And ode to the lowly buyer

Now that The Company has slipped through the clutches of yet another fiscal year, we begin to sweep up the crumbs and tidy the files and replenish supplies. Crazy days, indeed.

In this much welcomed slow down, my thoughts turn to the buyer team. A group of hardworking, underappreciated troopers.

Their role in a procurement organization is often overlooked or underestimated in favor of the glamour of the contracts people. Sure, it seems more high-end when you are the one who works with suppliers on multimillion dollar deals. You get to interact with Legal and negotiate, and generally have more fun than a buyer placing purchase orders all day.

But it was clear as a bell to me last week that a contracts rep can negotiate the deal of the century, but those beautiful T’s&C’s will just lay there and go nowhere without the work of the buyers. They make payments happen. They seal the deal.

If your buyer team fails, your procurement organization has failed.

And I think buyers everywhere deserve appreciation for all that they do.

At the last day of the fiscal year, I sent out a glowing thank you note to the buyer group and I couldn’t believe the response I got back. Just to be thanked for their hard work and dedication made those folks very grateful. They don’t often hear good words.

So if you haven’t thanked your buyer team lately, give it a try. They make you look good. Let ‘em know you think so.

Just going to have to quote directly…

From the “You can’t make this up” files.

An actual quote from an actual potential vendor participating in my ongoing RFP.

We got first round proposals and everyone missed the mark, so we gave each vendor specific feedback and a week to revise their proposal.

Today, this question shows up in my email inbox:

Regarding your comment, ‘Please revise pricing,’ could you explain the ‘Please revise pricing’ part? In what way would you like us to revise the number?”

Uh. Sideways?

Just a tip in case any vendors are out there reading my little blog. If a procurement person asks you to revise pricing, we *always* mean downward.

My reply was: “Let me make this simple. Your price is too high.”

Guess my “soften the blow” tactic initially employed didn’t work. Another lesson I’ll take into my next project…

Document Retention

A procurement organization lives and dies by its documents.

You always hope you never get into a situation where you have to turn to the contract document for guidance. But when you do, you REALLY don’t want to have to ask the supplier for a copy of it.

I’d like to say The Company has impeccable document retention.

We, however, don’t.

What we do have is a fabulous online database with scanned copies of the items we actually DO have. And that’s good.

Lately, I’ve been playing almost an Easter Egg hunting game trying to find old documents. Having worked here for MANY years, I actually have unearthed some documents in an archeological dig of my own desk files.

Sometimes The Client can turn up the goods as well. You have to follow the who begat who begat who to find ‘em. George left in ‘98 and gave his files to Sam who left in ‘01 and left his files to Sherry who moved departments in ‘03 and gave her files to Jim who was here for a nanosecond before getting fired and his desk was cleaned out by Eileen…..you get the picture.

We also have a paranoid and stern contract administrator who has a super secret spidey sense about when something has been disturbed in her file room. Though she drives me crazy, you really do need that kind of tenacity and vigilance to do her job.

I had to beg to get badge access to her file room. I had to promise, on death of my pets and spouse, that I wouldn’t remove anything. Or mess up anything. Or misfile anything.

Last week, I found a document that my supplier *swore* didn’t exist and therefore we must do a brand new contract. I put on my Indiana Jones hat, dove deep into the tomb of unknown contracts, and found it.

Then scaling the walls, sticking to shadows, I removed that document from the room (*gasp!*), scanned it, emailed it to the supplier and then, DA DAAAA, attached it to the database.

I also made a copy for my own files.

Trust in technology, but back up your files.

Let ‘em down easy

I’m in the home stretch of an RFx selection, and of course, this gets me thinking about the notifications I’ll have to write soon.

The “congratulations, you’ve been awarded…” email is easy. Giving good news is always fun.

It’s the bad news that’s harder to deliver.

And if delivered badly, can become the basis of litigation.

So how do I, intrepid Procurement Hero, go about delivering the rejection notices to the hardworking, eager, talented suppliers who so *desperately* want to win this hotly contested piece of business?’

With as few words as possible.

No flowery intros. No guilt riddled explanations. No loopholes that they can drive a truck through.

“Dear XYZ Widget Company:

This is to inform you that your proposal for *RFx Title* has been thoroughly reviewed by The Company team.

The award for *RFx Title* has been made to ABC Jobshop.

Thank you for your interest in doing business with The Company.

Regards,

Your Procurement Superhero

Or something similar. Business like. Chock full of brevity. Clean.

Same thing applies to termination letters.

In my experience, most Sales Weasels would rather hear the answer straight up anyway. They are in this business, they know how it works. Procurement guilt will get you nowhere…

Don’t make me start liking you!

Here, two weeks before the end of the fiscal year, we’ve been under siege from irrational clients and their even more irrational demands.

Today, one even said to me, innocently, “I wasn’t aware of that policy.”

Oh really? Three years you’ve been putting requests into the system and you weren’t aware? Riiiiiight.

The familiar refrains of “I need this NOW” and “My VP said so” are ringing through the air.

So imagine the surprise on the faces of my team when we received this:

It’s from one of The Clients. One who just last week broke about eight major rules and brought it to us to fix.

It involved taking an arse chewing from a couple directors, but we did, in fact, fix this little catastrophe.

And the guy went and had the gall to send my team a “thank you for all the work you do on our behalf” gift.

Dang it! Now I gotta keep being nice to him.

