نقش تغییردهنده تأمین تجهیزات: توسعه اثر بخشی حرفه ای

The major objectives of this paper are to explore, from the perspective of 18 senior procurement professionals interviewed, the current status of their role and identify the skills they need to develop, in order to effectively manage the changes they are experiencing. The interviews revealed a schism in perception of the procurement role between professionals (strategic) and their organisations (transactional). Although skills have a direct impact on the ability of procurement professionals to fulfil their role proficiently, the degree of organisational support and internal acknowledgement of the role's importance, were found to be a major barrier to the development and progress of procurement professionals. A Procurement Skills Effectiveness Framework is presented to enable managers to assess the likely sophistication level of procurement and its impact, given a set of procurement skills and the degree and type of internal support for the role.

The evolution of the procurement function is well documented in the literature. There has been a recognised shift away from the traditional administrative and transactional role, towards one which involves strategic partnerships, cooperative alliances and supply network management (Carr and Smeltzer, 1997; Scheuing, 1997; Ramsay, 1998; Lamming et al., 2000; Handfield and Nichols, 2002; Knudsen, 2003). In the literature, procurement is now deemed a core component of many organisations and considered to be of major strategic importance (Humphreys, 2001; Paulraj et al., 2006). However, others argue that the procurement role is still essentially a support function and that as a tactical role, it performs essentially low value adding activities (Kaufmann and Carter, 2004; Cox et al., 2005). Indeed, Ramsay (2004) highlights the fact that sometimes academic papers do not represent the reality of the context in which the practitioners operate and contradicts his previous findings about co-operative relations in supply chains, as being more fictional than factual. It is with this in mind that this paper aims to answer the following research questions related to procurement professionals: (1) How do procurement professionals perceive their role within their organisations? (2) How has their role changed and what challenges have they had to face as a result? (3) What portfolio of skills do they believe will enable them to fulfil their role effectively? The first part of the paper reviews different perspectives on the changing role of procurement from the literature. From this review, a new taxonomy for categorising procurement skills in the current business climate is introduced. The second part of the paper presents the findings from 18 semi-structured interviews with senior procurement professionals across a number of different industry sectors. A Procurement Skills Effectiveness Framework is developed, enabling managers to identify the knowledge, skills and level of support required in order for the role of procurement to optimise its effectiveness in achieving organisational objectives.

This exploratory study has shown that senior procurement professionals believe that their role is now strategic. However, even today, one of the main problems remains that this strategic role is not acknowledged internally and there are political and organisational-culture barriers to achieving this recognition, which is impacting procurement effectiveness. Our procurement skills effectiveness matrix demonstrates the impact these barriers can have on the efficacy of the role of the procurement professional given a portfolio of certain skills. The skills listed here are based on a consolidation of past literature and responses collated from participants in this study. They form the basis of a new procurement skills taxonomy relevant for the current environment. In order to be effective, not all procurement professionals will necessarily be operating on the same level, and thus will not require all the skills highlighted in the matrix. Organisations, however, need to ensure that they have all the skills identified in this study and incorporated into the procurement skills taxonomy and matrix, within their procurement team to ensure that they can attain the degree of effectiveness they require. Whether this will lead to the role of procurement professionals evolving into a more multi-disciplinary supply network management role, or be divided into strategic and tactical with different procurement professionals adopting different roles (Giunipero et al., 2006), is still unclear. This is one area for future observation and research. One of the major limitations of this study is that it is based on the perceptions of a small sample of procurement professionals from mainly large corporations. Future research can build on these findings by examining the perception of the role of procurement in organisations from different functional perspectives, such as operations, supply chain management, finance, marketing and strategy and different sizes of organisation. Murray (2003) criticises the procurement literature as being too focused on the private sector so further investigation of differences in perception of procurement and its impact on performance in the public sector may also be relevant. The issue of cross-functional working was raised as being important, thus further work can include documenting the extent of cross-departmental working in organisations, the practitioners’ skill level and quantifying this effect on the actual performance of the firm. With a more comprehensive and statistically robust study, these findings could be used to explore the interaction of other variables on acceptance of a strategic position and the performance of a firm in future work.