggested Answer Turn it Around, because she who plays chicken first loses the negotiation.

Problem: Salary is only one aspect of the picture.

Real Answer: It depends on the overall benefits package. I’m looking to stick around, so what do you have for health/disability benefits, retirement savings matching, continuing education, work-life balance, etc. Don’t just turn it around, say you expect your worth, but you’ll consider the full picture.


Question: What Questions Do You Have For Us?

Suggested Answer Any question that will allow you to demonstrate how you might make an impact.

Problem: Actually, this is the only question the doctor does not have a problem with, if you take the right approach, and the question is broad enough for you to do that! Just be sure to use all the tips and tricks outlined in the last nine points to emphasize you want to understand better how you can help and prepare yourself to hit the ground running, tomorrow even.

If you want to stand out, don’t answer the top 10 procurement questions! Part I!

If you Google “top procurement question”, you get a bunch of links to articles about top procurement interview questions and how to answer them, including this Slideshare that has some decent questions and answers, but not questions the doctor would actually ask other than to see how sharp you were (at detecting hidden intent), and definitely not answers that showcase the true range of your Procurement capabilities — which is what the doctor would want to know (as he’d only interview for a senior position and only if a company wanted a true leader, which most companies, despite the talk, still don’t want — but that’s another book). To explain, we’ll take them one by one.

Question: Describe a suggestion of yours that was implemented.

Suggested Answer: Any suggestion you made that your employer adopted to some degree of success.

Problem: If your boss was the PHB’s (Pointy Headed Boss’) brother, then chances are your best suggestion wasn’t even understood, yet alone considered. Their failure shouldn’t be your failure just like their random success shouldn’t be your success. The real key to evaluating your innovation capability is the best suggestion you made (implemented or not), why, and the data you have to back it up.

Real Answer: The best suggestion that was implemented was … as it increased effectiveness/efficiency/sustainability in the following way … but … the best suggestion I ever had was … as it would have increased effectiveness/efficiency/sustainability in the following ways (and I did the following analysis to back it up) … but due to lack of risk tolerance / change management support / etc, it unfortunately never got implemented. Then ask, “how does your company support this process”?

Question: What Experience Do You Have in Procurement?

Suggested Answer Whatever you did to support Procurement, direct or indirect.

Problem: The best Procurement professionals ARE NOT from Procurement (fields).

Real Answer: I have the following Procurement experience, but the real contribution I am able to make is my background in engineering/manufacturing/IT/etc. as it will allow me to better support your engineering/manufacturing/IT/etc. as I know what they need, why, and where to find better alternatives, etc.

Question: What Is Your Greatest Weakness?

Suggested Answer What you honestly feel, why, and what you are doing to tackle it.

Problem: Your greatest weakness might be relatively harmless in your target role. Maybe it’s people skills, but you are applying to be the senior analyst to support the senior negotiator. Maybe it’s math, but the organization is one of the smart few with an optimization-backed sourcing platform. Etc. Little impact.

Real Answer: My greatest weakness is … and I am doing this to improve on it … but I feel, even though I’m relatively strong, the area I could most improve in is … as doing so would help me deliver my employer the following benefits …

Question: What Challenges Are You Looking For?

Suggested Answer Any challenge — past, present, or future — that will allow you to utilize your skills.

Problem: What you are seeking might be of zero help to your employer.

Real Answer: The challenges I expect to encounter in this position are … and I expect to be able to tackle them using … and expect these … benefits. You want to show that you’ve done your homework and know what you’d be getting into and are the perfect candidate.

Question: Have You Ever Had a Conflict? How Was it Resolved?

Suggested Answer Describe a conflict and how you handled it in a way that emphasizes your approach to conflict resolution.

Problem: If this is your first senior Procurement role, the conflicts of the past are playground to what you should expect to encounter.

Real Answer: Start out with the suggested answer, but move on to the methods you will use during communications and negotiations with stakeholders and suppliers to try and avoid conflicts in the first place. Conflict resolution is good … but conflict avoidance is better!

Want to Fail Faster? Automate it! (Repost)


This post first appeared six years ago. But it’s as relevant today as you plan your budget requests for the acquisition of new Supply Management systems, so it’s being reposted.

This article in the McKinsey Quarterly on a better way to automate service operations nailed it: processes and work practices are best designed and implemented before companies roll out the new IT. Otherwise, the COO will walk into the field operations control center after spending millions on a new automated scheduling and dispatching system (and over a year implementing the software and installing the hardware) only to find that response times have not improved, and the number of jobs each engineer handles in a day has not increased.

This experience is all to common for leaders of service operations organizations that manage large groups of remote or distributed employees, including those that have made multi-million dollar IT investments in areas such as automated dispatching, schedule prioritization, workflow automation, and performance management. This is because these systems require processes and work practices different from those used in non-IT enabled situations.

