Category Archives: Talent

Where is Procurement Headed?

Will Procurement ever graduate from the status of misfit toy to that of
one eyed one horned flying purple people eater?

Procurement is still the back room function in many organizations. The early achievers adopted new technology and new processes in the early to mid noughts. The leaders adopted new technology and new processes from the late noughts to the early teens. But the laggards are still on the fence. And not just because they are laggards — but because their organizations are laggards and not giving them the respect and support they deserve.

Let’s face it, with the vast majority of Procurement organizations not having a seat at the table, they are still being treated as a misfit toy. Graduating to the status of one eyed one horned flying purple people eater would be a grand accomplishment — if they could get there.

But first they need to be a rockin’ band. But in order to rock, they need instruments. Technology, which they don’t get budget for, processes, that they haven’t been trained on, and knowledge, that they don’t even know they need. And even if they could get the tools, processes, and knowledge that they needed, they still need to learn how to play in sync.

We’ll start with the second issue first. In order to learn to play in sync, they need training. Training that they never got, even when training was a top procurement survey issue for almost five years in a row. But this is not only hurting Procurement, it’s hurting the organization. Because if Procurement had the training, they would not only know how to play in sync, but they would have the knowledge. In particular, the knowledge they need to not only obtain great savings, and value, for the organization, but the knowledge they need to institute better processes, identify better technology, and convince the organization of the proper steps to achieve savings success.

Good training not only provides knowledge to execute, but knowledge to educate, and knowledge to entice the rest of the organization to follow your lead.

So if your Procurement organization wants to excel, it has to get training. If it can’t get it by hook (by getting it in the budget), then it has to get it by crook (PO now and take the consequences when the invoice come in later), or if there are no other options, with the personal check book (and replace the funds with the bonus you’ll get when the savings materialize). And only then will Procurement be a band of one eyed one horned flying purple people eaters.

We Don’t Need Licenses, We Need Knowledge!

There comes a time in every profession where someone goes beyond screaming the need for certification and starts screaming the need for licenses and self regulation, like Engineers, Lawyers, and Doctor’s have. It doesn’t always happen (and CIPS, no, not CIPS, CIPS failed when it tried to get ISP, no, not your ISP, the ISP certification a regulatory standard in Canada), but some people (either because they like the attention or, more commonly, want the dollars that will come their way as they already offer the certification that they want to see as the foundation for licensing) try anyway.

And while the dialogue is sometimes useful, because it usually results from a lack of appropriately skilled individuals to fill industry need, sometimes it isn’t. Where Procurement is concerned, it isn’t. The problem isn’t lack of regulation, it’s lack of knowledge. As implied by SI’s recent repost on Why Your Organization Can’t Find Top Supply Management Talent, it’s because there just aren’t enough talented individuals out there. And the reason, they just don’t know everything they need to know.

Why?

First of all, most people still see Global Supply Management as backroom Procurement, a function that is so unsexy that the only place in the organization that is worse is the mailroom. As a result, they don’t study Procurement or anything seen as related to it in College.

Secondly, even if they decide to retrain, they are looking at what they can train for quickly, easily through a plethora of courses, and be pretty much guaranteed of getting a placement. Most private colleges focussed on getting people to work quickly with 4 to 8 month programs focus on traditional accounting, IT support, medical transcription, physician / dentist office manager, etc. Procurement isn’t even on their radar. As a result, the (re)training (& certification) offerings are, with only a couple of exceptions, limited to the professional associations, which the average non-Procurement individual isn’t going to know about.

But third, and most critically, you don’t train your people! (And neither do your peers!) Year after year after year your organization will rank lack of talent as one of the three most critical Procurement issues, but year after year you will slash the training budget. If you want talented people, you need to start with knowledgeable people. And if you want the people to have the knowledge they need, you need to give it to them, because they’re not going to get it anywhere else.

And once they have the knowledge they need, they’ll have a much better chance at reaching the level of success you expect. So forget about licensing when the average individual doesn’t even have the knowledge to pass the most basic of certifications, and just give them the knowledge they need. And do it for free if you really want to effect a wide-spread change.

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.