It is never easy to request additional headcount, so making sure the timing is right and having a solid business case are critical to protecting your internal reputation and hopefully getting an affirmative response.

There are plenty of ways procurement can stack the deck in their favor, and most of them have to do with demonstrating alignment with enterprise objectives and a vision that explains the value associated with that position in the longer term.

Alexis Ryan has been in procurement for 2 decades, the last 5 years of which have been spent in leadership positions. After starting her career in Legal, she ended up in procurement with no preconceived notions about the function’s value proposition or focus.

In this interview, Alexis provides her advice about how and when to request additional procurement headcount and how to increase the chances of the request being approved:

• Which procurement metrics can be most effective at supporting requests for additional headcount
• The objections to growing procurement’s headcount that leaders should expect to face in the enterprise-wide competition for resources
• What a documented headcount business case should look like, and the type of information it should include

When it comes to governance during the sourcing process, your experience probably matches one of the following two scenarios:

1. You have a strict 7 or 8 step process, and at the end of each step you have to get an approval of some sort to move to the next.  
2. You have an approval council that wants to see proof that you checked every single box during the sourcing process.  

What do these scenarios have in common? They are burdensome, create mountains of paperwork, and really slow down the process. No wonder stakeholders want to bypass procurement altogether.

In this podcast, AOP Founder and Host Philip Ideson shares his easy 2-step governance process, one that he created when he was an Indirect Sourcing Manager earlier in his career. This process - and the templates required to carry it out - are part of one of the AOP Mastermind mini-courses that you member companies will be able to access on July 1st,.

For many procurement teams, risk management is now priority #1. If that sounds like your situation, how can you make sense of all the unknowns and ensure that each one of your category strategies is prepared to adapt to whatever may come your way?

In today’s solo show, AOP Founder and Host Philip Ideson shares one way you can balance risk and agility: by taking the business continuity and disaster recovery plans we often ask our suppliers to provide and applying the concept to your category strategy.

This approach can be used whether the category, product or service in question has a physical supply chain (products) or a virtual supply chain (services). Either way, a category continuity plan will help you proactively identify the risks associated with a category, product, or service and identify potential mitigation steps to take should a particular scenario occur.

Listen to this podcast to learn more about the following ways to apply business continuity planning to risk management:

• The six key steps you will need to follow to create your business continuity plan, and why the focus is about ensuring you are well-informed
• Why supply chain mapping and scenario planning are a powerful (and actionable) combination
• Which proven frameworks and tools can be helpful when identifying specific points of failure

A lot of things have changed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, not the least of which has been procurement and supply chain teams being thrust into the spotlight in very challenging conditions. As an Executive Search Consultant, Tom Graham has naturally been focused on how this increased exposure has impacted leaders, individual contributors, and entire teams.

Since the lockdowns began, Tom has been holding regular, virtual roundtables with Chief Procurement Officers and Chief Supply Chain Officers to discuss everything from crisis management to planning for the new normal. Their observations and perspectives on next steps have evolved with the status of the crisis, and as businesses begin to open back up, the time is drawing near to start acting on those ideas. 

In this interview, Tom shares what he has seen and heard and what he expects to see next as the world continues to adapt to the new normal: 

• Why he expects the initial transition period to be so difficult for companies that are in the process of bringing their operations back online
• Why natural leaders have been less impacted by our current virtual ‘working from home’ situation than people might have expected
• One of the best techniques he has seen in practice for finding a solution to a highly complex problem and making it very easy and straightforward for others in the enterprise to support

Logistics has never been an easy category of spend to manage. Whether your company is multimodal, focused on less-than truckload (LTL), or depends upon small parcel, carriers and third-party logistics providers form a critical link between you and your customers. Superimpose the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic on top of that complexity, and you have one of the most fluid and challenging situations procurement will get involved in.

Joe Lazzerini is a Consultant at Corcentric, where he helps organizations manage their logistics category spend. In fact, he was consulting in logistics long before he found his way to the world of procurement.

In this interview, Joe Lazzerini shares his point of view with Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner on:

• What the state of the global logistics market looked like before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic
• When companies should look to their carriers for input on costs, contracts, and shipping capacity
• Why paying the right price is more important than paying the lowest price, and the importance of becoming a ‘shipper of choice’