Could we just agree, that it goes without saying;
- every company wants to save money from procurement;
- they are going to do jolly exciting things to achieve that;
- then they’ll report back in a year or so to say it all worked well and look, they’ve saved lots of dosh.
That would save us all (magazines, blogs etc) from having to report a bunch of meaningless platitudes that we will never be able to validate anyway. I’m really not getting at Premier Foods, they may really have a world-class programme in place, but it really is getting tedious. Since CEOs and Communications people discovered that this sort of thing provides a good headline – and presumably it impresses a few naive investors / analysts – it seems that every annual report or half-year announcement comes with an obligatory procurement ‘initiative’.
You can see the discussion in the Board room. “Next year looks a bit dodgy. What else can we throw in? Acquisitions? No plans there. New products? Not much in the pipeline. I know, let’s have another procurement initiative. Tell them we’re going to save – oh, I don’t know, would 5% of our spend sound vaguely credible? That’ll do, bung it in the presentation.”
Unless someone (analysts? pension funds? ) actually starts asking for the programme plans, the savings methodology, and detailed outputs, then it means nothing. Absolutely nothing.
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….sometimes it is ABC Consultancy (or Joe Bloggs – Ace Commercial Strategist) leads Acme Widgets plc to spectactular savings via a procurement revolution (clearly the existing CPO is an idiot, would never have thought of ‘having a plan’ or worse the CEO didn’t know they had one). I’d rather see investor/analysts being advised that an organisation has only delivered modest savings so ‘don’t touch them with a barge pole’.