There was a time in the not-too-distant past when the function of MRO/indirect procurement was a corporate backwater where buyers spent most of their time processing big piles of paper and rubber stamping buying decisions made elsewhere in the corporation. As PURCHASING's third annual MRO All Stars team report attests, those days are long gone.

This year, PURCHASING honors nine professionals from all walks of industry, sporting job titles like 'sourcing specialist', 'sourcing manager-MRO', and 'global commodity manager-indirect procurement'. The job titles alone provide a clue to the kinds of high caliber professional talent that corporate brass is now routinely dedicating to MRO/indirect sourcing and procurement.

Common activities among the All-Stars:

• Analyzing spend enterprise-wide,
• Rationalizing supply bases,
• Standardizing products,
• Forecasting and aggregating demand requirements,
• Running large, multi-line item, multi-iterative online sourcing events,
• Negotiating complex corporate agreements,
• Managing corporate contracts through centralized databases,
• Promoting/enforcing contract compliance,
• Establishing metrics and tracking supplier performance,
• Documenting cost savings, and
• Collaborating with MRO/indirect suppliers on process and product improvements that lead to systemic cost reductions in the supply chain.

You could do all of these things 10 years ago, but, in most cases, you couldn't do them efficiently enough to justify the labor cost relative to the size of the MRO/indirect spend. Increasingly sophisticated e-tools have changed all that; PURCHASING All-Stars are proving it by dropping lots of dollars to their company's bottom lines. The more they save, and publicize those savings, the more influence they're winning over total indirect corporate spend.

Please join us in congratulating this year's All-Stars. Learn more about state-of-the art MRO/indirect sourcing at PURCHASING's third online Global Procurement Conference. You can register for the conference at www.globalprocurement.purchasing.com .