What is the Biggest Challenge Facing Procurement?

From talent management, to ethics and transparency, there are some major challenges facing procurement in the current environment. But which is the biggest challenge?

When considering the potential issues and risks that procurement professionals need to be aware of in their day to day work, it’s difficult to single out one in particular requiring greater focus than the rest.

In fact, if you were to ask the question of what is the biggest challenge currently facing procurement, the chances are high that you would get a considerable number of topics listed. However, that is exactly what Deltabid did with a survey of over 500 procurement professionals. More on this shortly.

Blind Spots

During the Big Ideas Summit 2016, Procurious asked its delegates to tell us what they considered to be procurement’s blind spots, and major areas of risk, in the coming years. Our panel of experts highlighted these areas:

• Too great a focus on savings
• Dealing with the wider business
• Talent attraction and management
• A lack of ambition in procurement
• Working with legal teams

A contributor to the Procurement Leaders blog commented that, “CPOs face one of the most complex roles in an organisation”, and highlighted skills required for the future including a focus on strategic relationships, management of global supply chain risk and use of big data.

At the 9th Annual Asia-Pacific CPO Forum, The Faculty will be discussing the need for procurement to leverage supplier-enabled innovation, and a focus for procurement on SRM in order to make this a reality.

And when you consider the prevalence of stories and news reports on sustainability and supply chain transparency, it seems we are reaching a point where not only can we not reach a consensus on what the biggest challenge is, but also facing a lack of understanding about how we tackle these challenges.

Making Progress?

The other issue to consider is whether or not the procurement profession is making progress dealing with its biggest challenges. A quick search reveals a number of articles from the past couple of years asking a similar question of procurement leaders, including this one from Spend Matters.

In it, the top 5 challenges for CPOs are highlighted, including mitigating spend creep, the visibility of realised savings, compliance, technology, and procurement skills and capabilities to deliver on strategies. Starting to sound familiar?

What procurement must do is set out to tackle these challenges, and actually make some progress on them, instead of moving on to the next thing. And also to realise that these challenges don’t go away – it’s going to be a continuous process.

Biggest Challenge

This circles back to being able to identify the biggest challenge facing the profession, and perhaps assessing an order for them to be in, and a plan of attack for meeting them head on. This is where Deltabid’s research can help.

A survey of over 500 procurement professionals found that the biggest challenge was supplier-related issues, including finding and qualifying suppliers and maintaining consistent supply, with strategy selection, and cost reduction making up the top three. You can see the full results in the infographic below:

While the results may not be surprising, they go some way to helping generate a consensus on the biggest challenge facing procurement. It’s now down to the profession as a collective entity to work out the best way to tackle these challenges.

One of the best ways of doing this is by collaborating openly, sharing knowledge, information, and lessons learned, and flexing our collective muscle in order to change the profession for the better.

If you have any comments, ideas, thoughts, or anything else you would like to share, please let us know in the comments below. If you have also had successes in dealing with any of these challenges, then we would love to tell your story!