Category Archives: Talent

Why Can’t I Find Top Supply Management Talent? (Repost)

This post originally ran four years ago today. But it’s relevance has not waned.

The simple answer: you’re looking for a resource that is so rare it may not even exist! And I’m not the only one who thinks so. After talking with a number of thought leaders over the years it’s become clear that this is the most common reason Supply Management organizations can’t find talent. (Note that this is only the case with respect to “find”. The reasons a Supply Management organization can’t hire talent or keep talent are different.)

As Supply Management has become more and more challenging, the average reaction of a supply management organization has been to continually augment the job description of a supply manager to the point where the individual is expected to not only be a jack of all trades but master of all. This has resulted in a search for senior buyers with an eclectic collection of skills and experience so rare that you can probably count the number of global supply professionals around the globe that make the grade. For example, whereas the average job description for a senior buyer ten to fifteen years ago might have looked like:

  • good communication skills
  • college degree
  • negotiation experience
  • buying experience in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and energy
  • some supervisory experience

Today’s average job description for a senior buyer looks like:

  • great communication skills
  • excellent writing skills
  • master’s degree with 10 years experience, PhD preferred
  • expert in negotiations with a global supply base
  • buying experience in manufactured goods, services, IT & Telecommunications, legal, marketing, and temporary labour
  • supervisory experience of global business teams and outsourced services
  • buying experience in Europe and Asia
  • speaks English, Hindi, and Mandarin fluently
  • experienced in contract drafting
  • expertise in import/export requirements of the US, the EU,
    India, and China
  • in-depth knowledge of REACH, WEEE, RoHS, and similar regulations
  • expert in should cost models, TCO models, and global logistics models
  • experienced user of e-Sourcing and e-Procurement applications and expert in e-Negotiations and award optimization
  • expert in spend analysis
  • great project management skills
  • risk management skills
  • working capital management skills
  • financial reporting experience
  • innovative and capable of leading cross-functional innovation teams
  • NPD experience
  • implemented multiple successful SRM initiatives
  • experience with CSR and sustainability initiatives
  • expert at market intelligence
  • high CQ
  • great leadership skills
  • adept at navigating regulatory issues
  • speaks techie
  • etc.

See the problem?

If you don’t, think about it for a while.

Or, better yet, to get a clearer picture, check out “The Chief Procurement Officer Job Description: An Overview” co-authored by yours truly and the maverick over on the new Spend Matters CPO site as well as the follow-on posts:

  • CPO Job Description: A Procurement Leader
  • CPO Job Description: Primary Responsibilities
  • CPO Job Description: Picking Procurement Technology
  • CPO Job Description: Managing Procurement Staff
  • CPO Job Description: Developing Procurement Staff
  • CPO Job Description: Aligning Procurement With Other Business Functions
  • CPO Job Description: Budget Management

Talent IS the Biggest Issue Facing Procurement Today.

the doctor follows a wide-range of Procurement topics and channels. There’s a lot of noise. There’s a lot of repeat messaging. But sometimes there’s not enough repeat messaging. One area where there’s not enough repeat messaging is with respect to talent: the lack of talent, the difficulty in retaining talent, and, most importantly, the lack of necessary investment in talent by companies that need it the most.

A recent post over on the Argentus Talent Acquisition site on what are the biggest issues facing Procurement today correctly pointed out that there are two main issues: the shortage of attracting talent, and the shortage of retaining talent. But, to be fair, that’s not the biggest issue.

The biggest issue is the lack of training for emerging and existing talent. For years, talent has made the top three issues on Procurement survey after Procurement survey and for years, the investment in talent has been minimal or non-existent. The average university does not have a Supply Chain Management / Procurement program, the average individual looking for a career and funding her own continuing education doesn’t even consider Procurement, and the average subject matter expert (SME) hired into, or transferred into, Procurement barely understands basic Purchasing policy.

So where does an organization expect to get the talent it needs if it is not willing to invest to create that talent? And how does it expect to retain the ration of talent it gets if it does not continually invest in that talent to give it a reason to stay?

Talent is the issue. And will be the issue for years. It’s not a prediction. It’s not even an observation. It’s just reality.

Procurement Trend #17. Talent

Fourteen anti-trends from the grey-beards’ glory days still remain, and as much as we’d like to provide more entertainment to LOLCat who is bored with our anti-trend coverage, we must make sure that no good deed goes unpunished and since the futurists’ advice is as good as it gets, we must break it all down until you can look past the shiny new paint job and realize that it’s a twenty year old Skoda you are being sold.

So why do so many historians keep pegging talent as a future trend? Besides the fact that they are, unfortunately, still cemented in the people-process-technology (and not the talent-technology-transition management) mindset, it is probably because, no matter where your organization is on its Supply Management journey:

  • more knowledge is required

    Supply Management professionals are currently climbing the Devil’s Staircase

  • more technology is required

    because most work is still tactical paper pushing work (even if it’s pushing scanned PDFs, it’s still paper pushing work)

  • more skills are required

    to transition to better processes, use new technology, and identify more value generation opportunities for the organization

So what does this mean?

