Suddenly, the word purchasing is no longer in vogue. Even the Bard of Avon might be surprised by the proliferation of titles used to describe buyers in the 21st Century. First the National Association of Purchasing Management became the Institute for Supply Management. Now a new survey by PURCHASING shows that one in four readers describes "supply chain management" as their number one job responsibility.

Materials manager made big inroads many years ago. Now "supply chain manager" is definitely the in title. For the elite, make sure your title—when reduced to an acronym—includes a C, as in CEO, CFO, or CPO for chief procurement officer.

Other titles, however, show a combination of creativity and a heavy dose of how the roles of buyers are changing.

• At Harley Davidson, there was a major drive in recent years to bring cost discipline to an engineering culture. Thus Garry S. Berryman was named vice president of materials management and product cost.
• Textron launched a drive to build synergies across a disparate group of companies. So Ed Orzetti became vice president of enterprise excellence.
• Volkswagen AG in Wolfsburg, Germany, ramped up a major program to move buying to an Internet-based exchange and named Meike-Uta Hansen as the head of Internet B2B Negotiations.
• Jack Welch wanted to drive reverse auctions throughout GE without disturbing the company's decentralized corporate style and named CIO Gary Reiner the concept czar.

Heaven forbid having something actually called a central purchasing department. Not surprisingly, the focus of many of these efforts is very much the same: Find out what you buy in the company, organize it under the auspices of very smart people, study it, and then start buying it better.

That's "purchasing".

And in today's economy especially it is indeed a very sweet-smelling rose.