Grosvenor and Progressive Systems undertake regular research to understand the state of the procurement profession in Australia and New Zealand. This report details our findings from surveying 98 organisations about their efforts to implement sustainable practices in their procurement function.
With spend in supply chains representing an average of 60% of an organisation’s budget, procurement strategy and processes have a profound ability to affect the social, environmental and economic sustainability of business at large. The power of procurement to contribute, both positively and negatively, to sustainable objectives has never been so widely recognised.
Supplier management is often something that gets thrown at you with little explanation of what is required, little to no training in how you monitor supplier performance or avoid the biggest traps. Spend less time worrying about poor performance and more time on making strategic decisions that truly deliver value for money for your organisation.
In my last article, Is there a pot of gold hidden in your procurement spend?, I mentioned that one of the goals of our 2018 Procurement Study was to unlock a set of indicators that could be used to identify which categories, supplier and contracts are likely to yield the greatest opportunities to reduce spend.
It never ceases to amaze me how important the simple things like returning a phone call or responding to email are to successful buyer / seller relationships. Funny how we expect a supplier to respond and even fall over themselves when we need them. But do we always show the same respect back? Is it ok not to just because we are the ones handing over the cash?
Our 2018 procurement study “Eight savings myths debunked” was expected to stir the pot. It’s easy to allow assumptions and preconceived ideas about finding cost savings to influence where to look and what to expect.
With their focus on keeping supplier costs down, Australasian Chief Procurement Officers are used to having their attention trained on the external market: but did you know you can almost double your savings by turning your attention inside the organisation too?
As a new CPO you need to make an impact. Fast. Ideally within 100 days. This is important to win trust. Trust from the wider business that procurement will be better this time round. Better, in the sense of being able to help the organisation deliver the strategic goals. An enabler, rather than a roadblock. A coach, not a police offer.
Grosvenor benchmarked 31 organisations across Australia and internationally to understand what controls were in place to address the risk of modern slavery within their supply chains. Through our research in June 2018, we discovered what was considered best practice and what organisations across the country can be doing now to address modern slavery risks within their supply chains.
A game changing guide for modern (next generation) procurement professionals.
Being able to influence the business on how to use all available procurement levers, not just aggregation and tendering, is critical to drive the next wave of procurement savings and benefits for your business.
Great in theory but how can we as a profession effect significant change to such a well-entrenched and established way of working?
Perhaps the first and most important step is to think differently and not be afraid to question conventional thought.
In this guide we introduce to you three game changing ways of viewing and approaching existing business problems, namely:
This is not just theory, from our research of more than 250 Australian organisations we know that turning the ship around to better source and manage suppliers leads to an increase in performance of 29 percent!
Download your copy where we turn the world of procurement on its head, challenge the status quo and share our insights for dramatic supplier performance improvement.
