Ever wonder why many companies view indirect procurement as a non-strategic back office function? Maybe it’s that indirect practitioners often focus too narrowly on measuring cost savings from indirect spend sourcing initiatives and lose sight of how those initiatives impact core financial metrics such as total cost of ownership (TCO), operating profit, working capital, and cash flow, among others. Therefore, adopting a well-structured indirect spend management framework that establishes that connection can bring real value...

In our last post. we discussed adopting spend under management (SUM) and the first of five principles. Here are the other four: 2) Purchase through a formalized requisition to purchase order approval process. The purchasing processes of an organization should be governed by policies and procedures that are complete and enforced universally. Simply having them in place is a starting point but the key issue is enforcement. Are all the spend areas incorporated? Does my...