At the NCMA conference this week, I had the pleasure of speaking with a lot of interesting people with many different roles.<\/p>\n
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At one point, I spoke to a senior manager for a government contractor. He was at the conference primarily to learn some tricks-of-the-trade for working the contractual process with his clients (the government).<\/p>\n
I asked him about purchasing in his company, specifically with regard to skill development. He said nonchalantly that his company really didn\u2019t do much in terms of purchasing training and he wasn\u2019t concerned. They were a \u201csmall company\u201d and didn\u2019t spend much, relatively speaking.<\/p>\n
I asked him some questions and learned that his company spends about $20 million per year on goods and services. I then asked if the company could save 5% of that \u2013 in other words, increasing profit by $1 million \u2013 would the owners care.<\/p>\n
He took my card.<\/p>\n
Sometimes that is the approach you have to take when communicating the value of purchasing internally \u2013 if you could have $x more in profit, would that matter to the owners\/investors\/stockholders?<\/p>\n
What else can a reasonable person say?<\/p>\n
Saving 5% may be tough in an inflationary market if you have already squeezed out cost savings in the past few years. But if the company hasn\u2019t been historically \u201cconcerned\u201d with purchasing\u2026there\u2019s likely lots of low hanging fruit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the NCMA conference this week, I had the pleasure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":3996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n