United Kingdom

Details

  • Service: Advisory, Management Consulting
  • Type: Video
  • Date: 17/02/2012
  • Length: 2.22 Minutes

The Power of Procurement - Going beyond cost savings 

Going Beyond Cost Savings:

Richard Nixon, Partner, KPMG in the UK: In the credit constrained economic environment there’s a lot of focus on negotiation; there’s a lot of focus on cost, and there’s been less focused on those skills of facilitating change, of managing difficult conservations with clients and drawing the benefit out of them. There’s a good chunk of innovation that won’t come from within your own business. It will come from your supply chain. And that’s a competitive battle field. You’ve got a make sure as a procurement specialist that you’re the winner in that equation and that you’re not losing out on the innovation to one of your competitors. So, sometimes it’s not about negotiating the hardest deal; it’s about being the preferred customer.

 

Charlie Whitworth, Senior Manager, KPMG in Canada: Procurement doesn’t always think about demand management. It’s very much more focussed on unit costs, contract prices, contract terms, and isn’t thinking about the way in which demand is generated and how it’s controlled, and how it could be controlled through the procurement processes.

 

John Tros, Partner, KPMG in Netherlands: And if you would focus on business orientated challenges like how can I increase turnover, how can I increase margin or how can I create a procurement process in which my supplier enables me to differentiate from other companies so that I will become the customer of choice in the end, procurement would see that they would be influencing demand cycles. But at this moment, they aren’t.

KPMG has conducted one of the biggest global surveys into procurement functional excellence. The third video in a short series looking at the key themes arising from this survey discusses how procurement can stretch beyond cost savings to take on more strategic responsibilities such as demand management.
 

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Our global Procurement professionals discuss key themes from the survey:

 

    1. Taking on a more strategic role
    2. The impact of the economic crisis
    3. Going beyond cost savings
    4. How to build Procurement’s profile internally
    5. Growing trend towards more centralised models
    6. Importance of supply chain risk management
    7. Key role of technology
    8. Geographical comparisons

 

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