The Procurement and Supply Manager's Desk Reference, + Website, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 13

The Procurement Function's Internal Relationships

The Procurement Department's organizational support role requires extensive coordination and collaboration with other internal departments. While some of these departments—for example, legal and finance—actually provide services to your procurement team, all of them constitute the collective customer base that depend on you to provide critical procurement and supply management functions. You will be working collaboratively with many of these groups on cross-functional teams engaged in the development of a new product or service. You may also work with them in resolving quality issues in a manufacturing operation, or, even more likely, selecting a new supplier. Consequently, you will probably spend a major portion of your time working with them. For this reason, it is important that you understand other internal departments’ corresponding roles in your organization and the common activities they perform in fulfilling their missions.

In this chapter, you will first examine the roles of the major organizational groups you are likely to encounter and how these roles interface with those of your department. We then review the processes used to communicate with other departments and how you can best initiate and reinforce collaborative working relationships with each of them. And, finally, we examine how you can drive operational improvements within the Procurement Department to better serve your internal customers.

Understanding ...