This means that before a company implements a new service management system, the company not only has to sit down and baseline its current operations, but determine how these processes need to change in order to appropriately utilize the capabilities of an automated system. This is because best practices developed over the years to insure that manual processes don’t break down tend to be over cautious due to the limitations of the average person to manually schedule hundreds, or thousands, of resources across thousands of jobs — limitations that today’s software doesn’t have.

To succeed, a company needs to go back to square one and define the goals of its service operations, the resources it has available, and the equipment at the resources’ disposal. It has to throw away all of the old rules and constraints and be sure to only define true constraints (an engineer is only available 8 hours a day, service for tier 1 contracts must occur within 24 hours, etc), not perceived constraints (an engineer can only handle two calls a day, the repair must be by an engineer at the closest office, etc.). And then it has to trust the system which can optimize across thousands of variables.


Remember, a good Supply Management function is a service to the rest of the organization, so it’s important they have the processes and platforms to serve the organization right.

If AP is the Tax Department, Make Sure They Optimize Tax Recovery!

A recent guest post on spend matters that called “Accounts Payable: The New Tax Department” noted that as governments worldwide continue the fight against tax fraud, they are requiring more data from enterprises, even down to the individual invoice level.

The guest post also notes that VAT/GST payers often find these requirements onerous, as they can delay operations and increase processing costs for individual transactions, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

An appropriate software platform that supports both customer e-Invoicing from invoices that originate from the organization and customer paper invoicing and also supports the tracking of each tax collected (against an appropriate tax code) can make the identification, consolidation, and submission of such invoices a snap (as long as it supports the required output data format). One click can generate the “tax package” for a country of choice and a simple upload to the government site can send it on its way. It doesn’t have to be hard.

And even if your organization does not have to do this today, it should plan for it, especially if it wants to go international. Currently, as per the post, 16 countries require individual tax invoices and the number is growing. Moreover, many countries can ask for them at any time and an inability to produce quickly can land you in very hot water.

But even more important than tax payment is tax reclamation. If you have a really good platform, it will allow you to import the invoices you receive from your suppliers, track the tax you pay by tax code, and automatically calculate tax owed to you (as you pay tax you collect and get reimbursed for tax you pay in many countries) as well as the supporting tax package (if required). Remember, the governments typically only care about getting their share and the invoice submission laws are all about making sure you pay what you’re supposed to, not about making sure you get credit for what you pay.

Now, if you are operating in a dozen countries, it will be up to legal and finance to figure out which ones you have to collect in, report in, and what taxes and reports are relevant, and this will generally be beyond the capability of most e-Procurement and AP programs, but the necessary data:

  • standard tax code id
  • UNSPSC and/or HTS code
  • collected / paid
  • amount
  • date
  • etc.

as well as the required data formats (EDI, XML, etc.), and one-click import/export (for a standard date range) are easy to support — and any good e-Procurement platform should support it (and if it doesn’t, it’s not a platform for you). And you need one of these, so you can get the AP department what they need to not only make governments and suppliers happy, but make sure you reclaim every penny of tax globally you are required to. Taxes add up … fast … when not reclaimed. So make sure your Procurement platform does what it needs to do to support your reclamation.

Key Questions When Selecting a Multi-Criteria Supplier Sustainability Monitoring Solution

In our last post on why Supply Risk Management Can Not Be Siloed, we noted that the average organization was not properly managing risk, and this was not only costing the organization time and money, but putting it at significant risk. We noted that there were a number of reasons for this — which included a lack of time, resources, and even immediacy — but the biggest reason was because there is a lack of cohesion in the fragmented risk management approach employed by many organizations. But we also noted that there was something the organization could do, namely, take a holistic approach to sustainable risk management.

In a holistic approach to sustainable risk management, risk management is centralized through a Centre of Excellence (CoE) that holistically manages risk for the entire organization. This CoE will put together policies and procedures that not only ensure that

  • every supplier is covered
  • on all relevant dimensions
  • but not on irrelevant dimensions
  • without any duplication of effort

but also ensures that

    • there are no false positives in the risk assessment and
    • there are no false negatives

Part of these procedures will include regular monitoring for risk and the regular re-examination of risk and sustainability of organizational suppliers and potential suppliers. And best practice will dictate that part of this monitoring and review will be automated by a multi-criteria supplier sustainability monitoring solution and supported by a provider that specializes in this type of platform as the monitoring will need to be maintained and adjusted as new data sources become available, old data sources go offline, and the depth of data changes over time.

But how do you select a good provider, and, most importantly, how do you select a good platform to meet your multi-criteria sustainability needs? The first thing you do is understand what makes a good platform and what the platform needs to do to take away your risk and sustainability management and your risk and sustainability monitoring pain.

To help you achieve this goal, the doctor recommends that you download Sourcing Innovation’s latest white paper on 5 Essential Criteria for Selecting a Supplier Sustainability & Risk Monitoring Solution, sponsored by Ecovadis, that will help you understand what a good sustainability and risk monitoring solution needs to do, not just what features or functions need to be in the brochure.