When the horse is out of the barn

A purchase of $5000, feh, I don’t care. Even if it’s software. Do the deal, make it work, and whatever other buzz phrases I can think of.

Problem is…if 20 different people do a purchase of software at $5000 at a time, with unnegotiated maintenance coming due, suddenly I have a problem. A big problem.

The software is installed. Running. Working. Mission critical, of course.

The Client woke up one day and realized that maintaining all those licenses might cost real money.

So what do they do? Call the Procurement mop up crew, of course.

There is no contract. Oh yes there is! Claims the supplier. You clicked “I agree” on every single dingle one of those licenses you installed. You have a contract. That says the laws of Whoosiwhatitsstan covers the contract. And that pricing is subject to the mood of the supplier. And that The Company will issue a press release. Oh that’s my favorite one.

So, you know, the heart of negotiation is leverage. We have none.

And yet, it’s my job to “make it work”, and so I will. I’ll scrape up whatever leverage I can muster up, including threats to de-install all their crap and toss the bits back at them with as much force as I can muster.

Meanwhile, cranky Executive Client wants to know why in the hell Procurement is holding up progress.

Just another day at work, really.

Pardon me while I squeeze out my very large mop and get back to work.

Shell game

Keep your eye on the ball folks, keep a close watch, right to left, left to right, follow it!

Ya ever seen a shell game? Or at the baseball yard they play the “hat game”. The ball is slipped under one shell, the deft handler moves the shells around, you place your bets. If you can pick the shell the ball ends up under, you win.

The catch is that the really fast-handed guys can make that little ball go away so actually no one wins.

I felt like I was in the middle of a shell game yesterday with a potential new supplier.

It went like this:

Procurement Hero: “What’s your pricing for this service?”

Sales Weasel: “What’s your budget?”

PH: “Can you charge this service on a quarterly basis?”

SW: “Can you tell me why you want to bill that way?”

PH: “What’s your SLA for this service?”

SW: “What do you get with your incumbent supplier?”

PH: “Is your company financially viable?”

SW: “What’s your indicator for that?”

PH: “Are you actually an honest vendor?”

SW: “Why do you care?”

Ok, maybe that last one didn’t happen, but it felt like it.

I was left with my eyes spinning in my head. I can’t keep up with the little red ball. I don’t know what shell it’s under. I have no idea.

Yet The Client is ready to lay down a big bet.

What’s a Procurement Hero to do………?

Although, in the end, I was able to (weakly) play his game back.

Sales Weasel: “So if we meet all of these requirements, is there anything that would keep you from doing a deal with us?”

Procurement Hero: ” : shrug : Sorry, there are still too many unknowns for us to make that kind of decision.”

I may have won that round, but Sales Weasel will be back. Oh yes, he’ll be back…

Karnak Says…

I may have just hopelessly dated myself making that reference. Oh well, that’s for those of you who remember when Johnny Carson ran The Tonight Show, not that Leno yo-yo.

But I digress.

The management team spent the time in an early morning meeting today trying to come up with a “best guess” as to what our Executive VP will say when we report our numbers on procurement activity.

He is an enigmatic man, thus it’s genuinely hard to know.

Even for our Director, our leader, the person who has worked with Executive for, oh, like twelve years. Even the Director has no idea, which is both sad and a little bit frightening.

If we say that transactions grew but headcount didn’t, will he snidely tell us that we just need to work harder?

If we say that we turned in record cost savings, will he say how we accounted for them is wrong (because it probably is)?

If we tell them we are desperate for help, will he say “you made it work last year AND had huge cost savings”?

Tap dancing in a mine field.

And me without my crystal ball in my briefcase.

Thus the hazards of heading up an indirect procurement team in a company that values manufacturing first.

Usurp

American Heritage Dictionary

u·surp (yōō-sûrp’, -zûrp’)

v. u·surped, u·surp·ing, u·surps

v. To seize another’s place, authority, or possession wrongfully.

As in, to usurp my authority. Or if you are Cartman, “You will respect my authoritah!”

I’m used to The Client cutting the legs out from under me.

And occasionally a Sales Weasel.

But my own employee? Not ok. Not even a little.

I realize we’re all tired, overworked, sick of dealing with this snaky supplier, but really, when your boss asks nicely/tells you to do something, 1) you do it or 2) your explain why you cannot. You do not snottily ask (in front of The Client) “You want me to do *what*?” and then ignore the request.

There are many ways I’d like to handle this, many not sanctioned by HR. So I’ve retreated to my cubicle office to ponder just how to manage it because this will not happen again.

Et Tu Employee?

Ponder your move

Procurement really is, in the end, a chess game. You make a move. Observe their counter move, make your own zig and then zag. Dodge, parry, thrust, whatever…

Today was a game of numbers. If we do THIS business with THAT supplier it costs X dollars. But if we take THIS much and give it to someone else at Y rate we save? Or costs more?

And if we take THAT business away, will Widget supplier give us a better rate to keep the business?

It takes a good Finance person, a Client who truly understands their business and someone with a good business head (which, I hope, you know, that’s me).

We’ve got a hell of a peculiar deal on our hands. Gonna be hard to explain all this to The Executive.

