Daniel Pontieri has more than 20 years’ experience in procurement and supply chain namely with multinational pharma and biotech giant GSK and most recently with Brazilian conglomerate Grupo NC. A passionate executive who loves the possibilities procurement affords in finding new solutions, Daniel offers his thoughts on three questions, and three questions only.
Daniel, what do you like about Procurement?
It is a multifaceted step within Supply Chain with an emphasis on reducing risk and enhancing reliability, along with improving agility to anticipate changes in sales cycles or unanticipated disruptions to supplies and logistics systems.
Procurement is a strategic corporate business area to encompass policies, increase customer satisfaction by digitalisation, to reduce risk, and to ensure a best total cost of ownership throughout greater visibility and control at each stage of the demand and supply process – from planning and sourcing to production and product delivery.
Procurement is evolving at pace. The pace of change often calls for new skill sets and disciplines within a team. What value can procurement source from adding new skills to its repertoire?
Not only in the procurement function, but organisations are also increasingly embracing technology with it becoming even more important to enable success. Further to that, organisations continue to focus on employees as much as technology as they strive to seek harmony between tech and its people. As procurement evolves at pace it is important to rethink operating models, including how different functions work together.
The procurement skilled staff have already been confronted with tremendous challenges like price increases in the past few months. In markets where supply is still tight, and the suppliers seem to have the upper hand such claims for increases might be intimidating and make procurement folks feel uncomfortable. It is time to review the purchasing strategy to ensure you have fully exploited the procurement power. In that way, a purchasing portfolio analysis might be the right approach to tackle those challenges.
How do you feel procurement is perceived? Why is this?
For companies with best-in-class maturity it is easier for procurement to be heard and have real influence as stakeholder engagement is high. Everyone is focused to achieve great results with a good procurement environment for the whole company enabling a deeper assessment of total cost of ownership and building value creation opportunities based on short-long term definitions.
On the other side where procurement is not well perceived among companies with lower maturity levels (working by silos/areas). Procurement is not part of the key strategies decisions becoming harder to follow the purchasing process. No added value initiatives are prioritised resulting in extra efforts across the board from procurement.