Procurement Excellence beyond the Procurement CoE

Most progressive CPOs at large enterprises establish some type of a Center of Excellence (CoE) that performs center-led process enablement (e.g., market intelligence, bid event support, training, value measurement, digital tool enablement, etc.) to drive scale, repeatability, and best practice.  Unfortunately, a CoE can easily become a bureaucratic mini-function chasing staff for CPE credits, savings sign-offs, process/policy checklists, etc. rather than enabling them to create value with stakeholders to help the business.  

The bigger opportunity though is procurement working with other stakeholders (e.g., a third party risk management program integrated with GRC/IT that also ties into a procurement-led SRM program) to set up a spend/supply management CoE to the business to help enable all budget holders to safely get more value from their spend regardless of the business unit, geography, business objectives, P2P execution tools, or even “operating model” (i.e., who performs what steps in the S2P process).  The idea is to have center-led and center-enabled strategies, policies, resource planning, performance metric definitions, project/program coordination, data standards, and so on even though the process execution is distributed.

But, how does that work in practice?  Well, I’m really looking forward to finding out with a spirited discussion on this topic next Thursday at 10am EDT with Albea's CPO Julio Zimbron and with Adecco’s previous CPO Pierre Laprée (who is now CEO of Per Angusta).  Here's the [free] event registration link: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/3093740262443027216

Albea is a large packaging supplier serving some large and demanding CPG customers, and Julio is a passionate CPO that has built a "One Procurement" model to get procurement internally excellent while building the capabilities and a community of practice to deliver spend/supply excellence to the business.  Pierre is equally passionate and knowledgeable about this topic, especially related to digitizing all the strategic procurement processes independent of local execution (although that’s important too).  

I’ll be curious to see how Julio translates customer innovation needs to his firm and how that translates to supplier innovation activities within Albea procurement.  I also want to see how the technology enables a community of practice and knowledge management rather than just workflow automation. And I’m curious to hear how this can happen “glocally” (i.e., locally, but scalable up and down the global/regional level).  

Anyway, I hope to see you there!