I read the summary of a new report from down under earlier today that was not remarkable for its findings, but for its authors — a group of lawyers (at Norton Rose) who came to the same conclusion as any reasonable group of procurement or operations executives would. And that’s the importance, when it comes to outsourcing, of putting procurement first — lest the entire process “cost you time and money”. Specifically, “The take-away message from the survey for customers is that procurement should be placed firmly at the core of corporate strategy and have proper resources allocated to it for maximum benefit from IT expenditure to materialize.” Based on a relative small but global sample of CIOs, general counsels, CPOs and other executives, the study provides strong fuel to the outsourcing management fire when it comes to supporting procurement’s involvement more deeply in the sourcing and contracting process.
One of the findings suggests that despite the often high profile nature of outsourcing agreements, that a good many organizations still do not dedicate designated resources to ensuring the overall quality of the outsourcing buying and relationship management process. To this end, “38 per cent of respondents said sourcing team members were often expected to progress the procurement alongside their ‘day job’ … It is crucial that the selected sourcing team members have enough time and resources to fully commit to the project.”
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