1) Allow Employees to be Entrepreneurs 😎
Instead of shelling out millions on substandard generalist 3rd-party solutions, allow your employees to work on 0-1 problems to solve high-impact solutions for you. There are so many Procurement problems that can be solved with ingenious in-house solutions rather than chasing a shiny conference with pretty presentations.
Fund such employees and projects, be the first customer and co-own the equity/revenue share arrangements. 💸 💵I can not stress enough how important this will be from 2023 onwards! Build that Incubator!
2) Get rid of KPIs, Swing for the Fences ⚔:
KPIs are so 1960s. KPIs are meant to limit people and efforts into safe zones of what is achievable! Define a moonshot target, break down small wins and track the wins. Annual KPIs are meaningless and make you a myopic operator.
3) Lose the Fad everywhere you see, and Do not be a digital hoarder:
This is my favourite Brutal classifier. Get rid of things that don't make sense, have low adoption, are not contributing to your moonshot target or are only good to have!- For Procurement, this means looking back to your adoption rate of dashboards, features not being used in eSourcing, Contract management etc. Be bold! And Yes, Stop rolling out quarterly feature releases if overall adoption is poor. Prioritize your budget on change management.- For Procurement Centre of Excellence, this means saying NO to machine learning or AI projects when you do not even have the basics setup. Focus on Rule-Based logic engines, and you will just be fine. There are many fake it-till-you-make-it players at the moment in the Procurement AI/ML world, so do not fall for FOMO syndrome.
4) Procurement Tech Stack? Heck No! Define your Value Stack!
For the last few years, I have been seeing the beemap of Procurement Startups in various domains. Not sure what purpose it serves other than placing a few in the centre of the bee hive. 🏮Do not fall for Procurement Technologies. Procurement Technology is just a mean to achieve something (business value here). Rather, I urge you to build a Procurement Value Stack.If you have to deliver 5% EBIDTA value over the next 1-2 years, what is your strategic activity and project stack?
5) Travel Policy:
Odd one here, but I need to call this out. Travel policy needs to be de-linked to the designation. It doesn't make sense to me and probably never will for even your next-generation employees and managers. 12-hour travel is equally exhausting for an entry-level employee as it is for a director etc. Fix this!
6) Self-Service Procurement:
This should be made mandatory in all companies in 2023. Procurement can fix rates, agree upon quantity-based discounting slabs and let requestors manage their budget, approval and fulfilment. 2023 is going to be about where your teams focus, and it should definitely not be in admin/low-impact work
Follow Supernegotiate for more such reminders!
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