Performance management in procurement — Truth or fallacy

As I read a quote while surfing the net, a particular thought provoked my mind to question a few things in today’s world. The quote read “brilliance always presents itself in flashes, consistency is the virtue of the mediocre”, as I finished reading the line, I questioned myself, is it enough to be brilliant just once?For how long will people remember your moment of glory?

That is when I realized the futility of the quote, in this modern world, where everyone is competing in a cut throat competition, it is not enough to be just ‘brilliant’, you need to maintain the ‘brilliance’. Roger Federer is loved not because he won Wimbledon once, but because he kept repeating his winning performance every time.

Maintaining performance has achieved itself a new term in the books of management and it is called “performance management”. Performance management basically ensures that goals are met efficiently and effectively every time and not just once. It can focus on the performance of the organization, its department, employees or just one process. There are various exercises to maintain performance not just in office but also in, schools, churches, events etc.

However, since I hail from a procurement background, I would take an opportunity to talk a bit about “Procurement performance management” (PPM).

PPM refers to the holistic approach of managing and increasing the value of procurement organization. While doing so, the process is observed in finding savings potential via various modern strategic sourcing techniques.

Procurement organizations are evolving their value proposition in order to deliver higher levels of value to the business, and upgrading their ways of measuring and communicating performance to the broader organization.

On 23rdof September2015, we held a webinar that covered the topic “Performance Management in procurement “with Melani Flores , Head P2P Advisor Practise EMEA,The Hackett Group.

Mélani spoke about:

• Fundamentals of scorecards
• The challenges in defining value for the business
• The practical approaches to measure and track value and performance

Click here to access the archive link of the webinar