Consulting Q&AHow do you get the business lines to work with procurement for consulting services?
Mattéo DaviesMattéo Davies asked 1 year ago

1 Answers
Petunia UlfssonPetunia Ulfsson answered 1 year ago

Collaboration between business lines and procurement departments is essential for successful delivery of consulting services. While both disciplines bring their own unique set of knowledge and experience, coordinating their efforts will result in greater efficiency and improved outcomes.

To ensure that business lines work effectively with procurement on consulting services, it is important to develop a clear understanding of each team’s individual strengths. Both sides should make an effort to identify areas in which they can leverage the other’s expertise to develop more robust solutions.

Moreover, you need to convince your business lines that procurement done right can create value. But how do you do that? Well, you need to start off by gaining trust from your business lines.

When it comes to buying consulting services, gaining trust from your business lines is essential in order to demonstrate credibility. Making yourself the valued person by engaging with stakeholders and understanding the issues they face and how those issues are impacting their day-to-day operations and long-term growth is important.

It should be your top priority to develop a strong relationship with stakeholders and ensure that you have all pertinent information in order to logically solve their problems in an effective and meaningful way.

Taking this strategic approach will allow you to become the most beneficial procurement group within the organization as well as establish a sense of reliability with respect to the business line’s needs.

Furthermore, building a successful procurement organization requires diligently mapping out both the people and data elements. When dealing with people, understanding their personalities, agendas and history will help in navigating the complexities of working with them.

For example, who holds power? Who should be involved? Which items in company spending hold emotional value? Meanwhile, building an accurate picture of the data side involves comprehensive market intelligence reports or, at minimum, a clean system to gather all of the information.

Using a strategic approach focusing on easy wins such as office supplies briefly enables companies to create a strong foundation for future success. By having key players within the organization gain confidence from quick wins and the ability to connect changeover or justification initiatives will strengthen overall procurement effectiveness.

To learn more, watch this YouTube video on “How to convince your business lines that procurement done right can create value?”! It is an excellent podcast episode that will help you understand this subject matter better.