What stage is your company's purchasing department at?
When you start to work as a buyer and get to know your team, you may realize that there is a lot to do or even a lot to learn.
Is it an immature, unprofessional department? or the opposite, is there a clear and standardized structure with adjusted guidelines to your company?
Let's see where it stands:
- Origin: Basically, how to survive, operational needs, reactive purchases. This type of department is mostly seen only in very small companies, with very short start-up periods where the main disadvantage is the lack of efficiency and control. The expenditure will inevitably always be much higher than expected.
- Order management: The whole organization buy, follow up, accept, sell, etc. This increases control, and btw, a lot of micro management by the team leaders as they can’t control in other ways, many administrative tasks and high costs. At this stage, there is a high level of urgent procurement, and it remains inefficient in terms of both economic efficiency and human resources. It is usually in SMEs, where this area has not been professionalized or simply where there is not investment is made in this department but is integrated into the organization as part of an activity or other departments.
- Purchasing department: purchases centralization, purchasing team, management of non-strategic purchases, implementation of processes, focus on cost reduction.
- Forward-looking procurement: collaborative sourcing, crowd sourcing, digitalization, innovation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation.
Professionalizing the department is a bet on the profitability of the company that we cannot lose sight of.
Remember that good efficiency in purchasing, impacts not only on profitability, but directly on operations and processes optimization and distribution channels performance.
Camila Viña M #sourcing,#procurement, #Negotiation #sourcing, #remarkable
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