Good evening Abdullah - I'll contribute an observation on the first one. Perhaps others who have been doing contract management and procurement for longer than me might have a different view, or say it more eloquently, but here goes....

Purchasing is a subset of procurement. It is the giving effect to a lot of the procurement work that you've done earlier (i.e. establishing what you want, identifying suppliers etc).

That said, I think that you can purchase without doing procurement, and in fact, I'd go so far as to say that you can even get the same outcome.

However, only by procurement can you demonstrate that you've got the right outcome. If you only purchase, and don't understand your needs, identify the market and consider the offerings against your needs, you can't demonstrate that you've got the best outcome for the business.

And this is where I think we as a group can demonstrate our worth to the business. We can show with procurement the outcomes that we've avoided (goods not matching requirements, getting better pricing outcomes, repetitional damage etc) by running a fair and robust process ensures that the business is better off.

On many occasions I've seen my team has moved someone from their initial fixed ideas into better outcomes by taking the time to show them what's possible and what good looks like. Do that enough times, and you have more and more allies in the business to encourage others to use your services.

Regards


Darren

Hi, Abdullah,

Check out this article in the IACCM Library, 'Procurement' and 'Purchasing' Are Different:
www.iaccm.com/resources/

Having looked at this topic, there is actually already a lot written on the question of the difference between purchasing and procurement. As they observe, for the typical person they are probably the same, but apparently 'the experts' in procurement know the difference! Though once you start reading, there is plenty of contradiction...

When it comes to Supply Management, it is yet another variant and clear as mud whether it is actually different from Procurement. Supply Chain Management is certainly a more holistic activity of which procurement is part, but that's about all you can really deduce.

The net is, these terms are used with a high degree of variability and tend to mean whatever anyone wants them to mean; the only common factor is that they are all associated with the act of buying!

Tim Cummins

Hi Abdullah

Years ago Procurement and Purchasing were often used interchangeability. These days they have very different meanings. Procurement refers to the end-to-end activities from strategic category management, through to the operational analytics of spend and performance, to the tactical buying and sourcing activities which can happen in-house or in shared services.

As the Procurement function has 'grown up'it has become far more strategic, so although the term Procurement refers to all the activities conducted by the function, it also implies more strategic perspectives. The scope is also overlapping with other related functions like Finance (Accounts Payable as part of the purchase to pay process) and supply chain (Supply Planning, product innovation and supplier performance management). The increasing focus on digital in Procurement is also seeing more collaboration with other functions for example, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and machine learning, process automation and contract management, and predictive analytics.

Purchasing is clearly the administrative activity of raising a purchase order, managing the goods/service receipt notice and approving to pay. More advanced companies use on-line catalogues to support this along with automated workflow routing and defined delegations of authority. Put simply, Purchasing includes the tactical purchase and approval activities to support buying.

When we speak about supply chain today, we tend to talk about a value chain. Some organizations are now including supply chain and Procurement in one organization given the overlaps, but predominantly they continue to be separate, but related functions.

Supply chain will include demand planning and forecasting, distribution planning, warehousing and logistics, manufacturing (which may also be a separate function), supply planning and often new product development.

Where Procurement gets involved most is in supply planning and supplier performance management, for instance, using contracts to enforce performance, and collaborating with supply chain and marketing for product and service innovation by tracking supply markets and innovations.

Conceptually, the Procurement function has shifted from managing costs to providing value. Using advanced analytics of COGS and SG&A data, digital tools and advanced supplier market research, the function is working far more collaboratively with other functions. As business cadence increases, functions are becoming more linked and lines between which function does what is blurring.

Hope this helps.

In addition to particular responses from other members who may have noticed such a potential decline in remuneration, if any, I would encourage the poster of this forum entry to regularly check IACCM annual salary review. Please refer to our IACCM library, by clicking on www.iaccm.com/resources/contract-management-resources/

Dear David,
The performance of the Contract Manager role and the performance of the Contract Management Process in general is one of our key points in each one of our recent IACCM anual conferences and networking events, as the matter takes us to the question: "How should we measure and demonstrate success?"
Indeed, while transactional performance is clearly important, it rarely offers the insights that we need, if we are to raise our status and our contribution.
Our thinking and our measurements must start to focus on driving benefits at a portfolio level and relate directly to achieving the strategic goals of our business.
Value will be delivered through a process based view, through monitoring the outcomes of what we do, through generating measured innovation and continuous improvement.
This depends upon capturing and analysing performance data, through challenging established rules and procedures, through inspiring the new models and approaches we have discussed this week. And it also depends on courage - developing leadership and influencing skills.
Keep in mind one of IACCM survey findings: 'Contract Management is one of the least automated processes... and this results in inefficiency and weaknesses in PERFORMANCE oversight, as well as in the absence of management reporting and information'. Here we value the importance of Contract Management Automation and that´s why we are focused on this topic in recent Ask the Expert sessions and in our future events (Australasia and The Americas conferences).
Best regards,
Pablo Cilotta

Dear David, have you thought about listing out every task that contact managers are responsible for in your corporation then, assigning a numerical value to each task. Then, assigning a score to each task to analyse and create a quantified report on your overall contract management performance?

e.g. you mentioned governance, negotiation, change process as a few of the tasks. Perhaps you could write these tasks in a spreadsheet and assign values like so:

Total Value = 100

Governance - 30
Negotiation - 20
Change Process - 10
Deliverables Tracking - 10
Obligations Tracking - 10
Exit Management - 20

Then, for each contract manager, you could assess their performance based on a score. Score could be for example, between 1 and 10.

e.g.

Score Values = 1 through 10

Performance Assessment for: Joe Smith (Sr. Contract Manager) for Q1

Governance - 30 - 8
Negotiation - 20 - 6
Change Process - 10 - 9
Deliverables Tracking - 10 - 9.5
Obligations Tracking - 10 - 7
Exit Management - 20 - 9

You could average each of the score values and weigh it against how important each of the tasks are (based on their numerical value). From a high level point of view, based on these numbers, you could create a percentage of "contract management performance efficiency" per quarter/month/week/day for each of your contract managers.

This is just one idea. As full disclosure, I work with a contract management software vendor where we help our clients effectively manage their contracts online. We don't have this particular feature built out on our software yet, but would be open to discussing further and building it our for you in our Analytics & Reporting function, if you'd be interested.

Feel free to contact me directly at nazar.abdul@sysintellects.com

Hope the above ideas help!

The less standardization you have on your services the greater the difficulty will be in establishing useful performance metrics that span your portfolio. For example, a BPO contract or a customer IT services agreement will have many specific considerations that can lengthen the time of negotiation and result in contracts that vary substantially from other contracts in the same portfolio.

There are a few disadvantages from the pass-through approach. First, the party bearing the cost is not in direct negotiation with the source of the cost. As such, some costs that might be more aggressively addressed are not fully addressed. The discussions around how to best manage and mitigate the costs will exclude the party who is ultimately most interested and invested in those costs. As such, there is seldom much innovation or break-through thinking generated in these discussions.

There are other disadvantages arising under pass-through approaches related to the contractual terms, which also impact costs.

That's what SI's do. You go to an SI to be a one-stop shop. It is inevitable that he wont be able to do it all himself so much will be subcontracted. Where this is done at zero margin (!) we call it pass through. It does make me wonder why an SI would want the admin and risk burden of such a large pass through without any reward and, I agree with Anonymous that you are distanced from the party actually completing the work, so you don't have direct control over half of your project.

Hire a good PM and split the SI contract into two and deal direct with both.

Not sure of the size of your proposed project nor of your organization. I just finished leading negotiation of a large, multi-year ERP implementation project that will span several countries and be vital to our company's future. We have a single SI who has the resources to complete the work themselves (we reserved the right to review and approve any proposed subcontractor/subcontractor resources prior to their use). Not sure why you have an SI that wants to, if I understand correctly, use one or more subcontractors to perform a significant portion of the work.

If you are using a smaller Systems Integrator, then I would want to make sure that the SI is responsible for consistency in how the work is performed and that consistent methodology is used; and that ultimately the SI is FULLY responsible for the work delivered. Depending on the size of the ERP work and your organization, you may want to hire a Project Management team or at least Project Manager to help oversee the timely completion of the work.

As to you question about whether or not the project is worth executing - without knowing the business case, the cost and understanding the risks, I'm not sure anyone can answer that, but I would be cautious with such a large percentage being subcontracted.

Hi Suzanne,

You might want to start with Suzanne Birch at IACCM Resourcing sbirch@iaccmresourcing.com. Also, you can post your resume on the IACCM Job Post page under the resource tab. Good luck!

P.S. Next week Suzanne Birch will be hosting a Women's Networking Group webinar on 'Marketing Yourself through Social Media.' You might want to sign up for it. Check out the events calendar.

You might want to check with Global Resources depending on what you want to do. They do a lot of placement of professionals into Corproate settings as consultants. My company has used them and I know peopel that work for them.

