It’s Getting Crowded At The Top!
Add comment October 15th, 2007 David Bush - Iasta
Re-reading the recent Purchasing article Sourcing … The Profession, which I originally blogged about in this post, one can’t help but realize that it’s getting awfully crowded in the C-suite, especially in supply chain now that we have a CSO - Chief Sourcing Officer - in addition to a CPO - Chief Purchasing/Procurement Officer - and a CSCO - Chief Supply Chain Officer.
Of course, in reality, your organization will generally only have one of these individuals, and her duties will be the same regardless of title, and she will be focused in aligning sourcing strategies with business goals, with an eye towards:
- accessing superior technology, skills, and processes
- reducing or transforming costs and avoiding capital investment
- minimizing TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
- protecting intellectual property
- maintaining control over core competencies
- enabling joint product development
- improving customer service
- creating a “win/win” through mutually beneficial deal structures
- negotiating highly complex service agreements
- managing internal demand for goods and services
- designing effective exit strategies
In particular, this person should be focussed on implementing superior eSourcing technology if it’s not already in place as these technologies will streamline processes, will reduce TCO - especially if decision optimization is used, will identify ways to reduce costs through spend analysis, will help in the creation and tracking of agreements and contracts, will enable product development through the collaboration capabilities they contain, and will help the organization get a much better grip on its overall performance. And it won’t matter what she is called.
Entry Filed under: General, Supply Management Best Practices
