Despite considerable further development of procurement in the past few decades, significant savings potential still remains untapped in companies.
The main reason for this can be seen in the structure of many procurement organizations, which assign all strategic sourcing process tasks to one purchaser for one or, as a general rule, even several commodity groups. As a result of such organizational models, too many heterogeneous task packages are assigned to just one single employee despite frequent separation of strategic and operational procurement. In this way, purchasers become "commodity group generalists," who often do not have the time and know-how to perform each activity across the strategic sourcing process with the necessary accuracy and speed.
This is where the smart procurement organization comes into play: The objective of this new organizational form in procurement is to minimize complexity of tasks for the purchasers, thereby tremendously improving performance in procurement.
That’s why core focus of the smart procurement organization is on defining new task packages in the scope of strategic sourcing.