Purchasing

Mary Walker

Moving from Tactical to Strategic
July 25, 2007

It always interests me when people say, “Purchasing is no longer tactical, it is strategic.”  This just does not happen because you announce you are now a strategic purchasing department.

 
In the best practices’ article, Kimball’s procurement moves from tactical to strategic, Bob Price recognized that one of the keys to a centralized strategic sourcing function is training, so he sought out training for his procurement staffers in three main areas: functional skills, technical skills and leadership.

How long has it been since you have read about a company really putting out a plan to train their procurement staff? Companies furnish inter-company training programs. Many have self-improvement programs. Many offer computer training programs. But here we are talking about individual based self improvement and training.

In Kimball's model, the functional skills training involve things like improved knowledge of Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. There are all kinds of computer training programs in these two programs. The key is to use what you learn. If you take the course and never put any of the knowledge to work, you have wasted your time.

Price focused the leadership skills on developing detailed action plans for projects. Is this one of the reasons that interest in Project Management has sky rocketed in the last couple of years? PMI meets the same night at the hotel that ISM meets, they have 200 or more in attendance, and we are lucky to have 40. One of my friends has his project management certification. He used a spreadsheet with tasks, due dates and completion dates from a project management template. I am using it now for a project management seminar ISM-Dallas is bringing to town in September.  

But Kimball's technical skills area stood out most for me–notably that contract management and negotiation skills received the most attention. Price worked with training specialists at Next Level Purchasing. Charles Dominick, President of Next Level Purchasing has a very informative website, http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com. First they assessed the buyers’ current competency and then built a customized curriculum for each procurement staffer that improved areas where the staffer had the least experience.

Customized buyer curriculums were made up of both online courses and instructor-led course work at the university level in areas such as change management and global sourcing. Price is offering his buyers an opportunity to help them in their job and to improve their skills. The company is showing an interest in bringing their employees up to the level needed to do the job. Any company that shows this interest in their employees should certainly be commended. I'm glad Purchasing recognized Kimball's efforts in these areas.

Posted by Mary Walker on July 25, 2007 | Comments (0)