The expanding role of the purchasing professional

By Kathryn Belyea -- Purchasing, 5/4/2000

The profile of today's purchasing professional continues to increase in sophistication. Managers in supply management need a comprehensive grasp of the entire supply chain, broadly defined expertise in business and systems, high ethical standards and finely honed interpersonal skills. No one knows this better than Arthur Rowe, Deere & Co.'s manager of supply management planning-a twenty-two-year veteran of the company.

"What provides leadership," says Rowe, "is not a company, but the entire supply chain that produces a given product or service. So it's going to be increasingly important for our supply management professionals to understand our supply base and have the skill to make that supply base continually better and more competitive. An increased understanding of our complete supply base is needed, not just first-tier suppliers, and specifically where costs accumulate, where delays in delivery occur and where quality can be improved."

In keeping with this definition, each division at Deere has a manager of strategic sourcing, a manager of supplier cost management and a supplier development manager. "A fundamental change that's occurred over the years," says Rowe, "is that there's a very strategic sense to what managers in the supply management function are doing. It's not a transactional or tactical position. There are staffs of high-level professionals involved with supplier development, working with suppliers to understand costs and to identify areas of cost reduction, and working to really understand markets on a global basis. This involves making strategic decisions across the enterprise."

A sound process orientation helps to shape the leadership role of the supplier manager at Deere. A product development process has a consistent definition of how suppliers will be involved in new product development. In addition, an order fulfillment process defines what the expectations are of supplier performance in terms of adequacy of delivery. All of this requires both broad and comprehensive knowledge on the part of supply management, and recruiting efforts over the years at Deere have developed into partnerships with 12 universities to help meet requirements.

University partnerships

"The numbers in supply management have grown enormously in the past several years," says Rowe, "and we continue to look for promising managers-both mid-career and off-campus hires, as well as within Deere ranks." In fact, says Rowe, internal inquiries from Deere employees have escalated. "We had much less of that kind of inquiry a few years ago than we do now."

To help meet the demand for qualified supplier managers, in the fall of 1997 Deere established relationships with a number of universities, specifically for the supply management function, as well as an internship program geared to supply management's needs. "The first year," notes Rowe, "we had in the order of 20 interns for the year. Last year we had 40. This year we will have 80, and the number will soon approach 130-140, so it's practically doubling yearly."

In relation to off-campus hires, the curricula differ somewhat among the 12 universities in the current program. At Iowa State, for example, the focus of attention is the industrial engineering program and the logistics program. At the University of Wisconsin, Deere's interest centers around the masters program in manufacturing systems engineering. Western Michigan is unique in that they have a program called "integrated supply matrix management" or ISM2, which is part technical and part business-oriented. The required curriculum includes a number of courses out of the engineering college. "When managers come from this program," says Rowe, "they're not engineers per se, but they have familiarity with the engineering discipline, and this serves them very well in the assignments we place them in."

The challenge and the payback

This disparity of course offerings presents somewhat of a challenge to the recruiting effort in trying to match academic backgrounds to job requirements. But on the other hand, it also provides the increasingly wide range of expertise needed to satisfy the varied requirements of the supply management function. In fact, once on the job, managers in supply management begin a program of cross training. "Our vision of new professionals," says Rowe, "is that subsequent assignments for them ought to be focused on a different process within supply management. So if someone comes in and their first assignment is in supplier cost management, perhaps their next assignment needs to be in the order-fulfillment process or the product delivery process. This way over time they understand the reach of all the initiatives that we're undertaking."

Clearly defined ethical standards

In addition to academic qualifications, Rowe also looks for candidates with high ethical standards and good interpersonal communication skills. "We ask suppliers to share a lot of information with us that some are understandably reluctant to share, so it's important they feel they can trust the managers they're dealing with to protect their interests and be discrete with the information provided."

-Kathryn Belyea