Saturday 28 November 2015

Enablers for Supplier Management

When delivering category management or supplier management workshops I often find myself saying "I wrote a blog on that". Last month I provided an index of the blogs that I mentioned during a Category Management workshop. Today I'm sharing the blogs that refer to content covered in a recent 3 day Supplier Management workshop (and updated to support learning covered in subsequent sessions in 2016.)

As ever the blogs seem to concentrate on the enablers for effective working rather than the procurement tools and techniques covered in the workshop. And yes there's a degree of similarity in the index between Category Management and the Supplier Management workshops - not because the procurement tools were similar - but because soft skills, change management, communication, influencing and creativity are common enablers, and are all skills requiring development and use in all aspects of procurement activity. 

The Enablers (in no particular order - and I'm not expecting anyone to want to read every blog - just any that either pique your interest as you read the title - or for those who have attended the workshops - topics you wanted to explore further)
Some of the unconventional, yet effective, tools we used or spoke about
Supplier Management - because I do write some processey blogs
Future blogs that I would like to write following discussions during the workshop(s) include:
  • Problem reversal - a great technique for problem solving.
  • What's in a word - would relationship management be a better term than supplier relationship management? See picture for what we think the 3 different interpretations of 'supplier management' might be dependant on whether we're procurement, a supplier or an internal stakeholder. 
  • The language of stick and carrot - because we need to be consciously aware of which of these we're using.
  • The link between mind, body and emotions.
  • More on organisational and personal metaphors and the words we use for each (exploit, attach, fight, war, threat and enemy are words that work well for those operating a war like metaphor, but won't work with someone who operates a nature like metaphor for their life).
  • Use of pipe cleaners to solve problems!?!
For other more procurementy or businessy blogs I've written please see this index

I also mentioned a few of my rants during the session, and an index of all my rants can be found by following this link (The common theme seems to be the lack of humanity with which we often treat each other!)

Alison Smith
The Purchasing Coach 
Inspiring change inside and out (more here on why that's important)

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