What makes a good procurement professional

With major enhancements to supplier onboarding and management, advanced sourcing , chemical inventory management and reporting, the most recent release of our supplier management solution for supplier lifecycle management demonstrates our commitment to creating cutting-edge, easy-to-use business automation software for a seamless user experience.

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These cookies are used to ensure that any adverts visible are relevant to your interests. Contact us. Blog 02 May What are the secrets to procurement professional success? Here are the top seven habits of high functioning procurement professionals: Be a team player.

Keep the big picture in mind. Make fiscally responsible decisions. They seek out best practices in procurement, benchmarking performance, and continually seeking improvement. Great procurement professionals identify the needs of their customers and find the best ways to meet those needs. Building stakeholder and supplier relationships based on trust, mutual benefits, and innovation while still delivering value is a core requirement and no easy feat for procurement professionals. To develop these skills, one must be an expert listener and an even better communicator.

Salim Khalife is the founder, president and CEO of Paramount WorkPlace, a technology company that develops, sells, and supports advanced web-based and mobile requisition, procurement, and expense software solutions for mid-market organizations. The company introduced its first cloud-based SaaS requisition application in and continues to innovate and expand its partnerships and integrations ever since. Learn more at www. How We Help. Get a Demo. Top 5 Traits of Successful Procurement Professionals.

What does it take to move procurement from a tactical function in the accounting department to a strategic role within the supply chain?

They possess excellent negotiation skills Procurement professionals must scrutinize every contract and negotiate the best prices for their companies while remaining courteous and fair to suppliers. They embrace technology The procurement process is under powerful pressure to transform — to leverage technology to make the entire process more strategic.

They are detail oriented, yet have a big picture view Procurement professionals are often very detail oriented, organized people, and such attention to the fine points is a tremendous asset in the job. They are service minded and great communicators Great procurement professionals identify the needs of their customers and find the best ways to meet those needs. About the author: Salim Khalife is the founder, president and CEO of Paramount WorkPlace, a technology company that develops, sells, and supports advanced web-based and mobile requisition, procurement, and expense software solutions for mid-market organizations.

Share on twitter. Is your commodity high risk? Is this a new product? Is this a new supplier? Does your program team not have a clue? This is, likely, the single most important skill to have engaged at all times.

This skill is essential to get out of the reactive way of doing business and behaving proactively. How many times do we encounter people, departments or companies that spend all of their time whining about all the firefighting they have to do? An ounce of anticipation can go a long way to prevent this way of doing business. You need to kick off a supplier by January 7 to meet program timing. Engineering has committed to get you drawings by December 7.

However, if you wait until December 7 to check on them, you will almost certainly be disappointed. On November 7 you should be asking for partial information and validating that drawing creation is on schedule.

People buy from people. Build relationships with suppliers and with the members of your organization for whom you are doing the buying. Visit your suppliers. Resilience and agility: Not everything is going to go well all the time. How we, as procurement professionals, react and adapt to situations will maximize our value and contribution to our company.

Patience: Your internal processes will take too long. Your supplier will quote too high of a price or too long of a lead-time. The program team will give you unreasonable cost and timing expectations.