Last week, the ISM held their annual conference in
Indianapolis, Indiana. The conference
was well attended, and the folks that I spoke to appeared to be happy with the
content and the training sessions.
Overall, I agree – the ISM did a great job organizing an agenda that met
the overarching needs of the supply management community. However, I can’t help but wonder if our
profession is getting a little stale.
Year after year it seems like we are talking about different variations
of the same topics – stakeholder engagement, category management, cost savings,
sourcing strategy, and negotiation strategy, to name a few. This is not a criticism
of the ISM at all – these topics are still relevant to our community. My question is, why? Aren’t we supposed to be evolving, adapting, and
(hopefully) improving? Yet year after
year, we still cover the same topics, and people seem to need these same
trainings over and over again.
For all the talk in the blogs on the evolution of
procurement and procurement 2020, we are still rehashing the same challenges
and making very little progress in a profession that has a lot of room for
improvement. The title of my session at
ISM this year (co-presented by the esteemed Rebecca Karp), was “Navigating
Ahead in an On-Demand World – Procurement’s New Realm”. During this session, Rebecca and I covered the
evolution, or at least perceived evolution, of procurement, from a three bid
and buy facilitator to the role of true business partner. Most people in the room agreed that business
partner is where we are at today – both supporting the business objectives of
the organizations we serve, and acting as a front line account manager for the
suppliers we work with. The problem, as outlined by our presentation, is that
the business doesn’t feel the same way about us.
To them, we are still a facilitator at best, and a
bottle-neck at worst. We focus on cost
savings instead of value, we run a process that is too rigid, we aren’t customer-service
focused, and no one understands our spreadsheets! These are the basics, and we still aren’t getting
them right. So it’s not that strange
that the topics covered at ISM this year are the same that were covered last
year, and the year before. Apparently,
we aren’t learning anything!
Outside of the same old coverage, if I had to pick three “trending”
topics based on the conversations I had at ISM this year, they would be “millennials”, “soft-skills” and “revenue-focus”. In a way, all three of these trending topics
give me some hope that the future is coming, but all for different reasons.
The millennial topic was covered in great detail, from
senior procurement executives trying to understand how we manage this
apparently new breed of human – that wants to be valued at work, but also have
a work-life balance, to actual millennials either trying to explain why they
are so special, or explaining that not all people, even within the same age
group, should be considered the same.
The controversy around millennials in itself didn’t give me
much hope, but the fact that so many people with a fresh perspective are
entering our industry, excited about it, and see it as a good start to a career
– represents a huge change from even the procurement function of 10 years
ago. Fresh blood never hurts!
Soft skills and revenue focus for procurement professionals are
things we’ve known for a long time, but I have never seen them talked about as
much as at the conference this year. As
an industry, we are starting to understand that just running a process isn’t enough,
we need to provide good customer service to support the business and put
strategy back into strategic sourcing.
We are also finally starting to understand that a dollar of cost savings
is worth a heck of a lot more than a dollar of revenue. That recognition is critical to our future success,
and the sooner we can report the bottom line impact on EBITA and profitability
to the C-suite, the better.
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