Should your organization employ a team of procurement experts to sustain its procurement and reach planned targets? Or should your organization assign procurement function to other departments, like finance, legal, logistics/admin or sometimes ever HR? Or should it outsource procurement to a third party?
If you cannot afford employing a decent procurement team, or even a single procurement … hero, outsource your procurement to procurement professionals. Never assign procurement functions to other units. Think about the following. You will not assign financial functions to HR, or logistics functions to legal, will you? Why should you even consider assigning such important task as procurement management to other departments?
If your organization does not employ lawyers, it will outsource that function to a law firm. If you don’t have an HR department, the best way is to hire a headhunter or an HR company. The same is procurement. Such super vital function as procurement should always be taken care of by professionals. So far, the Procurement Network is considered the best in the industry and therefore numerous organizations outsource procurement to the Network without hesitation.
There are many other, smaller companies in the market too. This displays the level of need and the importance of procurement in every organization.
Procurement is a combination of numerous skills. It contains a lot of elements from finance, law, HR, logistics and admin, etc.
Imagine your organization is a small army and you are a general. You desperately need a soldier (procurement) who is great in boxing, kung fu, karate, aikido and sword fighting at the same time. You absolutely need all these elements in one, because the nature of task that soldier has requires all these martial arts. And you know the target cannot be reached if the soldier lacks any of the mentioned skills.
You also have other soldiers in your small army, however these soldiers have only one skill each, be it only aikido (f.e. finance), or only boxing (f.e. legal), or else.
The biggest mistake today is to think that other departments can substitute your procurement soldier. In reality, procurement can substitute any of these departments, but never the opposite.
When you outsource your procurement to procurement professionals, you know you have a soldier who masters all required skills. Any other temporary solution will fail when it comes to a specific (missing) fighting method.
Procurement Passion 