Retaining Traditions

June 16th, 2017

Merging eProcurement with Traditional Sourcing

 

Today’s post is by Dave Wenig, Director of Sales, North America at SafeSourcing

Even the best planned eProcurement initiatives, sponsored as they should be at the executive level, are susceptible to one common challenge. Moving to eProcurement, just like any change, will require an organization’s resources to support the change. It’s important to understand that the individuals required to support eProcurement must be coached and must buy into the program. Sometimes, however, individuals or teams within the organization will be reluctant to adopt to the change.

It’s understandable that we all believe our own techniques and processes are best. After all, we’ve learned and honed these over the course of our careers. That makes it more difficult to accept change. Some people may even feel threatened by change.

Knowing this, I’ll offer a couple suggestions to help ease the transition and provide an atmosphere that encourages each individual resource to embrace the change and not fear it. This does not necessarily mean that existing techniques and processes are no longer valuable. In fact, certain traditional purchasing concepts will continue to play as integral a role in eProcurement as they did before eProcurement. For example, vendor relationships will continue to be necessary.

Encourage culture: Spread the good news. Did Marketing just have a great month of savings? Share that with your other business units. We’ve seen tremendous momentum generated by posting a scoreboard where BU’s savings percentages are posted on a regular basis. This often drives friendly competition.

Keep positive: Focus on the wins. When you see big savings, applaud it. The worst thing you can do is to ask why you were overpaying before. Instead, focus that energy on targeting the next category for savings opportunity.

By using these and other techniques to encourage adoption of your eProcurement process and retaining certain key elements of traditional purchasing, you will pave the way for success.

Dave Wenig is the Director of Sales, North America at SafeSourcing. For more information, please contact SafeSourcing.  

We look forward to your comments.

 

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