Reimagining the procurement operating model for tomorrow

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the May-June 2021 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

May-June 2021

Indulge me for a minute, while I lead a cheer for our profession. I wrote my column for the January 2021 issue of SCMR one Sunday morning after watching the first trucks full of vaccine roll out of a Pfizer plant in Michigan, headed for a UPS sortation depot. I felt an incredible sense of optimism for the country, and pride in the role that we, as supply chain managers, were going to play to combat a pandemic. Supply chain as in the spotlight, and on that morning, it was for all the right reasons. Fast forward to late April 2021.

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All organizations, irrespective of the nature of their business, are dependent on external vendors for most of the materials and components comprising their products and services.

External vendors play so much a part of the current operating model that organizations cannot be sustained without their support. We are emerging from the unprecedented challenges thrown at us by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has significantly changed the basic ways in which operations are planned and executed, necessitating procurement leaders to transform their operating model to align with a revised organizational business operating model.

Procurement leaders and strategists will be challenged to reimagine the entire procurement model and vendor relationships and lifecycle management. It is going to be a journey with a consistent focus on redefinitions and continual efforts to enhance efficiency and optimize costs while considering new requirements for resilience, sustainability and purpose.

What have we learned?

While more long-term issues will emerge, let’s consider some of the near-term issues that have surfaced already during the pandemic to challenge CPOs.

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