It is a pretty nice arrangement, though.

hmph.

I made sure my boss and my Director saw this bit of thanks. They need to know that we actually do take our customer service *very* seriously.

Is there a difference?

I had occasion yesterday to visit with a counterpart at a local company not too far away from The Company.

They are in a different industry but a similar type of set up.

Their procurement department is pretty small, growing fast, and they’re looking for lots of input on how to grow their group.

The most interesting part of the conversation was that this other company makes a very strong distinction between “procurement” and “sourcing”.

As we talked through, I wondered if the difference is really semantics? To me it’s all the same thing. Is sourcing really the new word for procurement?

To some people, “sourcing” implies HR and people recruiting. But that’s another blog post for another day.

Loosely, this company defines procurement as the process of cutting a purchase order and paying it. There isn’t negotiation, contracts or much in the way of purchasing help in the process. Purely the mechanics of buying something.

And sourcing is when purchasing/procurement/sourcing/whateveryoucallthem professionals help to find suppliers, do RFx’s, negotiate pricing, write contracts and help put the deal in place.

Maybe I’m an old dog showing my age spots, but I’ve always viewed “purchasing” as the end-to-end process, and everything in between. It’s how The Company defines it, and previous companies I worked at, too.

But maybe there’s an advantage to splitting them out? Don’t know.

Aren’t they really just two sides of the same coin? Maybe.

Something to noodle on for a while.

Theme Song

Got into one of my silly moods today while reading RFP proposals and listening to iTunes.

I think my job needs a soundtrack.

Yes, I’m ashamed to admit I was an avid Ally McBeal, watcher back in the day, and one of my favorite characters, John Cage, an uptight OCD riddled lawyer, always had a theme song for big cases.

So with that in mind, here’s some first thoughts on the soundtrack of my job….

In the morning, coming into the office, before that first cuppa joe…something like the Toy’s R Us jingle…you know the one…”I don’t wanna grow up…”

Yeah.

For those sticky political work situations…”Spiderwebs” by No Doubt.

“Leave a message and I’ll call you back”. Best way to deal, I think…

For that negotiation where you have to be spot on: It’s gotta be “Headstrong” by Trapt. This used to play at the ballpark when my favorite relief pitcher would come in (who has since been traded to the Cubs…bah!).

But I like the sentiment: “Back off, I’ll take you on.”

Perfect.

For that moment when The Client has gone all weak on you, skeered the deal will die because we’ve pushed the supplier too far, despite the able Procurement Hero swinging hard for the fences…

Why…”I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” by Culture Club.

Self evident, I think.

And on those days when you just can’t close a deal, no matter how hard you try?

“Better Days” by Citizen King.

September 11th – A moment of reflection

The passing of seven years has maybe lessened the immediacy of the pain, the wrenching in the heart.

But it’s still there. The hurt. The memories.

I had a chance to visit ground zero a couple years ago. What was most amazing was the nothing. The huge empty space in a booming metropolitan town.

I remember that day seven years ago in vivid detail. I remember where I was, what I was doing.

I’m amazed at how far I’ve come since then. How much personal loss I had in the wake of the national loss. How much I’ve grown. How much stronger I’ve become.

And on today, I mourn not only for those who lost their loved ones on that historic day, I mourn for who I was then…and take strength in the enduring power of human spirit.

Auld Lang Syne

Ah yes, get ready to strike up the band and pour the bubbly as we begin the proceedings to wave adieu to yet another fiscal year.

For your procurement minded friends, this like the Three Stooges wearing high heels in a race to the finish line.

It’s that messy.

There are approximately two weeks left to get a PO in before the end of the year, and today, I noticed a subtle shift from “just another day” to “HOLY #$%!!!” on the part of my client teams.

And at fifteen years of enduring this last minute freak out, I have to say, I’m tired.

I *know* you have to spend the money or you’ll lose it. I *know* your boss told you that you have to spend it NOW. I *understand* that your procurement takes priority over all the other squawking chickens in line ahead of you. I *get* that I have to pay attention to you.

I really do.

And why again couldn’t you have thought of this in the month of August?

What’s the deadline?

Rules are made for a reason, right?

In this crazy life, it seems people *love* to interpret rules to meet their own needs.

In my personal life, I’m currently involved in a competition where it seems there is a bit of a flex in one of the rules that many of us took seriously. Other competitors did not (in some cases bragging loudly about flouting the rules) and their entries were accepted.

And oh how tempers are flaring. (Ok, including mine, a bit)

All of this got me thinking, as I have an RFP out on the street. Responses were due yesterday at 5:00pm on the dot.

“Late proposals could be considered non-responsive and excluded from consideration.” So sayeth the RFP documents.

One supplier, a pretty good supplier, turned their proposal in late.

Yup, time stamped 5:02pm. Two minutes.

Some would say, “eh, no biggie…”

Others would say, “oh HELL NO! You had three weeks to finish and I won’t allow a moment’s late delivery!”

How the procurement person views this breach of the rules depends on a lot of variables. In the scheme of things, should I give all OTHER respondents two extra minutes, just to make it fair?

“You have two minutes to revise anything you’d care to revise in your response….go!”

Silly. I don’t like to traffic in the ridiculous. Then again. A deadline is a deadline.

Does this breach of the rules mean this supplier will continue to push the boundaries to see what they can get away with? It’s something to consider.

All things to ponder as I sort through endless binders of mind numbing information.