Denali Consulting as a very good e-whitepaper available, which I thought was tremendous for getting results from strategic sourcing initiatives. They surveyed over 50 sourcing professionals and came up with a very interesting Top 10 list, and who doesn’t love a list.

Ten Best Practices
1: Begin with an End State in Mind
2: Prepare Prior to Launch
3: Focus on People From Day One
4: Plan Early for Savings Tracking
5: Standardize Your Sourcing Process, But Be Flexible
6: Put Strategic Sourcing Into Context of a Holistic Category Management Process
7: Formalize Your Change Management Approach
8: Maintain a Commitment to Total Cost of Ownership
9: Use Holistic Measures to Track Success
10: Don’t Shortcut Market Assessment: Use External Market Intelligence

First off, for any one that has been involved in these issues, the list brings back many memories, both positive and negative. All of the points are excellent, and I was very interested while reading 3 and 5. Having the proper team assembled when launching a new process is critical. Denali points out:

• Be up-front about expectations regarding time commitment to avoid bottlenecks in the future.
• Use a formal, collaborative knowledge management program to capture and share sourcing process, category, and market information across the organization. Follow with a knowledge transfer program for future initiatives.
• Consider an organizational structure that enables the new processes associated with Strategic Sourcing and supplier development.
• Ensure team success by putting the right people, with the right skills, in place from day one, beginning with recruiting, through training and redeployment.

Standardization of process for repeatable success, was listed as the 5th item in the survey results.

Learning from past sourcing teams and implementing a standardized, documented Sourcing process can guarantee repeated sourcing successes, improved processes, and quickly adopted new best practices and technologies. Some of the best organizations we’ve seen with regard to standardized sourcing processes use a web-based “Sourcing toolkit” that gives step-by-step instructions for each sourcing phase and includes standard templates for key activities.

Obviously, this point is where we are doing the most to help companies. We get to see a large number of companies make the transition from no e-tools, to some type of implementation. The ones that are getting the most value are also following many of the other concepts listed in this list. This is not a coincidence.

As usual, Denali has done a very comprehensive job of addressing the issues and offering good recommendations. This article is worth saving in your archives.