In a recent post by Roz Usheroff, she indicated that you would probably have to be on another planet – maybe even in another galaxy – to not have heard of the recent call to arms of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to eradicate the word “bossy” from our everyday vernacular. The reason for Sandberg’s discontent with the word is that it unfairly portrays women in a negative light.
While I will leave it to you to read Usheroff’s post to get the whole Sandberg story, I could not help but think that a similarly negative word was recently used by Zycus in describing procurement and more specifically procurement professionals.
I am talking about a Zycus post in the United by Procurement LinkedIn group in which one of their marketing managers shared an article titled “Helping procurement to emerge as a function that delivers value beyond savings.”
My concern is that when you use the word function, you confine procurement to its traditional definition of being transactional as opposed to strategic and relational. Functions are a series of preordained steps that you merely execute within the context of an established role. When you become strategic and relational, it means that you are going beyond the stereotypical definition of your role to become a bigger part of an extended process that reflects an holistic view of the larger enterprise and the markets it seeks to serve.
No one for example will refer to the role of a CEO or CFO as being functional. CEO’s are visionaries and leaders, while CFOs are being called stewards, operators, strategists and catalysts. Yet we in procurement are functional?
We have to move beyond this limiting kind of terminology if we hope to gain our rightful seat at the executive table.
So what do you think fellow procurement professionals . . . are we strategic and relational or merely functional.
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Procurement Insights 
Silky Agarwal
March 21, 2014
I appreciate it. Your argument indicates a forward looking view about the procurement community. If read ‘in whole’ we are saying the same exact thing in the post title. We hope you are able to see that.
piblogger
March 21, 2014
Thank you for your feedback Silky. To start I think that Zycus is a great organization. That being said, and after reading the article as well as the corresponding links, the issue is not so much one of intent but of scope. Specifically, there is no reference or perhaps expansion on how procurement “contributes well to the organization’s profit margins.”
As you well know over the years there has been a major disconnect between finance and purchasing to the extent that one study found that 90% of all savings claimed by purchasing are routinely discounted by the CFO as being irrelevant. Even though we have made a great deal of progress since that report first came out in 2007, we have not as of yet secured our seat at the executive table. This is largely due to the fact that we do not or have not spoken the same language as finance.
To ultimately bridge that gap, we have to look outside of the “functional” aspect of what we do, and spend more time on aligning our contributions with the overall corporate goals, while also being able to present it in a manner that clearly demonstrates our value to other key executive areas.
Last year I delivered a keynote session at the Commonwealth of Virginia Forum on this point, as well as other areas upon which we need to improve in terms of branding our contributions. In fact I opened the session by saying that procurement professionals are great at delivering value but terrible at promoting that value.
As CIOs and CFOs (refer to my post link) are redefining their roles in the context of the bigger enterprise picture, we need to start doing the same.
Unfortunately, your article talks about what we do within the limiting framework of the procurement world without explaining why and more specifically how it is having the referenced impact. In short – at least as the article is written – the emphasis is more on “practical procurement technology applications” without enough detail on the specifics relating to its “impacts on business.” Or as I like to put it, we need to not only walk the walk, we also need to learn how to talk the walk as well.