1) 📉 Old thinking about Cost Savings
💸 Unless it hits the cash flow, stop overselling Cost Savings. The worst is when category managers classify cost avoidance as cost-saving! (I know this hurts!). Find ways to remit the dollars back to the income statement. More on this later in a detailed article!
2) 🚫Meaningless (Adoptionless) Procurement Digitization
🛠️ Do you also have procurement tools that took 6 months of implementation and 300k in implementation fees, and still you have only 10% of people using them actively?Here is my experience and bitter truth. Any tool with less than 10% active adoption is not needed, and you should consider terminating the contract. Approximately everything in digital procurement (Which has such a low adoption rate) can be developed in-house by using Python and open-source software. I'll show you how! And yes, I am talking about eSourcing, contract management, and spend analysis tools.
3) 🌱 Buying Your Way in Sustainability Through Credit Purchases:
Stop greenwashing. Do the hard work of actually replacing inefficient high-emission products/devices in your supply chain with better ones.
4) ⏰ >3 Months RFP Tenders:
There is no way the next generation of 🗓️ Procurement leaders will entertain such long, bureaucratic timelines. Long tendering/sourcing processes only favour big bulky firms, and you will hardly see any shift in vendor base if your processes are unnecessarily lengthy! There can be exceptions to this, but 95% of your sourcing (by transaction count and not value) should be under 1 month, and I am not even talking about RFQs, etc.
5) 💰 Paid Proof of Concepts by StartupsI am calling out this one as I have seen many arrogant in Series B and C startups asking for investment to run Proof of Concepts. This kills innovation as procurement can not absorb sunk costs just to try new technology that might not even work.You can argue that it costs startups money, but No thanks. It's plain stupid. Procurement has to fight internally by building the business case, and such startups are only making it more challenging!
6) 📈 Rising Spend in Consulting
💼 The rise in business consulting spend is directly linked to your team's and organisation's performance. You can not have a high-performing team and general business consulting spend growth (I stand to be corrected on this one). Many firms use high-paid consultants for generic administrative work, and that's just nonsense!Try to establish an 80% budget cut on all consulting spending in 2024, and you will notice a much higher uptick in the quality of consulting projects and results!
7) Be technical about Procurement.
It's a beautiful profession. Do not chase generic, flashy conferences. I know your next Steve Jobs-alike presentation on big topics such as GenAi and now Q* learning sounds fun, but can we talk about spend analysis and negotiations first? Your team need it more
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