What words could describe them? Brilliant. Visionary. Insightful. Ethical. Value creators. Senior. Thought leaders.
Some years ago, I was lucky to serve for a time as a director of a strategic procurement consultancy, and they’re words that leap to mind thinking about some of my amazing colleagues.
“What?”, I hear you cry incredulously. “Those phrases describe procurement people?” Because I’m guessing that if I asked most bidders to play word association about the folks on the opposite side of the table, that’s not exactly the list they’d come up with.
Undoubtedly, customers have got better at buying. CEOs understand the importance of supply chains in creating competitive advantage. Chief Procurement Officers sit at boardroom tables. Their profession has arguably moved further and faster than ours – anyone met a Chief Proposal Officer recently?
Yet, at the coalface – the ITT or RFP process – enlightenment feels far, far away. Too often it feels like buyers are setting bidders up for failure – posing exam questions disconnected from their organisation’s real needs, masked in pompous and self-important bureaucracy. It results in them selecting the best of a bad bunch, rather than choosing between excellence in the evaluation room.
I do occasionally see brilliantly run procurement processes. Fantastic early engagement with the market that helps shape the art of the possible for all involved. An insightful RFP that encourages and enables bidders to create the best possible proposition, followed by thorough – but fair and warm – post-proposal engagement to pick the winner. A smooth segue for all concerned from buying/bidding into delivery. The procurement team actively soliciting feedback from vendors as to how they could improve their process next time.
But: “occasionally”. When did you last see one like that? Have you ever? The reality of our world is too often more about reacting to ill-conceived, cumbersome, arrogant processes that constrain us rather than encouraging and enabling us to put our best feet forward.
Frameworks that don’t. “Work”, that is. Ever-delayed RFPs. Conflicting and irrelevant questions. (My latest favourite: “Have you used AI while developing your proposal?”) Amusingly, the evaluators have no idea whether the correct answer is “yes” or “no”. It’s “yes”, by the way…) A lack of a firm grasp on reality from too-junior buyers forcing bidders to price high to factor in risk and set projects up for inevitable failure to meet expectations.
Customers get the suppliers they deserve, right?
So find the good procurement people out there. Celebrate what they do. Learn from them. I know I do. And then downgrade your expectations for the mundane of the day-to-day – the endlessly frustrating procurement theatre of the absurd.
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