"De-Age" your Procurement
How to build the right Procurement culture for Millennials? It is becoming tricky to attract and retain a high-quality talent pipeline in Procurement. Extremely difficult.
Advanced Procurement CoEs demand niche skillsets. A Procurement category manager who can also code will always be my favourite yardstick (because I am one, and yes, I am bragging here:-P). Coming back to the point, Procurement is not cool enough YET to attract young talent and scale fresh ideas. It is also not a defacto choice as a career option, to begin with. Very few youngsters will chase "Chief Procurement Officer" as their future career option during their graduation.
Amazon/Spotify/Youtube/Freelancer/Twitter/Etoro experience is what we need to bring into Procurement.
So, here is what you can do to De-AGE your procurement :
1) Amazon Like Experience for Indirect Procurement: Get indirect spend on the procurement marketplace. Let end users buy directly through the marketplace. Procurement doesn't need to micro-manage indirect spend. Fix the price, vendors annually and move on. Establish tier-wise discounting.
2) Spotify and Youtube Like Experience for Upskilling: These are your Learning Management platforms. How to negotiate with Vendor X, How to prepare your category strategy, What are the top 10 cost factors, Market News, Vendor Updates everything on Spotify and Youtube. This is why I am asking you to Subscribe to Supernegotiate. Now it makes sense?
3) Freelancers: CPOs are notorious for ignoring how useful high-quality freelancers are and the value they can add. I strongly STRONGLY believe that niche freelancers are far better than generic consulting firms when it comes to execution kind of work. But do not push your old boring procurement process on them. Change your process to work with freelancers and get a Paypal payment option. You will thank me later!
4) Twitter Like Experience for Supplier Management: Twitter for Suppliers. Simple. Get rid of every other supplier management platform.
5) Etoro Like Experience for eSourcing: Your commodity or buying portfolio is like a stock portfolio. You need all the analytics and market news like a stock trading desk. Hence, Provide it. This is how the esourcing tool should be, powered by community intelligence.
This is what I am striving for in Digital Procurement. Nothing less.
Point 2 is what Supernegotiate is all about. It is bonkers that your team is not listening to the podcasts :-P
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