In a recent post, that I hesitate to link to because it doesn’t help me stay in the obscurity you seek out only when you’re ready to learn, Joel tell us that Procurement Has Changed when, in fact, it really hasn’t.

It seems that I have to again argue that Procurement has NOT changed since the first book on Purchasing I know of was published 138 years ago. (The 1887 Handbook of Railway Supplies). The goal is still the same: assure supply at the lowest cost that minimizes risk to the business while creating the most overall value so the business can remain profitable and grow. NO CHANGE (or at least there shouldn’t be)!

It’s the world that’s changed. The business models we play in. The economic landscapes we trade in. The processes we’ve developed to deal with the complexity. The tools we use to do our jobs (and this is now the best of times and the worst of times: computational power to optimize global networks and Gen-AI LLMs to hallucinate answers so convincing, but yet so wrong, they could destroy your business).

It’s learning how to quickly adapt to changing business environments, changing economic models, and changing global landscapes, especially with dichotomies we haven’t seen before — a double down on sustainability by the EU and some countries as we hit year after year of record heatwaves, and an abandoning of all commitments and many recent legislations in the USA. Same for DEI. Then dealing with those changes that are coming orders of magnitude faster than in the past (the majority of tariffs would generally change only [semi-]annually when government bodies got around to it or a crisis happened, now you have them fluctuating sometimes daily).

It’s realizing that the STEM skills you need to navigate the technology to do this are far beyond what you would have received UNLESS you entered Procurement from a STEM field, and shoring up those skills, as well as your ability to use tools that help you with those skills. It is navigating fractured relationships caused by political bodies outside of the scope of your influence. And so on.

It may feel like Procurement has changed, but the reality is that it hasn’t! It’s everything around it that has changed.