Tuesday afternoon I participated in a webinar/Q&A session that allowed me to tackle a series of hot topic questions [I’ll post the archive when it becomes available]. One question that really got me thinking was the following, which I will expand upon below.
Do you have any advice for more tenured strategic sourcing teams? What should these teams be doing to prepare for the next 5-10 years?
Recommendation Number One: Manage your career aggressively. Start by asking for a raise.
We believe that experienced and talented sourcing professionals should ask for a raise immediately – especially those who have not done so since 2008 or 2009. If you’ve been part of a sourcing team that has delivered savings over the past few years, hit (or, in many cases, crushed) your numbers and helped your company make it through very difficult times, the time is now to make your case. We believe it’s reasonable to request a reward and we believe there are many deserving sourcing professionals who have been overly patient.
Strategic sourcing skill sets are an extraordinarily valuable asset. When we interview or survey the average chief procurement officer, one of their primary constraints in driving and achieving success are the capabilities of their current staff. Those professionals who understand the strategic sourcing process and can drive large complex projects and have done so successfully are very valuable to CPOs.
The reality of today’s job market is that the average working professional will be with their current employer for five years. The job demographics in most developed countries have shifted dramatically over the past twenty years – so much so, that a 22-year old college grad in 2011 is expected to have 10 different jobs over the next 16 years. This means that it’s really incumbent upon sourcing ( and other procurement) professionals to manage their careers proactively aggressively.
All of the above is why we also recommend that professionals investigate the job market every couple of years – to make sure that they are current with what’s valued in the market and what is available in the market so that they understand and better realize the value that their skill sets and experience can garner. It is also very helpful to keep refreshing your resume every 18-24 months. Like tie widths and skirt lengths, resume styles change every few years – if your resume has a format created in the 1990s, you may as well show up for your next job interview wearing a piano tie.
Recommendation Number Two: Source more, source everything. Adopt the eSourcing 2.0 doctrine.
It has been a while since we’ve dedicated space to eSourcing 2.0 but that doesn’t mean we think it’s any less important or any less relevant today than when we introduced the idea last year. As a reminder, the eSourcing 2.0 doctrine states that any supplier negotiation that results in a contract should leverage an Sourcing solution for the negotiation. While we believe that any number of platforms can be useful in adopting eSourcing 2.0 as a policy, we are talking to sourcing professionals so an eSourcing solution clearly makes the most sense. As a reminder, this policy does not mandate that everything must be competitively bid. Users can determine their preferred sourcing strategy – reverse auction, sealed bid, one-to-one negotiation, etc. but they must use the tool to capture the final requirements and final bid information.
We continue to believe that that there should be an enterprise-level system of record that captures the key elements of the discussion with suppliers that result in the final (or agreed upon) business requirements and associated terms. As such, adopting an eSourcing 2.0 mentality can fast-track any procurement transformation and have the most significant, broad-based, and long-lasting benefits of almost any strategy that could be enacted this year or any time over the next five or ten years.
Next time, our third main recommendation – Think Globally.
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