Procurement Legends

Join our World of Procurement Discord Community here.

Take our Contract Management for Beginners Course here.

Check out our article on The Top Procurement Trends of 2022 here.

Over Christmas, I started thinking about the top Procurement trends for 2022. Essentially, I believe that we will build on the trends that emerged in 2021 as we navigated our way through a new way of living, travelling and existing.

I think the last two years have made a lot of Procurement Pros aware of the fragilities in their processes, their "tools" to do the job and within their supply chain. 

In this Podcast Episode, we're going to talk about:

Understanding your Supply Chain through Data

Sustainability and Ethical Sourcing

Digital Procurement

Data Protection

Procurement Tech

Risk

Lean Process

I might share some views that are a bit different, a bit out there but they're views that I preach and act on every day in my role as a Procurement and Contract Management Pro.

Join our World of Procurement Discord Community here.

Take our Contract Management for Beginners Course here.

Check out our article on Contract Management Trends 2022 here.

Over Christmas, I started thinking about the top Contract Management trends for 2022. Essentially, I believe that we will build on the trends that emerged in 2021 as we navigated our way through a new way of living, travelling and existing.

One general observation I have of us Contract Managers is that there is a fantastic opportunity to become more closely aligned with our Legal colleagues.

There is talk of a rise in Legal Operations and Legal Design type roles throughout 2022. If you look at what the generic job description of these Legal type roles are (and these aren’t usually qualified lawyers hence the comparison to us), we are doing many of the activities they are.

My additional point here is that I think you, as a Contract Manager, should be working closely with Legal.

Why?

To make massive improvements to how your business operates from a contracts perspective.

This year will be incredible if you make the most of the available opportunities.

Here's what I think will happen with Contract Management:

Make sure you check out our Contract Management for Beginners Course here.

Come join us for free over on Discord in the World of Procurement Community where we talk all things Procurement, Supply Chain and Contract Management. 

Check out the full transcript over on World of Procurement.

Rich Sains is the Founder of Acada, a Procurement Tech company that looks to remove the mundane admin based work and gives real time insights as to what teams are working on. The awesome part about this solution is that it doesn’t require loads of “admin” to input the data. It gives a central view to Procurement Leaders as to what their team is working on.

We like that a lot.

Whilst talking, Rich started to go into detail around the design principles they follow at Acada. I was blown away by the attention to detail in the user experience. I’m sure all of you reading this right now have encountered a Procurement tool that promises the world but when you use it, it looks awful. There is nothing worse that a piece of software that is clunky and is stuck in the 90s.

With everything being tracked, it gives you insights into how much time is required to complete tasks. This could be an RFP exercise, a contract review or consolidation of your supply chain. This in invaluable data as a procurement leader and let’s you utilise your available resource in the best way possible.

If we want to get even nerdier here, this is great for any audits that you may have that look into your organisational control measures such as ISO or SOC2.

In this episode we talk about Acada, why Rich started it and when we met a while back in London for a drink.

You can connect with Rich here on Linkedin.

Hey Procurement Legends, I had an awesome chat with Natasha, the COO of Paid which is a Procurement automation platform. I’ve pulled a technical extract from their website, which you can see here, so that you can get an idea of what the platform is.

I do encourage you to check out their product and think about how it may help you in your day-to-day procurement work.

Natasha is incredible, she gets it and it’s clear that she is in the business of solving business problems first and foremost. It just happens that these sit within the realms of procurement.

You’re going to love this one.

Check out the transcript over on our website.

We're live on Discord with our new Community Server on Discord. Click here to join right now as we start growing the Community in a place of our own, away from social media algorithms and the endless scroll.

In this episode, I talk about my vision for the World of Procurement Community, why I set it up and why it's going o be an awesome place for you to be. 

See the show notes here. 

For more awesome content in Procurement, Supply Chain and Contract Management, visit www.worldofprocurement.co.uk.

WE'VE GOT A SLIGHT GLITCH BETWEEN 10:00 - 11:30 MINS OF THE PODCAST. IT WILL COME BACK ON :D 

We had Tom Mills on the World of Procurement Podcast to talk about his views and ideas around what Procurement truly is. At one point in the episode, Tom referred to The Heart of Procurement and I instantly knew that would be the title for this episode.