Communications is a repeated source of success or failure in contract management (as with so many other pursuits!). Unfortunately, communications are treated as a step or action item. Successful contract management programs often cite their sustainable communication strategy, and not merely an occasional tactic, as the key driver of their success.

It would be interesting to see whether any members have examples of sustainable communication strategies that they can share across the IACCM membership base.

I've noticed generally that younger, less mature organizations have a less enthusiastic view of the contract management function, whereas a large, mature organization usually has realized at some point that it is essential. To a certain extent, I think that we in legal or contract management roles are unreasonable if we expect that others will really "get" what we do. Normally they just want answers or results. But time and time again I've seen the greatest successes come in situations where the legal/contracts function sits down and works directly with the business leads as partners. Once the business leads feel supported, they will become evangelists, that is, provided that the support we give is creative, responsive, and timely.

Contract Management needs to be driven as strategic initiative, with top down approach to see success. Integrating the activities of contract management with existing quality audit process and project execution norms may give the required boost or importance. Continuous improvement with revision in tools and checklists, creating extensions of contract management process within the stakeholders like sales and operations, by providing enough ammunition through trainings and continuous dialogue to resolve issues. Management attention and involvement in the process can be increased by helping in provisioning of visual metrics depicting risk analysis, risk profiling without consuming the precious hours.

I would like to reply (after two years :)) to the second comment here below which starts with a great observation on the effect on maturity of organisations on how they perceive contract management bu then states that "Normally they just want answers or results. But time and time again I've seen the greatest successes come in situations where the legal/contracts function sits down and works directly with the business leads as partners. Once the business leads feel supported, they will become evangelists, that is, provided that the support we give is creative, responsive, and timely."

Actually my view is that if this would be sales-side contract management this exactly describes the way less mature organisations look at contract management. Contract management 'only' as supporting function and not as performance monitor, 'checks and balances' of sales and delivery, profit maximizer and risk reducer which goes much further then working together with other functions but actually keeping them on track.

"Supply Chain?"

"Partner" rather than manager?

This said, I'm pretty sure that "Procurement" is the term commonly used in PM circles (It's certainly the term used in PMBOK) so I would question whether the re-brand is the way to go.

Is your procurement team centralised / remote from the projects? Any prospect of co-locating resources? (Even if it's only one or two days a week - it's harder to hurdle a real person!). Any road-shows / team building events in the pipeline?

Any idea if the Contract Management team feel like there is a similar issue between themselves and the PMs?

Thanks for your reply, useful comments. Something cosmetic like a name change would certainly not help on its own, but I was interested to see if anyone had done it successfully as a starting point of wider culture change. We've tried lots of things over the years, and our Commercial team on the sales contract side do indeed have the same problem. We have different offices, but the majority of project staff are in the same building as us. I think part of the problem is that because people are so busy, they don't stop for 2 minutes and just think about what they need to do, it's not deliberate bypassing (on the whole). It's an age old issue that I know many contracts staff face.

I like to think that effective procurement delivers the right deal with the right supplier. If you are really committed to doing that, to making your internal "client" successful, you will be less likely to be bypassed. That is very much in the way you engage with them, and what you do for them, If you help them see risks and opportunities they had not yet identified, and find a smart way to handle them, word will get around, and you may have to turn away business!
A new name might not be the way to go - but a new tag line might.
I'm not sure what it would look like in your business, but maybe along the lines of "Making your deals happen" or just "the right deals with the right suppliers"
Good luck

It's a great question!

Many functions struggle with this same issue - and in the end, it's about behaviour more than a name. Of course, the Procurement 'brand' may be tarnished, but re-naming usually doesn't fix it. It's a visible - and perhaps shocking - change of behaviour that makes people start to think differently.

I've led and witnessed transformations and I'd be happy to chat with you if you would like to discuss ideas.

Thanks for the further replies, much appreciated.

Tim - I'll take you up on that offer, thank you. I'll talk to my boss as I'm sure he'd like to be in on the conversation. Will be in touch.

Commercial has much more positive connotations but it is going to be deeds and actions rather than titles that will change perceptions. The IACCM research on the Future of Contracting is a good thought provoking read about what needs to change.

In one of the previous organisations I worked for, the whole procurement and contract management division was called "Enabling Services" and this was quite effective in creating a "helping" culture for our operational areas. In fact, we had a "customer service" attitude and this was quite transformational - Of course, culture is more than just having a name change and a new slogan.