TOP STORY: 10 Critical Skills Your Procurement Team Needs Right Now
We all know that the work to increase procurement skills will never be complete. Unfortunately, our learning & development budgets are not as bottomless as our desire to learn. In this week’s top story we get advice about the critical skills procurement teams need to focus on now, along with “quick upskill” recommendations from Keith Bird, Managing Director of The Faculty. Top among his recommendations? “For all the latest in technology, you can’t go past industry podcasts.” We second the suggestion!
ON THE POD: How Cimpress Built A Procurement Team That Operates Like A Services Business W/ Evert Karsen
Evert Karsen is the Vice President of Global Procurement at Cimpress. His team functions in a unique set of circumstances: they don’t have a savings target, but they don’t have an executive mandate to lean on with internal stakeholders, either. That combination of conditions has made it possible for them to deliver a wide range of value types while building a services-oriented relationship with the business.
HEARD ON THE STREET: Building a Healthy CEO/CPO Relationship
“Through delivering strong results and building credibility with the stakeholder community, procurement elevated its position and perception in the business. Moving away from a function, that was seen as a service, involved at the latter stages of any process into one that helped shape commercial decisions from the outset.” (An insight into the CPO / CFO relationship – Lucy Harding via LinkedIn)
“Among candidates for professional and technical jobs, raising the interview difficulty by even one level, as rated by job seekers on a five-point scale, was enough to lift acceptance rates by 2.6 percentage points, Glassdoor data show.” (Tough Job Interviews Make Candidates More Likely to Take the Offer – WSJ, Subscription Required)
“Business leaders are increasingly recognising that the rise of digitalisation will change future business models, said Hackett, which surveyed an undisclosed number of procurement executives at global midsized and large enterprises. Their responses identified five areas where procurement has critical capability gaps that need to be addressed in 2020.” (Organisational resistance blocking procurement – CIPS’ Supply Management)
TURN BACK TIME: Previously on the Art of Procurement podcast…
This week in 2019: Episode 241: Aligning Intent And Investment To Build (The Right) Procurement Capabilities
This week in 2018: Episode 173: Lessons Learned In Contract Negotiations From A Trial Lawyer, Mediator And Contract Coach W/ Jeanette Nyden
This week in 2017: Episode 124: How D&B Procurement Increased Customer Satisfaction By 40% In 5 Months, W/ Kevin Giblin
This week in 2016: Episode 025: Q&A: Making The Move From Indirect To Direct Procurement
BITS & PIECES: A cautionary tale about emailed volume commitments
+ Law: Email upheld as contract go-ahead (CIPS Supply Management)
+ Is the industrialized world overly dependent on sourcing from the Chinese? (All Things Supply Chain blog)
+ The Behavioral Science Behind Video Conferencing and Remote Work (OWL Labs)
+ 101 Time Management Tips to Boost Productivity Every Day (John Rampton via LinkedIn)
