PROCUREMENT LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS. WHERE ARE THE MAIN GAPS?

Last year The EIPM Peter Kraljik Award has celebrate its 10th anniversary.

To enter this award, companies need to answer 99 questions, describe their practices and go through a one day validation visit with two assessors who investigate the extent to which relevant best practices are appropriately implemented and systematically deployed.

Looking into the data, we were able to identify the practices with the highest gaps between leaders and followers. You can see them in the figure below.

The results are quite interesting

Risk management

First, leading purchasing teams tend to be more systematic than followers for the proactive management of risks. This resonates with what we have seen in the past months where companies Companies who had invested in collaborative supplier relationships, risk management and business continuity were faster to recover than other.

People, Team & Communication

However the gap are really significant for many items related to people management and communication. This shows that many companies treat their buyers as a pool of individuals and not as a community, as a network of people who grow, develop and win together.

Make sure the whole team is on the same boat and progresses toward a shared goal

Indeed to excel procurement teams need to invest more in building a great team with a strong purpose, a culture of excellence, mutual learning opportunities, motivational engagement and learning experience.

And the good news is…. This is something possible.

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

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Hervé Legenvre, PhD

EIPM Value Creation Observatory Director