With over 12 years of experience in Procurement, Strategic Sourcing, and Procurement Strategy, Ana Pertot is currently leading Procurement at Bolt, where she divides her time between the Netherlands and Estonia, where her company’s HQ is based.
At Bolt, Ana has built the Procurement function from scratch. Although still a recent department, the team has been delivering great solutions in terms of ESG, technology, and compliance – going beyond the savings targets. Ana believes that everyone on the team can create an impact, with diversity and inclusion one of the core keys to the team’s success.
An exciting time in an intriguing business. Ana offers a few thoughts on procurements impact when all the stars align.
Ana, how do you feel procurement is perceived in general? Why is this?
Procurement is often perceived as the blocker in what should be an agile process for hiring a new supplier for a certain organisation. The departments feel that they can easily “purchase” services or goods, based on common business sense and practice, and that is already sufficient for their needs. While that can be partially true, the procurement professional will not only discuss the final pricing and secure higher discounts in most of the cases but will also pay a closer attention to possible commercial risks that the company could be exposed to, and will work to mitigate those. (COLA, missed SLAs/delivery schedules, volume commitments, etc.)
At times, some departments also feel that procurement will force them to choose a certain supplier based on pricing only, without looking at the quality of the goods/services.
Honestly, for all those perceptions mentioned above, that’s still the case in multiple organisations. Many procurement & finance leaders focus purely on the costs and indeed transmit the message to the departments that the mandate will be to always hire the cheapest provider, not necessarily interested if this might compromise or not the quality of what should be provided. You will never win over the stakeholders like this, and you will be encountering more bypasses than this area might face sometimes, making procurement an unpopular department by many.
What can procurement do better?
Procurement can always make it better in terms of processes. You can reinforce compliance and best practices, and still have a leaner process in place. That’s what I like about tech companies and start-ups: if you want to win over the other teams to start working with you, you need to design and build a direct and efficient process. Obviously, it’s hard to expect that when linking a P2P process with an ERP system (especially some in the market that are not user-friendly at all, making the final users frustrated about the purchase requisitions/orders and approval flows). So, the procurement team needs to always see what serves work better for its own function (nobody wants to sit for hours doing the same admin task everyday), but also what can be welcoming and less painful for the stakeholders that work with us.
Another point is to listen to the stakeholders, their needs, and how to incorporate a procurement strategy into it. We need to aim towards our own goals, synced with ones from that department, and consequently, with the company’s final goals. If the organisation needs more frugality from the teams, procurement should use this as a key argument, but not as the only one. It is important to act as a business partner, in a more collaborative and solutions-driven posture, vs being the one creating problems for the business.
Another area that still could be changed is acting full-time as a tough negotiator with the suppliers, aiming only towards savings, and not considering the bigger picture, nor playing a fair game. Suppliers should not be perceived as the enemy, but many times as the enablers for our own organisations to fulfill needs that only (or partially) an external provider can cover. Obviously, strategic negotiations need to take place to secure the best deal for our organisations, but listening to the other side is also important. (Again, the impact of listening, for successful results in our jobs).
Procurement is evolving at pace. The pace of change often calls for new skill sets and disciplines within a team. What are those expected changes?
As mentioned before, the current and future procurement landscape asks for professionals with a mindset beyond savings. No longer should we play the role of the “bad cop” either internally or with suppliers. In fact, being collaborative has already shown higher engagement rates in our organisation, and better deals were achieved with suppliers, than the other way around. Being hands-on, and focused on the bigger picture beyond procurement is still needed, given the more volatile scenarios we are facing in our economy, politics, and environment, which will continue to impact the value chain as a whole this is vital.
We should not ignore technology either, there are use cases for excel and word documents but there is significant room for SaaS solutions and the use of the AI. The need to digitise and automate certain tasks is obvious.
All in all, an easy-to-adapt and flexible approach to embracing new ways or workings is required.