But if we pull it off…we’re HEROS.

Hey, this stuff is fun! Been awhile since work was fun…

Just like 1885

I see before me a jowly balding head hovering over a blue tie and a blue striped shirt. The cufflinks are gold. The watch is Rolex. Ring of shiny platinum and buffed and polished nails.

A raconteur? No. A Telco executive.

The one woman in the group, an account manager, just ran out of the room and brought back a coffee drink (latte, I believe) for Blue Tie.

He’s smooth, I’ll give him that. He’s saying words The Client wants to hear. They just told him “don’t tell us what we want to hear, tell us the truth”. He chuckled, said, “I got it” then launched into one of the biggest piles of bullsh*t spread around this lawn in a long, long time.

He deftly moves through his slide deck, adding points, skipping over points, talking “near” them, not to them.

His charts shimmer, his graphs twirl, the images slide in and out silently.

I’m keeping a watchful Procurement eye on this one. And on my clients. Let’s not get too wowed by sharp suits and pretty words.

He is good though, I’ll give him that. Uses tone of voice to great effect. Modulates it down when The Client gets frantic. Up when he wants to make a point. Faster, slower. He’s slick. Real slick.

I may even end up buying a case of snake oil from him before this day is done.

Thar she blows!

Or, really, in this instance, he.

There’s one in every group. The blowhard.

We’ve got one. Well, several, but one in particular is sitting at the other end of the table from me today.

He’s the policy guy. Is that any surprise? Nah, it wasn’t to me either.

We’re talking about changing how the procurement folks track their projects. It will add lots of rigor to an already busy group of people. I’m not happy. But for each valid point I raise, I am shouted down in response.

Which makes me want to quote something I saw online:

Being loud isn’t the same as being right.

Problem is, you need to pack a lunch to have a conversation with this guy. He can filibuster better than anyone I know. He’s starting to wear me down. I’m almost to the point where I’ll agree to anything if he’ll just stop talking. My ears are ringing. Seriously.

Oh? You want to force my contracts professionals to present their deals to something like a “loan committee” before signature? Oh. Hell. No.

I can talk loud too. From deep in the lungs (a deep voice certainly helps me be heard).

Back to it. We’ve many miles to go…

Second verse same as the first.

Ah yes, MRO Procurement is on the road again.

No, not travel. Think boxes.

See when you are on the indirect side of a very fast moving young company, you learn early where you stand in the pecking order. Near the top, we are not.

Engineering is king, as it should be.

Two years ago we were bumped out of our building as manufacturing procurement wanted it. They got it. We left.

But it worked out ok. We moved into a funny L shaped building, but it was a newer, roomier place. Managers even got offices! Whatta deal.

We happily put up with our odd ball space and not actually sitting geographically together, but it worked. We like it. The mellow yellows and greens on the walls grew on us and it became home.

About six months ago an Engineering team rolled by our place. With tape measures.

They need more lab space. Therefore, we’re done. They will knock out all our homey green and yellow walls, take out all the windows and deploy racks and racks of super secret test gear.

We are now relegated to the building that is the farthest away from the main cluster of buildings. Think taking a car to get to meetings. And since we are expanding so fast, the company isn’t spending much on new locations. We get the cheap, mismatched furniture, the dirty used cubicle walls and tiny 8×8 cubes. Yes, even for the managers.

I’m trying to be ok about this. I really am.

Meanwhile, the bright side is, this is a great opportunity to purge two years worth of desk files out of my office and send to storage.

On the roooad again……

FIREDRILL!!

No, not the orderly evacuation of the building. Nope.

More insidious than that.

It seems anymore a company lives and dies by their reporting.

And when you work for a company that doesn’t do it well, it causes many problems.

Particularly when you have a brand new manager from the outside. Who used to be a consultant. Who only knows how to manage by the numbers.

“I want the spend for your top ten suppliers for last year and so far this year!”

Simple request? It should be. Blaming IT doesn’t get you very far. So how does a beleaguered Procurement Professional like me satisfy the new master? And keep my badge?

Run an online report, one by one. I have a pretty good gut feel for where our money is going so I can look up each supplier and pull spend. Silly, huh?

The information may not be rock solid, but I’m going to present it like these numbers have been chipped in granite.

Until then, bring me an asbestos suit. Things are heating up around here.

Suit of Armor Needed

I spoke on Friday about a less than pleasant encounter with a certain highly titled executive in my organization.

Well, the fallout from that continues. Seems now that not only me, but all my counterparts in each commodity team are being called to a meeting. The purpose? To sit in front of The Grumpy One and give an accounting of the business and contracts with our top suppliers.

In preparation for this, our personal weights and measures team has decided to pull spend report data. Great idea right? Go in with numbers?

That would be true if the information pulled was accurate. Problem is, no one has been able to verify the data. No one. Not a single digit. The weights and measures guy *swears* it’s correct. Memo to Self: never trust an IT guy who swears to anything.

So here’s how the week is shaping up. A team of managers is going to go into a meeting room with a certain executive who is known to be quite an unknown quantity. And we’re going to present to said executive with numbers we don’t know to be true.

This is nothing short of a suicide mission.

I’m going in wearing one of these: