Everyone wants an efficient purchasing team, so in order to learn just what is an efficient purchasing team it can be helpful to turn the issue on its head and look at how you can build an inefficient purchasing team, so that you can avoid this at all costs!
1. Have a culture where there is no collaboration between the purchasing team and suppliers. Use a stick to beat them (metaphorically of course) but ensure that they do not share any information with suppliers and above all, do not communicate with them!
2. Have a culture where price is the only determining factor when it comes to choosing suppliers. This will ensure that the supply chain is weak and unstable and this will render the purchasing team not just inefficient but completely impotent!
3. Always ensure that the purchasing team will ignore all quality control issues and requirements. This will result in defects, shoddy goods and the production line being interrupted, which will show the purchasing team in all its inefficient glory.
4. The purchasing team should be unrecognised by top management. They should not have the backing of management and instead should simply be very much a back room function that is given no recognition at all. Without the endorsement of senior management or the boardroom, no one will listen to what they have to say and they will soon lose any efficiency they may have had……
5. Separate the purchasing team from the design team and do not let them communicate with the design team. This means that the purchasing team will have no idea of what is happening within the design team or be aware of any issues that may be causing problems within the production process, again rendering their efforts ineffective.
6. Do not allow the purchasing team to become involved in demand planning or looking at what the future demand is likely to be. If you do this, then the supply chain will be precarious and make the purchasing team virtually unable to do their jobs in any way, let alone an efficient manner.
7. Foster a culture of inflexibility. The more flexible the supply chain is the easier the job will be for the procurement team. So the ideal (when building an inefficient team) is to create a culture where there is no flexibility and they will find that the supply chain will simply not be able to come up with the goods when required, which is a fundamental requirement for the performance of a purchasing team.
8. When building an inefficient team, you don’t need to worry about the calibre of the purchasing team. You appoint anyone, it doesn’t matter if they understand the principles of purchasing or how it is done in the 21st Century. Anyone will do; after all to build an efficient team you need to secure the best quality candidates, but if you are creating an inefficient one, you can simply appoint anyone……
9. Always have a disparate team who are simply individuals who are also mavericks; the more they are separate and doing their own thing then the more inefficient the team will be. For the purchasing team to be efficient they must all operate as a team with egos kept firmly in check; otherwise the team will be courting disaster on a daily basis.
10. The final thing that will result in an inefficient team is a lack of strategic approach and supplier relationship management. For the team to be effective they need to operate strategically and realise that this is the only platform that they should operate from. If you withdraw this approach then the purchasing team will simply wither on the vine.
Achieving all these steps and approaches will result in a completely inefficient purchasing team and the end result is achieved!