Procurement Skills for 2025

Every change needs a trigger. There has to be something what drives us forward. It does not necessarily need to be Send a Man on the Moon type of BHAG [Big Hairy Audacious Goal], but at least forward-looking idea for something what is not easily reachable would be good.

In addition to your own set of ideas it would be good to combine these with trends and paradigm shifts alter from multiple directions.

Procurement is one of these areas where simultaneously different changes happen. On one hand it is very traditional field where demand meets supply and where agreement between multiple parties is made.

However nowadays more and more is requested from Procurement by other functions. Traditional task of finding supplier, fulfilling purchase request and ensuring on-time and on-quality delivery may not be enough anymore.

Industry 4.0 hype expands all borders and original roles and responsibilities get vaguer. Therefore, new skills are required from teams working in procurement.

CIPS aerospace study from 2018 listed important skills in procurement required under Industry 4.0. Highlighting most interesting ones below:

Centre of Excellence on Markets and Business, this requires to be very open minded and curious by nature. But additionally, demands to build up solid information network and being able to filter good from bad.

Analytical Skills, nowadays it is all about data, data quality, but also to do something meaningful with data and understand this in a way that new strategical decisions can be made.

Ability to influence and lead change, procurement must take stronger approach and drive and lead changes. Often most of the money is saved in supply chain and only ones who can make it happen are procurement teams.

On top of these I would add

Integrations & Collaboration and to act as connector between Finance, Commercial, Operations and Suppliers. Understanding that suppliers are extension to business and that strategic relations are key success factors.

By using Procurement Flow many of these newly required skills can already be applied and Procurement can be more strategical. Efficient collaborative teamwork platform allows to save time on routine tasks. Hence there will be more time left to work with suppliers, crawl market information or use analytical skills to develop new Procurement Strategies.