“You have to make sure that what procurement is doing is going to matter to the rest of the business, or you run the risk of being rendered irrelevant to them. Certainly not strategic, but maybe not even relevant.” –Greg Anderson, Senior Vice President of Sales in North America, WNS Denali
Historically, procurement has focused too much on savings and not enough on revenue and growth – the true heartbeat of any competitive enterprise. Rather than trying to reposition savings as top line impact, procurement needs to insist upon more suitable performance metrics.
This insistence has to be backed by concrete examples of the spend categories procurement believes they can manage in such a way that it fuels corporate growth. If these categories have been ‘off limits’ in the past, procurement is going to have to make a results-driven pitch for access, followed by the delivery of measurable outcomes.
In this episode, based on an AOP Live session run in late 2021, Host Philip Ideson speaks with Greg Anderson and David Clevenger about what procurement needs to do differently in 2022 and beyond:
- The importance of user experience, improved by breaking free from legacy thinking and out-of-date business models
- How procurement can connect company-wide value drivers with strategic supplier relationships to support sustained growth
- Why there may be more of an opportunity to move away from savings as the key procurement performance metric than we think
Subscribe to Art of Procurement
Apple | Stitcher | iHeart Radio | Email
Links & Resources
- Greg Anderson on LinkedIn
- David Clevenger on LinkedIn
- [Pod] Taking a BOLD and Focused Approach to Transforming Indirect P2P at Clorox w/ Kathy Thrasher and Mike Caldron
- What is Category Management? (According to the Experts)
- What Does a Category Manager Do? (To Elevate Procurement’s Impact)
