STILL TRUE, The fact is neither internal nor external aggregate collaboration is happening on a large scale!
Today’s Re-Post is by Ron Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing Inc.
This post is a excerpt from one of Ron’s previous White Paper’s titled The Art of Collaboration
The fact is neither internal nor external aggregate collaboration is happening on a large scale in many companies and collective organizations. This is especially true in mid-tier or loosely organized larger national and multinational organizations.
The terms collaboration, collaborative partners, collaborative supply chains, collaborative commerce, and collaborative networks are often used when discussing procurement. It rolls off the tongue like everyone knows what they are talking about. According to Wikipedia, Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together toward an intersection of common goals, and, an aggregate is a collection of items that are gathered together to form a total quantity.
Since collaboration can happen with groups or organizations of any size working together toward the same goal, it can also apply to virtually any business function. When we combine it with the word aggregate to form the collective eProcurement term Collaborative Aggregation, however, we arrive at something potentially meaningful.
Collective buying organizations and share groups often combine purchasing volumes of similar products and services in order to drive better discounts. Large companies often aggregate their purchases among departments and are doing the same thing across different operating groups or companies within a larger organization in order to drive economy of scale in purchasing.
The unfortunate truth is that not much out-of-the-box thinking or art is going on in this process. They are so involved in the process (weeds) that they cannot see the forest for the trees.
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