We cover an incredible amount of conversation pieces as summarised below. 

Show Notes:

• Introduction into Tom’s career


• Procurement versus Purchasing, key differences and what Tom loves about Procurement


• Why Procurement having a seat at the table is the wrong question and the wrong angle to come from


• The Role of Procurement Pros moving forwards


• Managing conflict and “office” politics as a Procurement Professional


• Integrity as a Supply Chain/Procurement Professional

BECOME A FREE MEMBER HERE TODAY AT GET YOUR DISCORD INVITE NEXT MONTH.

Martin Smith is the Founder of Talent Drive, a recruitment company that specialises in Procurement and Supply Chain roles. Martin is perfectly placed to understand what is going on in the Procurement jobs market right now, what skillsets are required and what issues we face in this space as Procurement Professionals.

Martin is also the founder of the Talent Talks Podcast, where he talks with Senior Procurement Pros - give it a listen. 

Procurement roles seem to be breaking the norm, with purported salary increases in the UK that are way above the market norm, with, at least from my perspective, more roles than ever before and we, as Procurement Pros should be making the most out of such a rich opportunity to secure improved roles for us.

We covered a lot of different top level topics in this episode and you can skip along to a section that suits you using the timestamps below.

0000 Intro

1:39 generic procurement job descriptions

3:00 work is needed by hiring managers to recruit for the skills gap

3:36 hybrid working for procurement pros

9:40 the skills shortage on procurement

12:15 salary in the job description

13:10 salaries in procurement

13:55 how to make procurement more interesting to new people

16:00 the entry point to the procurement

24:00 procurement and university

27:00 lack of diversity in the profession

Building supplier relationships has grown in significant importance over the last two years.

COVID19 disrupted Supply Chains all across the world.

Businesses scrambled to ensure they still had certainty of supply.

What they didn’t realise was that they were not necessarily the Customer of Choice for that Supplier any longer.

I came across Suppeco a few months ago and I wanted to bring them onto the Podcast to find out, from a tech perspective, how they can help us Supply Chain and Procurement Pros build more collaborative relationships within the Supply Chain.

They way, we can maintain our status as Customer of Choice and have better supply from the Supply Chain.

Check out the timestamps below to the relevant section of the podcast. My advice… listen to all of it.

• 00:00 Background to Sheldon and what he did pre-Suppeco


• 00:50 Difficulty driving value out of relationships


• 01:11 Using Excel/PPT to build out Relationships


• 02:00 The start of Suppeco


• 03:17 The issue of managing Supplier Relationships


• 05:52 Building Suppeco


• 08:15 What Suppeco is


• 10:11 Using live data for insights not reports


• 14:40 How do we create KPIs/SLAs


• -16:14 How to get suppliers to use the platform


• 1930 - Awesome Insights into Suppeco


• 20:55 - User Experience matters with Procurement Tech

Check out Suppeco here

Connect with Sheldon here

Fairmarkit is the intelligent sourcing platform and they automate sourcing events for enterprise clients so they can work on more interesting things. I caught up with Erin McFarlane, VP of Services at Fairmarkit to talk to her about her reason for being in the Procurement space and what Fairmarkit offers as a service to people like you and me as Procurement and Supply Chain pros.

Check out the Full Show Notes here.

Subscribe to World of Procurement Here.

Get the book:

UK -  Good to Great by Jim Collins

US - Good to Great by Jim Collins

Support me as a content creator over on Patreon for a small amount of money each month. This same, awesome content will always be available to you all but creating content is expensive and I'm looking to expand my ability to make more and better content. This will help by giving you way more access to me, the process and massive influence over the types of content I create for all of you. Check it out here.

Hey Procurement Legends, I've been reading the most incredible book by Jim Collins titled Good to Great. It's all about the concept of level 5 leaders in a hierarchal system have taken companies from...Good to Great. 

I started reading it to answer some of my own internal questions here:

• What are these 5 different levels?


• What makes a company great?


• How to become a great leader?

And whilst I've been reading the book, taking notes and processing the content, I started to think about how the hierarchy could be used to attribute procurement people and procurement leaders to each of the hierarchies and why we should all be striving to be at the very top, say a level 4 or even a 5 to elevate this Procurement Profession.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.