Whitepaper Wednesday - The Future of Procurement

Welcome to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. Today, I will be sharing some details of a new whitepaper entitled "The Evolution & Future of Procurement & Procurement Skills" from Next Level Purchasing.

This whitepaper is in interview format with me answering questions such as:

• Some experts are predicting that traditional, transactional procurement positions will disappear in favor of outsourcing. Do you see the procurement field going in this direction as well?
  
• How can people in the procurement trenches make themselves more strategic and take advantage of the evolution of procurement rather than being destroyed by it?
• The Next Level Purchasing Association recently did a thorough procurement salary survey. What do your findings tell us about where procurement is headed?

In addition to my answers to these questions, you'll also find some predictions and insights like those in this excerpt:

"I think one of the areas that is weak today from both a skill and a technology standpoint is predicting supplier performance. As in predicting future supplier performance, not just measuring past supplier performance.

"While skilled procurement professionals have good judgment in their supplier selection decisions, there’s still somewhat of a leap of faith involved when selecting a supplier. Sure, we do reference checks, evaluate financial statements, audit the supplier’s facility, and so forth but, to a large degree, we are taking a leap of faith by awarding business to a supplier.

"I predict that, in the future, we will have at our disposal better tools and practices for more scientifically predicting supplier performance. We’ll be able to calculate probabilities of success. We’ll be able to easily build simulations of what supplier performance will look like in the years ahead. These new approaches probably will never be perfect and will always require a skilled procurement human to manage them, but I believe that the leap of faith of today will be reduced to a baby step of faith in the future."

If you're interested in reading my answers to the above questions and getting even more predictions and insights, you can download the whitepaper from Next Level Purchasing's website at http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com/EFP .

To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM, SPSM2
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
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