Balancing Internal and External Service Provision – Key Decisions for Procurement Professionals

In this Spend Matters research paper, we look at two separate but related topics.

The first looks at what we believe is a key role for procurement leaders today. That is to optimize the use of resources from both inside and outside the organization, blending them successfully to achieve their goals. We consider the decision process CPOs can use to decide what is best delivered from external sources, and why getting these decisions right can bring big benefits.

In part two of the paper, we consider a particular example that demonstrates this sort of CPO decision making. Supplier Information Management (SIM) is a powerful example of a capability that can be provided effectively from outside the organisation, yet contribute greatly to successful delivery of procurement objectives for the in-house team. We explain what makes SIM a suitable candidate for external provision.