Efficient procurement teams are absolutely critical to a business’s daily processes, as well as its overall success. These teams can take on a significant percentage of the company’s financial responsibility, handling tasks such as creating project specs, sourcing supplies, and going through negotiations on a daily basis. This can be quite a challenging role, meaning that simply having an established team won’t necessarily guarantee your organization’s success. Instead, you will have to make sure that your procurement team has access to all the resources necessary for delivering the best results. With that in mind, here are some ways you can build a great procurement team and empower them to achieve success:
Choose the right candidates
As with any other role, choosing the right people can be the best indicator of your procurement team’s future success. As long as you have the right individuals on your team, ones with extensive experience and great attitudes, the entire department can be significantly more effective and successful. While selecting the most suitable candidates can be complex at times, focus on important interview questions such as those pertaining to education, skills, and practical experience to ensure the right fit. For the best possible results, aim to balance expertise with personality and cultural compatibility. As team members get more acquainted with their roles, track their progress and provide mentoring opportunities for higher chances of success.
Follow the best practices
As procurement is slowly becoming more regulated, new rules and regulations are constantly implemented, and greater transparency is often required. This can significantly impact your day-to-day operations, but it may affect your company’s potential of handling government contracts in the future as well. Avoid these issues by staying on top of any changes and regulations, and ensuring you always follow the best current industry practices. Establish standardized operations and distribute them throughout the team hierarchy. Ensure all your procurement team members have completed industry-standard qualifications as well. This will allow you to remain compliant while empowering everyone on the team to continue following the best practices at all company levels.
Leverage managed services
In order to evolve procurement management and empower procurement teams, automating analytics for higher data transparency can be of great help. For instance, you can invest in reliable solutions such as Robobai Managed Services to add more value to your supply chain. This program will enable you to lower operational costs, improve procurement efficiency, increase supply chain agility, transform your procurement strategy, and boost the overall value. In turn, you will get the opportunity to optimize spending, control working capital, and drive financial resilience. Not only will this aid in building more effective and productive procurement teams, but it can also help in protecting your brand and operations.
Prioritize good relationships
Cost savings are often the main drivers for performance measurement. But even though they may be a critical aspect of the procurement process, consider highlighting other important advantages as well. They can prove to be just as effective, and they can aid in building stronger professional relationships with internal stakeholders. When you only prioritize cost efficiencies, the entire process can seem quite transactional and cold. Instead, aim to fuse this factor with other long-term business benefits. This will provide your stakeholders with a more valued overview of the procurement department and its advantages, thus enabling you to build better relationships while empowering your procurement team and maximizing their overall engagement.
Empower greater efficiency
Established procurement operations are often followed by new policies and procedures that require employees to comply with a different system. Rather than enforcing this need to comply with different policies, aim to highlight the new potential for enhanced efficiencies. Begin by asking your teams what they need, listen to their issues and try to understand them, and then offer viable solutions that your procurement team can help you provide. For instance, you can call attention to the fact that automating procurement operations can save some valuable time while increasing productivity and effectiveness in the process. You can also aim to explore other areas of value that may empower greater efficiency, such as leveraging market trend knowledge to drive decision-making for sales and marketing.
Encourage communication
Regardless of their specific roles, the most efficient teams always have excellent communication skills. As they can pass information quickly and explain the root of problems easily, they will be much more productive as well. This goes right to the core of the concept, rather than requiring long communication chains for clarification and understanding. For your procurement team to be as effective as possible, you will need to encourage good communication. Experiment with different methods of communication to find the solutions that work best for your team. If emails seem to be too time-consuming and inefficient, for example, you can try implementing an instant messaging solution such as Slack.
Building and empowering a great procurement team can take plenty of time and money, but these improvements can deliver excellent results. Aim to develop, assess, and improve your teams to give your company a strategic advantage over its competitors and increase your opportunities for growth and success.