Getting more out of your procurement department

As a business in any part of the supply chain, you likely know just how important your procurement efforts are to your overall organizational success. With that in mind, it's important to make sure your department is set up for success on an ongoing basis and will be able to continually put its best foot forward. This is, of course, far more easily said than done, but there are ways to go about it.

Perhaps one of the best is to shift your perspective on suppliers, according to Supply Chain Dive. In the past several years, with rapid delivery times becoming the norm with personal and business orders, it can be easy to fly off the handlebars and get upset when a shipment is more than a day or two late, but the  supply chain functioned effectively for years with long-tail shipping times, and a delay of a few days won't destroy your business by any means.

Don't let a bad experience derail a solid procurement plan.

Often, shippers promise fast turnaround times because that's what people want to hear, even if they can't always deliver on those promises, the report said. For that reason, it's important to have a more open and honest relationship with your partners, and try to increase your options, so you can determine which suppliers will be able to get you what you need on a timeline that works for you. In all situations, you should feel that you can trust your suppliers, and that they will do the right thing for you — just as you would do for them.

Getting it right
With that having been said, one or two delays are just the cost of doing business, but when it becomes persistent, that's an obvious problem; you need to be able to approach a solution with confidence as well, according to Daily Commercial News. That may mean you have to be increasingly proactive about collecting and evaluating data for and from all of your shipping partners. That way, when issues arise, it becomes easier for all involved to understand why, and find ways to address them.

After all, some of the problems with a specific shipment could have arisen as a result of mistakes made on your end of the transaction, and getting to the root cause is always a good idea, the report said. That way, with more transparency, you can make better determinations about every decision you have made, and will make in the future.

Look internally
The odds are that your company has not perfected procurement, nor mitigated all the problems that arise outside your organization, according to Spend Matters. For that reason, you need to look at things you've done well and where you've fallen short, finding ways to lean into the former and avoid the latter. You may be surprised at the number of things you can improve upon if you have better data collection.

The point of improving any aspect of your procurement effort is to improve business function and the bottom line, and that starts with having all the high-quality data you need to make better decisions.