A truly strategic procurement team

We talk a lot about ‘strategic’ procurement teams - but what does this mean? Is it just business jargon for anything other than a purchasing function?

I spoke with Evri's Pauline Potter on The Procurement Conversation Podcast about what makes a truly strategic team. She spoke about assessing and delivering total value, a strong talent pipeline, collaborative negotiations and acting as an aggregator in your business. It's a great conversation and well worth a listen.

It’s useful to understand what the best teams are doing - we can improve our teams and individual performance to deliver more for our organisations.

I’ve pulled together 10 indicators of a truly strategic procurement team. Have I missed any? Any you would disagree with?

1. They have a clear vision - a north star that guides their activity, ways of working and decision making. Aligned with their overall business mission and shared with stakeholders. Everyone is excited by it - it’s challenging but not unachievable.
2. They attract and retain the best people - looking for those with the best soft skills (facilitation, influencing, listening etc). They have a clear talent pipeline, are developing their teams and retaining their best people. The right vision attracts the right talent.
3. They innovate. They do things differently and think of completely different ways to solve problems. Their processes are slick and smooth and they work quickly to achieve outcomes. Their negotiation skills are excellent because of this.
4. They are masters of collaboration - known for quickly bringing various business stakeholders together to gain alignment, solve problems or collate information. They do this in a way that is the best use of people’s time. They know the right supplier contacts and have contacts in the wider industry to solve problems when they come up. They have a great peer network for support, challenge and sharing best practice.
5. They prioritise - assessing what is the right thing to be working on right now. This isn’t what is being shouted about the loudest, but what is the best use of our time? This also must be continually reassessed - is this still the best use of our time? They delete or delegate unnecessary tasks. We’re too busy to be wasting time on a regular basis.
6. The develop excellent stakeholder relationships - especially with senior stakeholders who can advocate for the team and ensure that they are involved in the most strategic conversations at an early stage. They focus on ensuring an excellent stakeholder experience of dealing with Procurement.
7. They achieve balanced outcomes. Not just lowest cost, but gain the best value for money across multiple metrics, cost, quality, time, ESG, service etc etc. Their outcomes can be externally benchmarked as great outcomes.
8. They look into the future - undertaking pragmatic risk management. Not just flagging a risk for risk’s sake - what is likely to happen? Especially in large relationships - a deep focus on exit and exit triggers are vital to avoid lock-in. They highlight and mitigate issues before they become problems.
9. They measure their performance and improve, month-on-month, year-on-year. They look beyond savings for the right metrics - average cycle time, revenue delivery, TCO, carbon savings, innovation opportunities. Ideally something that aligns to an organisation wide metric.
10. They make data driven decisions. They have the right data, to their fingertips and can analyse it to support decision making. Everything that they do should be driven by data rather than perception or supposition. It is used to challenge where stakeholders are making the wrong decisions.

Which one resonates with you most? I didn't talk much about systems here - is that right?