How to change your Procurement culture — EDUCATION, EDUCATION AND MORE EDUCATION.

You have probably been there before. You engage with your wider business because they need to buy something. The one massive problem is that they’ve pretty much sealed the deal.

• They have had meetings with the Supplier.
• They have held meetings with the Supplier.
• The Supplier has shown them a lot of amazing things that can be done to make the thing they want even sexier.
• They have discussed pricing.
• The Supplier Just needs a Purchase Order.
• What is taking you so long????
• The Supplier wants a PO and I needed this thing yesterday!
• They are the only Supplier who can provide this.
• They are the only Supplier in the world that has a laptop with this processor and graphics card combination.

This is a far too common scenario, that any Procurement person has had to deal with. Sometimes daily.

They have to deal with the demanders within their organisation already agreeing to deals, they have to deal with leverage being given up by their colleagues who have wiped it away with naivety and lack of thought. They are then expected to place an order with sums of money that usually dwarfs their pay package and sometimes even the amount of money that they will earn after 45 years of working.

Not to mention that the Procurement team are usually the only team (I’m including Commercial people in this too) who have any delegation to engage with Suppliers. And this is why. To stop crappy deals, to stop the business engaging Suppliers with their requirement and to prevent a salesperson from the Supplier rubbing their hands together because all they see is money.

All the salesperson needs to do is close the deal before any Procurement staff get involved. They know that the business will be too far invested at that point and they will have to use that Supplier.

So, how can you change this Culture within your business?

With time, patience, executive level support and a whole lot of education. I mean a serious amount of education. The education can never stop but to pull this off you are going to need to reach up to the heights of your Organisation.

Procurement Transformation is not an easy thing to achieve. You will need to produce a roadmap on how to change your Procurement Culture. This is good though. You start to get ideas flowing, you try to work out how to build up your Company/Organisation Culture from the ground. You need to think long and hard on this.

This is our approach to solving this issue. Do this when you are next in the Office. Get this process started as soon as possible and it will generate results.

• Engage the CEO/MD/VP community. Highlight that if the Procurement team had early engagement and could get involved before all of this stuff happened that savings can be made. Highlight that efficiencies can be made which requires fewer man-hours going forward as you won’t need staff to unpick any mess that has already been made. It’s not all about cost savings, it’s about culture. It is about making your business Commercially aware so that you can all work together to drive profits/savings depending on your Organisation’s goals.
• Next, you need the executive community to Communicate the need for early engagement with Procurement but more importantly that all staff members will be having Commercial Awareness training.
• Devise a Commercial Awareness training programme. Best advise would be to run monthly mandatory workshops/lectures that cover different aspects of how to be Commercial Aware. If you do not have this capability, speak with Ikaros. We can create a tailored Commercial Awareness Course including all Communications that will need to sit alongside it. Ikaros can deliver this Commercial Awareness Course to your teams regardless of location and we will deliver them as an independent party. This can help.
• Next, build up a weekly email/blog post/video post that clearly communicates the wider Commercial Awareness Message that you need to deliver to the business. This is crucial. You need to constructively spread the message. In addition, we advise you to display messages on-screens across your business or put up posters if paper is your thing. You’d be surprised what a poster at eye-level in the cubicle of a toilet can do.
• Enrol your organisation on the Commercial Awareness Course with a directive from Executive Level Down. There can be no messing around. This is the way the Organisation will operate. Every staff member is required to attend the events. This message must be issued to all leaders in the organisation and they will be mandated to ensure all staff members attend.
• Get the email and messaging campaigns rolled out a month before the courses start. Daily snippet emails just before lunchtime could be good here, or just after 9 am.
• Get the Commercial Awareness Workshops started. Make them slick. No 1hour long presentations. These sessions must only be a maximum of 30 mins. They start on time — no waiting around for anyone. Explain the objective of the session. Jump into the education for 10 mins. Workshop it for 10 mins. 5 mins to close the workshop. Rinse and repeat through all staff for the next 12 months to enforce the culture change along with everything else you have started.
• Create a Commercial Awareness Programme for all new starters. Your new starters shall take part in this after their first 2 weeks and they will be expected to follow the same 12 month programme (you can condense this too if they are up to it).
• Never stop. You must enforce this culture in your organisation from a top down level. It needs to become the norm. Continuous monthly 30 min workshops should be mandated going forward. Case examples of best practice can be used after the first 12 months so that your staff can understand how this has helped the business and made their lives easier.

It is going to be difficult.

You might not be able to pull this off.

You might be able to do bits of it, such as a weekly email digest on Commercial Awareness or how Procurement can help your Organisation.

Try to do this though.

Try with all of your effort.

If you need help with this then either email me at daniel@ikaros.uk.com or head over to https://ikaros.uk.com/contact-us/ and get in contact.

At Ikaros, we believe in helping your Organisation in isolation. We may well have our templates and standard information but this will always be upgraded to work for your Organisation.

Thanks for you time and attention.

I wish you well and hope you can pull this off.

Originally published at ikaros.uk.com on February 18, 2019.