Anyone who thinks that buyers simply process orders is - hopefully - very much mistaken. Purchasing can make a significant contribution to competitiveness. For this to succeed, companies must drastically reduce the time spent on routine activities.
At its core, purchasing is concerned with procuring goods and services of the right quality and at an optimal price/performance ratio. In order to perform this task responsibly, they need good information and, above all, sufficient time. Buyers analyze, research and compare offers. They lay the foundation for providing your colleagues with materials that ultimately lead to the desired work result.
Therefore, it would be a pity if the purchasing department had to deal with faxing papers every day, switching from SAP® to Outlook or, in case of doubt, ordering past the system because it does not work in the system to create an order the way it has to be? Such questions have also been asked by the Fraunhofer ILM and within the scope of the study "Purchasing 4.0 - How purchasing departments need to position themselves in the course of digitalization". researched with the help of experts.
Purchasing of the future - what is changing
The respondents see a change in job descriptions in purchasing: away from clerical work and increasingly toward multi-talent. A multi-talent who indirectly helps to develop products with his knowledge, analyzes data and is more involved in controlling and coordination tasks. The result is a field of tasks with new, challenging requirements. A higher level of qualification is expected in order to make employees part of innovation management.
All tasks that are of an administrative or operational nature will (according to one of the theses) be largely digitized and automated. What remains is the function of monitoring by strategic purchasing. In the future, approximately 75 % of the respondents see their role as an active shaper and pioneer, as their interface position to internal teams and external parties in the supply chain is of high importance.
Change Management: How we can support you in this transformation
As an SAP® Silver Partner, we are experts in the areas of Purchase2Pay and Order2Cash. We ourselves come from the retail industry and know how these process chains work and what is important if you want to create transparency in your SAP®. Our proven solutions are only one side of the coin that we can offer you. The other side is that in our over 80 customer projects with well-known German retailers or retail groupsWe were able to gain experience in how to get all parties involved under one communicative hat in order to achieve the best possible project result.
We learned what questions need to be asked about ingrained processes and to what degree internal processes may or should be streamlined in order for positive change to occur. Let's find out together what we can do for you. Feel free to contact us: stephan.kaup@consult-sk.de | thomas.dresselhaus@consult-sk.de
