Part I — Streamline — The Holy Trinity of Procurement Performance Metrics

In a world that makes sense to most business leaders, most readily, when tagged with numbers, you want to be sure not only that you measure things at your end, but also that you measure the right ones. However, when it comes to choosing what to analyze, with omni-measurability all around you, one can easily get confused with too many metrics to keep track of. So, Zycus has come up with an eBook listing the TEN must-analyze metrics for the procurement leaders, written by our very dear author, Richard Waugh.

But there’s more to it. And that’s what my blog’s about. It was interesting for me to note how our author had very intelligently bunched those ten metrics into three separate buckets. And these buckets are what I refer to, fancily, as the holy trinity of procurement performance metrics:

• The Spend Management Metrics
• The Supplier Management Metrics
• The Procurement Operations Metrics

I would like to associate each of these set-of-metrics with a word or a phrase. So, let me start with the first one — The Spend Management Metrics. The expression that comes to my mind is ‘STREAMLINE’. I say this, because I feel, that the Spend Management Metrics are to do with making sure that procurement’s control and oversight extends to the hundred-percent of the organization-wide day to day business operations. The smallest of the small units of observation is crucial here, such as the spend commodities or the contract clauses, or even the presence or absence of a contract. And as you would have experienced, they also correspond to probably the most difficult task for a procurement team — dealing with the obstinacies and inertia of the organization while also with the inbuilt obsolescence of their automation and tracking systems.

Indeed, every procurement department’s automation journey tends to begins with streamlining, but this is not really the goal. It is a pre-requisite, in fact, which sets the tone for everything else, including whether you will be able to measure anything else! Being the most patience-requiring and the most painstaking of the ‘holy trinity’, it does, however, reward you richly. It opens the doors for you to move beyond the limitations of old-school procurement job descriptions and to start contributing to the second piece of the holy triad. More on that, in the next blog!