Posted 24/04/2015
Another Insight Guide covering Nine
Major Cost & Value Options summarised those
capable of “Making Procurement Cost and Value Management a Core Competence”. However
one of the other key elements in the procurement equation is the operational activities
and strategic initiatives associated with capturing and harnessing value from suppliers.
The challenge is the development of internal and external change programmes that
enable organisations to drive cost down and out of the supply chain while simultaneously
driving up and extracting additional value. Company performance in this area can
be assessed using competitive benchmarks, with those companies that are demonstrably
superior in this area exceeding the laggards on critical dimensions by more than
50%. Through their success, they are achieving competitive advantage as a result
of “value minus cost”
with their supplier base. Progress, though, is decidedly uneven, and this has been
confirmed by Future Purchasing’s “Strategies for Procurement Transformation” practitioner
research. Several extracts from the research, below, illustrate this.
The cost management ambitions of European and US companies have become increasingly
aggressive, with one in five of our web survey respondents needing to achieve 5%
annual cost reduction after inflation. 63% of respondents need to achieve in excess
of 2% per annum. However, surprisingly, almost a third of respondents have no cost
goals and / or do not believe that they are relevant for their organisations over
the next three years.
A strongly emerging theme from the Future Purchasing research is that supplier
management, while much discussed in both practitioner and academic literature, is
relatively ignored in practice. Or, alternatively, there are major organisational
or resource constraints inhibiting it. Neglect in this area clearly undermines the
potential for competitive advantage through addressing the value part of the purchasing
equation. Coverage is very patchy.
Having outlined the necessary linkage between programmes of cost management (“cost
down”) and supplier management (“value up”), it is now possible to create a framework
to assess the current and potential impact that procurement can make on overall corporate
performance. The metrics required to track this will be examined in later Insight
Guides on www.futurepurchasing.com. A considerable number of organisations are still
relatively early in the change process and their cost and value initiatives are essentially
tactical, delivering moderate impact. This is certainly the case for many organisations
addressing cross-country and regional supplier consolidation. Others are building
on their progress, redefining processes and applying, for example, strategic sourcing
and lean supply tools. However, the real pioneers are aligning strategic supplier
initiatives with product development, brand equity and customer value propositions.
The procurement mix is increasingly being focused on value creation and business
growth, as well as value capture.
Future Purchasing, in procurement transformation and cost reduction consulting,
and through its leadership of ongoing practitioner research, has found that many
procurement professionals and their executive colleagues are optimistic about the
progress being made, and also the opportunities still to be realised. For many organisations,
however, the value gap between current performance and future potential is still
considerable. Creating an appropriate organisational design, recruiting the necessary
leaders, embedding the required processes and mobilising teams remain a major challenge
and call for substantial investment in human resources and team development. This
route to business advantage through pioneering procurement will be explored in much
more detail in later Insight Guides.
Find out how Future Purchasing can support your initiatives in procurement transformation, cost reduction, category management and performance learning by getting in touch with us here.
Tagged by topic: Category Management , Category Management Survey , Cost Reduction , Procurement Transformation , SRM
by
Mark Webb