Category Archives: Best Practices

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.

Only an Optimization-Backed Sourcing Platform will Answer a Buyer’s SOS


We all know the importance of a good Sourcing Platform to power our Procurement Value Engine. But even after multiple posts (on Sourcing Innovation) and (white) papers on the topic, one still might not be convinced that an optimization-backed sourcing platform is truly necessary. If the organization is still getting reasonably good results from its (last-generation) sourcing suite, has a large number of templates, workflows, and processes configured for its key/strategic categories, and has a consultancy/service provider that handles its tougher events (and they use an optimization-powered platform for those few really complex or high-dollar categories), it might think that everything is fine. And the reality is that everything is fine … until it isn’t!
from How Optimization-Backed Sourcing Platforms Save Our Souls . . . Or At Least Our Backsides


One has to understand that disruptions don’t only occur in the supply chain after the contract is signed, they occur during the sourcing process, and a significant disruption can result in an evergreen contract renewing at above market prices (which is bad) or a contract expiring and the organization left with insufficient inventory and no source of supply in a tight market (which is worse). And even if the disruption doesn’t result in an evergreen renewal or a (costly) inventory stock-out (that shuts down a production line), it can still result in increased costs, increased risks, and missed opportunities.

Sourcing events need to go smoothly, but in a typical sourcing platform, as may of you know, that’s not always the case. Sometimes suppliers change the rules, and sometimes the rules just change, and everything, as they say, quickly goes to hell in a handbasket.

For example, all of a sudden at the 11th hour, a fire happens or a border closes, and a supplier offers you a backup location, or pulls out, and you need to bring in a supplier at a new location. Your transportation bids are useless, your risk profile is unuseably skewed, and maybe even your whole event setup is useless, and you have to start over. And this is just one of a dozen scenarios that can flip an average buyer’s world upside down with an average sourcing platform.

But if you had a flexible optimization-backed sourcing platform, instead of going back to square one, you’d just keep on truckin’ with an optimization-backed sourcing platform as they are designed, from the gorund up, to support dynamic, complex, cost models, dozens of what-if scenarios, and ever changing real-world requirements and made for change.

A factory and associated lanes disappears, no problem, it is just removed from the model with a single click. A new one is added? No problem, define the associated end points, the lanes are automatically populated, and a partial bid survey can be resent to all incumbent suppliers for revised bids. These are then loaded into the model, amalgamated with current bids, and the model is solved. No starting from scratch, creating new RFPs, creating a new model structure, etc. Just a few simple changes, a few new bids, and everything keeps on going like nothing ever happened.

And this is only one way optimization-backed sourcing platforms save a buyer’s behind. For more, check out the doctor‘s latest paper on How Optimization-Backed Sourcing Platforms Save Our Souls . . . Or At Least Our Backsides, sponsored by Trade Extensions, and realize that if you don’t have one, you need a proper sourcing platform today.