Since I first began interacting with suppliers as a new buyer in the mid-90\u2019s, I\u2019ve dealt with countless suppliers between then and now. Some of them left me thinking \u201cNow THAT\u2019S how ALL suppliers should be\u201d while others just plain ticked me off. One type of supplier that got under my skin is the supplier who tries to sell you what they want to sell instead of what you want to buy.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t miss updates on Procurement & Supply Chain, Subscribe here!<\/p>\n
I have a couple of examples, one in today\u2019s post, one in tomorrow\u2019s post. Let\u2019s get started with the first example\u2026<\/p>\n
Back in the dot-com era, I just joined a new employer and I was responsible for leading a team that was charged with selecting and implementing an eProcurement system. Now, we didn\u2019t have a formal budget yet and the initiative could have gotten pulled off the table at any time. The senior management of my organization believed our message of eProcurement\u2019s value. They saw that our procurement department was processing tens of thousands of paper requisitions a year and knew that there had to be a better way. But, if anything made the project seem too complicated or costly, their support could be yanked without notice.<\/p>\n
We evaluated demos and proposals from probably around a dozen providers and found one that seemed to fit our needs rather well. We engaged that provider in discussions of implementation matters to confirm whether the relationship could work. No contract was signed yet.<\/p>\n
During one of the discussions, the provider started asking us about non-eProcurement-related things, specifically about how we analyzed our spend. With no \u201creal\u201d budget for technology yet \u2013 the eProcurement implementation would be the deciding factor in terms of whether senior management would trust us to spend their dollars on technology \u2013 we had an effective, if less than optimal way of using our data warehouse and Microsoft Access to get the spend information we needed in the short term.<\/p>\n