Knowledge

As per our previous posts on inter-departmental collaboration and more stakeholder collaboration you need to implement knowledge management. You need to capture the knowledge you have. You need to capture the knowledge your partners bring you. And you definitely to capture the knowledge you generate before it walks out the door when your people move on to the next stage of their professional and/or personal life. It is a knowledge economy, and if you don’t have the knowledge required, you won’t be in the new economy much longer. C’est la vie dans le nouveau monde de l’enterprise.

Technology

As per our previous posts on increased accuracy in demand planning, process convergence into Supply Management, and e-Procurement System Adoption, you need to implement new and better technology solutions. These solutions need to automate the tactical, optimize the operations, and enable the strategic. Electronically pushing paper is not strategic. Monitoring dashboards is not strategic. Re-sourcing a category for the third time through an e-Auction for a measly 3% savings is not strategic. Doing detailed analyses that allow you to identify untapped opportunities, define new processes that will get marketing or legal on-board with spend management methodologies, or helping R&D design a product that is both more cost efficient to produce and more desirable to the market — that’s strategic.

Skills

It’s like we keep saying here at SI, a modern Supply Management professional needs to be a jack of all trades and a master of one. You need to continually enhance your soft skills, your tech skills, and your knowledge of different organizational disciplines, processes, and goals and learn to take advantage of the new technologies and opportunities that are continually being made available to you.

Procurement Trend #18. Improved Supply Management Skill Set

Fifteen anti-trends still remain but today we can take solace in the fact that we have finally finished with the “old news” anti-trends and have reached the “ongoing” blues anti-trends. While these anti-trends are still “old news”, most are only a few decades old, as opposed to some of the earlier trends we debunked which described situations encountered by many business centuries ago (which is when globalization really began).

So why do the modern historians continue to peg an improved supply management skill set as a future trend? Maybe it’s because they’ve only recently been expelled from an old-school Procurement organization into this brave new world, and this is as far as they’ve made it in their readings, but three likely reasons are:

  • technology is progressing rapidly

    and much faster than the average person can be reasonably expected to keep up with

  • the breadth of supply management continues to expand

    and new categories and responsibilities are often added to Supply Management’s (shared) purview on a regular basis

  • processes aren’t keeping up

    and Supply Managers are getting buried under an avalanche of tactical demands

So what does this mean?

Rapid Technology Progression

Your organization, and in particular, your talent, needs to keep up. Regular training is going to be required for your talent, and thus your organization to keep up. You will have to fight for this though, because despite the fact that it has been among the top three or top five concerns of most CPOs and CXOs for the past five years, the training budget is always the first budget to get cut.

Expanding Supply Management Breadth

This is a good thing, but you your Supply Management organization needs to keep up, not fall behind. The tech progression is a good starting point, the training is a good continuation, but you need to also learn other areas of the business – their language, processes, and goals so that you can collaborate with them, learn their wisdom, and, if possible, share the workload.

Processes Need to Move Out of the Past

Processes need to continually progress forward — that’s why SI is all about Transition management and not just focussed on the classic people-product-technology triangle (as it’s actually talent-technology-transition management). You will have to conduct process reviews not only on all Procurement processes, but on all related operational processes to determine if they can be made more efficient, reliable, or better, identify what new processes would look like, determine if the current technology platforms can support these new processes or if new platforms are needed, and create, and then execute on, appropriate transition plans.

Procurement Trend #25: More Stakeholder Collaboration

Twenty-two dull, swampy, trends from the days of yore still remain, so let’s go full steam ahead. The sooner we get through these, the sooner you stop getting fooled by snake-oil salesmen.

So why do so many historians keep pegging more stakeholder collaboration as a future trend, while helps poor LOLCats everywhere regress to past lives? There are a number of reasons, but among the top three today are:

  • knowledge-based outsourcing requires knowledgeand one cannot outsource even a tactical function and expect results without an understanding of what is required for success
  • process based outsourcing requires process managersand one cannot outsource even basic processes, such as the regular purchase of on-contract indirect items, group purchasing of items not strategic enough for sourcing, or even building management without regular oversight of those processes
  • transitioning to better ways requires team inputit’s hard enough for Procurement to outsource tactical Procurement processes without a solid understanding of those processes, so imagine the difficulty in helping the company outsource other back-office or front-office functions without a good understanding of those functions, which will require input and cross-departmental collaboration from other organizational team members

So what do you do about this?

Knowledge-Based Outsourcing

As per our prior discussion, you need to institute knowledge management and web-based collaboration tools ASAP to insure that all appropriate knowledge is captured, organized, reviewed, delivered, improved, and learnt from. You need knowledge to initiate the process, to manage the process, and to capture the results of the process so that it can be effectively repeated — inside or outside the organization, as circumstances desire.

Process-Based Outsourcing

As more back-office and front-office functions get outsourced, more and better change management is going to be required. When functions get outsourced, everything changes, and that change has to be managed. Not only does the transition has to be managed, but so does the process oversight, because at some point the provider might have to change or circumstances may change and the function needs to be brought back in house. The Procurement team will have to be become well-versed in change models such as Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model or ADKAR and also learn how to integrate them with team management.

Team Management

As indicated above, success is going to depend on the creation and effective management of cross-disciplinary teams that can effectively document, transition, and manage the processes being outsourced and, in some cases, being taken back in house because the wrong processes were sent out. The team will have to be become intimately familiar with team performance models, such as the Drexler/Sibbet, and become good at integrating these models with the chosen change management model.