What Makes a Winning Procurement Organization?

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the July-August 2013 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

July-August 2013

How do you extend the frontiers of supply management excellence and build a solid competitive advantage? Answers to this pivotal question emerged from an Executive Summit of supply chain leaders convened recently at Michigan State University. The four companies profiled here, all participants in that summit, have adopted principles that promote excellence and continue to expand that frontier.

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What is procurement excellence? The answer depends on whom you ask. It seems that each expert comes at the concept from a different perspective.

For Robert Rudzki, procurement excellence is about understanding corporate leadership’s expectations for the function—regardless of how basic or how advanced these are—and then meeting those expectations. For Philip Carter, procurement excellence is about managing risk. For Robert Monczka, it’s about improving competitiveness. For Timothy Fiore, procurement excellence is about aligning with overall business objectives, and then collaborating around those objectives.

As diverse as these definitions seem, however, they are all in a way interconnected. For example, meeting corporate leadership’s expectations requires managing competitiveness, collaborating on corporate objectives, and managing risk. Managing competitiveness depends on the ability to meet corporate leadership expectations as well as the ability to collaborate and manage risk. Managing risk requires the ability to manage competitiveness and faster collaboration.

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