CPO Content

Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Naseem Malik, managing partner at MRA Global Sourcing. I recently had the opportunity to attend a Procurement Leaders forum where a renowned CPO shared his top four attributes that made him successful over the course of his four different CPO assignments with four different companies and industries. It was straight talk that came across as authentic and highly informative on what this CPO learned and what his advice would be for the upcoming executives in the profession. He approached it from a top-down perspective, i.e. how to win support from top management to enable and ensure success as a CPO. Without further ado, here are the top four pearls of wisdom shared by this CPO.

Supply risk is almost always at the top of the CPO agenda (and if it’s not, it should be). Most organizations focus on supplier risk elements that are relatively easy to implement, such as supplier financial risk management, which is a good start. It essentially helps monitor supplier viability through the lens of the financial statements (assuming you can get them from your private suppliers too). But, supplier financial risk management only goes so far. It does provide an "assurance of supplier,” but it doesn’t necessarily protect your assurance of supply from that supplier. We have a handy diagram that illustrates this concept.

Brand new, hot-off-the-press research from our sister site, Spend Matters UK/Europe, Should CPOs Use Consensus Decision Making? takes a long, hard look at what has proven to be a successful method in business over the past 2 or so decades, and whether or not it should apply to the procurement function. Get your copy today!

Over on our sister site, Chief Procurement Officer, we recently started a series analyzing what a merger of the Big 2 office supply firms, Staples and Office Depot, would mean for buyers. If your company has substantial US operations, you’ve likely sourced office supplies from either of these 2 firms, and the ramifications – and learnings – for CPOs go far beyond the proposed deal.

Our last article introduced Daniel Kahneman’s brilliant “Thinking Fast and Slow” book, which explains how our thought processes work. He is a psychologist, but won the Nobel Prize for economics as his work explained how humans really think and behave, which turned out to be quite differently to how that was treated in classical economic theory.

A number of us at Spend Matters originally came from a consulting background where the project management office (PMO) function is an essential component of larger projects, especially around systems implementation or large-scale procurement and sourcing projects impacting a wide range of functions and individuals across a company. As background on the topic, Wikipedia defines a PMO as “a group or department within a business, agency or enterprise that defines and maintains standards for project management within the organization.”

I caught up with some old colleagues of mine at The Hackett Group, who offered to let me share some of the insights from their […]