Procurement is magic
There is a moment in J. K. Rowling’s 4th Wizarding World movie – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – where Professor Dumbledore says to Harry, “We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.” Whilst it would be quite wrong to assert that procurement was the next closest thing to actual magic, it can sometimes seem that way to an outside observer. Making sure things are done right is seldom easy, though if things work well then they may well give that impression.
When you work in procurement, you’re almost never buying goods or services for yourself or your own team. In fact, in many large and complex organisations the things that you are buying often spill over to supply multiple teams and departments and collating all their individual needs and wants in to coherent purchases can be challenging.
A broomstick and a book of spells may not be part of a typical procurement professional’s toolkit – but at least a magic wand with a pointy end would be useful for emphasising a point during a meeting. One of the more complex parts of a procurement and supply chain role is getting a cross functional team of stakeholders together to make a decision when evaluating bids after an invitation to tender.
The complexity comes in different aspects – for a start, the people who need to give their input to a decision may not normally work together or even be aware of the impact of their role on the matter in hand. If you’re tasked with buying a travel booking service for use by the student recruitment team, there is no certainty that the IT team are aware of their requirements and vice versa.
Different teams will all have a valid input to make and being able to prioritise those views can be difficult, especially in a world of finite resources and competing objectives. The Finance Dept. might want you to buy things cheaply, the technical teams might expect you to buy the highest specification and the operational teams might need you to buy whatever has the most comprehensive customer service support.
Setting the expectations of these internal teams is part of the vital groundwork that any successful procurement professional is accustomed to doing. It requires the ability to gain confidence and that is not something that happens overnight. Managing internal stakeholders and decision makers is just as valuable as taking care of the external supply chain. Similarly, it’s not something that can be left until the moment that you need to go to market – getting those internal teams familiar with what you need from them during a tender and how you can work well together will help you achieve the right things for everyone and will even make them a whole lot easier.
