Procurement has always been about the famous Five R – Quantity, Quality, Price, Time and Place. Quite significantly this has been one of brand values on which the profession evolved itself for an independent recognition, for its visibility and value capture – and over a period of time this has needless to say become the pillars of every professional.
The world has seen and ever been in the eye of storms of massive change – within the global environment to the game changes of business environment - from magnetic pole shifts to earthquakes, from production to global operations, from volcanoes to tsunamis, from buying to purchasing to procurement, from transporting to 3 PL and 4 PL logistics, from hacking to battlefronts, from multi-national organizations to low cost country source organizations, from nuclear damage to radioactive fallout, from single professional specialist to multi-tasking strategists. Off all these things, one aspect that has emerged as a single most factor for survival and sustainment, from all these environmental and business complexities is the alignment of profession and professionals involved towards the “customer” – be it society as large or our own end customers or the organization customers.
To remain visible, every professional, procurement (and supply chain) in particular, have to adjust ourselves to the (changing) business environment by diligently mapping the (everyone has one - internal or external) customer needs and the environmental conditions – this shapes our footprints towards pursuit of excellence. At this stage, it is now fair to re-emphasize “Excellence” is everything we as professionals as committed and as we perform focusing on customer’ sustainability, enhancing our opportunities for their innovations, our efforts to enable their requisites thereby reduce the risks if not eliminate and map out tangibly results therein.
In the above context, it is high time for professionals to embrace the 4 R’s. These are not something newly coined; they always existed earlier as part of Logistics enablers as well as many other management professions. These ‘4 Rs’ are - Responsiveness, Reliability, Resilience - and - Relationships.
Responsiveness
The key is Agility – a professional’s ability to respond in quickest time with the greatest possible flexibility. In today’s everything quick and just-in-time world, the ability to respond to customer with feedback and to cater to their requirements in shortest time has become critical. Not only do customers want shorter lead times, they are also looking for flexibility and increasingly customized solutions.
Lack of responsiveness and speed have become the most prime competitive variable for survival and sustained growth, absence of which not only can strain the whole system but can cause endless and irrevocable reputation to the profession (al). So time to check your calendar and day book, have you forgotten to at least respond back?
Reliability
In any business organizational environments, consistency to process driven performance is a key. No longer are a good presentation once or twice and a smile few more times going to be the solution for the environment, the business organization and the customer. Solutions by all means are vital for the profession (al) to be the only choice of order. It is very important to be honest in performing what we say or commit. Raising the bar of performance is a result of significant improvement achieved through continual re-engineering of efforts and processes that impact such performances - reduce variability. If there is variability in order processing lead times then the causes of that variability can be identified and where necessary the process can be changed and brought under control through the use of six sigma tools and procedures.
Resilience
Resilience refers to our ability to cope with unexpected disturbances. Today’s environment and business organizations are characterized by higher levels of turbulence and volatility, increasingly subjected to several repeated unexpected shocks and discontinuities. There are questions often raised and practical incidents of evidences that business organizations as well as environment tends to to seek out low-cost solutions because of pressure on quick wins solutions or to stretch those squeezed margins leading to vulnerability. Professional resilience is about our individual capacity to sustain and outperform even in such situations of high demand and ongoing pressure - to recover from significant challenges, difficulties and setbacks – and importantly use these for continual learning and further growth.
Relationship
Professionalism in itself is about management of relationships across complex networks of environment and business organizations. Pursuit of constant search for win-win solution based on high degrees of maturity, mutuality and trust is a model that has and will have to continue to prevail. Such partnerships on one hand can prove to be formidable barriers to entry for professional competitions. Relationship helps to enhance the capacity to foresee as well as tolerate a lot more stress helping share concepts, vent frustrations, obtain support and generate look ahead for tackling challenges. Think over, have you set yourself with this seamlessly at both ends of your network?
As mentioned earlier, these are not newly conceptualized. However, with the growth or a seamless environmentwhere baseprofessionaldriversare no longervisionary benchmarks but are reflections of existence of the profession(al) itself. Instead, we theProfession(al) have to embrace these R’s to elevate ourselves to enable the endless flow of “value” to ourcustomers and raise our“visibility” to the environment - enabling sustainability of synergies across ourentire networks.
(The contents and opinions expressed in this material are entirely personal, and do not represent or reflect on those of my past or present employers)
