Profit from Procurement

2AMBITION: Ensuring You Are Set Up for Success

A Dirty Procurement Word

I attended a Procurement panel event last year where the audience was putting questions to half a dozen senior and well-respected people from the Procurement profession. The audience was itself full of successful Procurement people, and it's one of those evenings where you learn a lot about the profession.

The theme of the evening was the future of Procurement and what people should be considering when deciding on the next priorities for their function. In other words, What should Procurement's ambition be?

Most of the panel were CPOs from large companies—a couple of the brands were household names. The panel had been generally agreeable up until that point, but thankfully it contained a couple of characters who are known to hold strong views and not to be shy about voicing them.

One question and answer round I found particularly fascinating was when the following question was asked: “Do you think that Procurement should be measured on savings?”

Now, the first reason I thought this was interesting was because of the way the question was asked. The questioner might as well have added the words “surely not!” at the end, such was the tone used. It's funny because savings (or any other word to denote monetary benefits) has become a bit of a dirty word in Procurement in recent years, as if people in the profession are ashamed to talk about it.

It's certainly less fashionable to talk about savings at events such ...