Performance Procurement: How do you create more value?

Data talks! Let it speak, check the results.

What makes great procurement great? What separates the all-star procurement teams from their middle-of-the-road peers? How does your organization measure up against best-in-class procurement? And what exactly is best-in-class procurement?

With these questions and many anecdotal examples in mind, WNS partnered with CIPS and embarked on a mission to better understand top performance procurement by documenting the common threads within high-performing procurement organizations.

Over the course of eight weeks, we polled more than 300 European and global firms across a broad range of company sizes and industries to gain insights into the mindset of a high performer, and compared that to a more traditional definition of procurement maturity.

What did we find?

Responses did not translate into any one ‘best’ procurement operating model, technology package or spend management process. Instead, high-performing organizations connected to a mindset emphasizing tight alignment with business objectives – what we call Total Business Alignment. This allows them to influence all facets of procurement operations, from performance metrics to pipeline to talent model.

The study data has also confirmed what we have seen in the industry in recent years: achieving greater business alignment allows procurement to deliver more value. Through a deep analysis of the study results, we identified five critical contributors to Total Business Alignment:

• Vision

• Stakeholder Partnering

• Talent

• Organizational model

• Performance and operational reporting

In this paper, we examine each of these to identify how they contribute to Total Business Alignment, how they in turn increase the impact of procurement, and how they have been applied by leading procurement organizations today.