Motivate your staff to help get the best procurement results by involving them from the start

Effective cost management cannot, in most cases, be carried out by senior management and/or consultants in isolation from those within the organisation that are involved in the purchasing or are affected by the service or products being purchased.

These individuals, lets call them stakeholders, can easily feel undermined if they are not consulted and involved in the process. They may feel that they will be shown up as not doing a good job if someone else is able to obtain a saving that has been unavailable to them; or feel side-lined if not consulted about service levels or product quality. Once alienated it is much more difficult to redress the situation than it would have been to involve these stakeholders in the first place.

This need not be time consuming but stakeholders need to understand that consultants and managers can help them achieve the best result.

Managers and consultants must emphatically, not be in competition with stakeholders! Very often stakeholders are brilliant at determining what equipment or service is needed. But these same people are usually not professional procurement managers. So when it comes to negotiating and purchasing, it is highly likely that a procurement manager, expert in the particular category of expense, will be able to structure a process that leads to a better procurement result for the organisation. It is after all their day job!

So part of the category expert’s job should always be to make stakeholders feel good about the process by being involved from the start and to share ownership, not only with the process, but also, importantly with the result.