Initiatives enable a senior procurement manager or chief purchasing officer execute and monitor strategic procurement initiatives, aimed to meet a specific set of objectives, in their organization. Initiatives also enables buyers break down the complex task of negotiation and supplier identification into smaller tasks, and collaborate with colleagues in order to gather information that is necessary to conduct an effective negotiation. Some essential advantages of Sourcing Initiatives include:
Ability to Create and Manage Initiatives: Buyers and Procurement Managers can organize their strategic procurement activities and sourcing activities into initiatives, using a set of tasks that is completed by a collaboration team.
Monitor Progress of Initiatives: Each initiative is be assigned one or more objectives. Initiative owners, sponsors and the chief purchasing officer can track the initiative, to see if it has achieved the targeted objectives.
Negotiations can be linked to the initiative. Thus any procurement documents that are an outcome of the negotiation, or any related documents can also be linked to the initiative.
The following describes the Sourcing Initiatives process at a high-level:
Various events that can start the creation of a Sourcing Initiative: an item / service requisition that needs a negotiation, a procurement plan for purchasing items / services for a cycle, a requirement to meet business demands where a series of tasks need to be tracked to meet objectives.
Changes in procurement strategy, or changes in organization goals / new objectives within the procurement team can also lead to the creation of new initiatives to execute the change management process, or to align the organization to the new set of objectives.
When the initiative is created, the buyer adds tasks to it, and assigns the tasks to various task owners. These task owners can be anybody in the organization whose involvement is needed in meeting the objectives of the initiative.
The initiative is started; notifications go to various task owners to complete their tasks. Task owners would complete their tasks.
The initiative is completed in due course, however, the initiative might need to be put on-hold, or cancelled for reasons such as non-completion of tasks, non-availability of information.