A decade of globalization-fueled competition has opened the eyes of executives everywhere to the strategic benefits that can be achieved through the intelligent use of purchasing and supply management. These include more competitive supply chains, improved product development, and faster times to market—in addition to the significant cost advantages associated with sourcing from low-cost countries. Often, however, evolution in the way executives think about purchasing hasn’t translated into results. A dearth of talent derails the improvement efforts of many companies, while others suffer from a misalignment between purchasing and the broader company strategy or from low or misguided aspirations.
十年的全球化竞争让各地的高管们意识到，通过智能化的采购和供应管理可以实现的战略利益。这些利益包括更具竞争力的供应链、改进的产品开发和更快的市场推出时间——此外，还有与从低成本国家采购相关的显著成本优势。然而，通常情况下，高管们对采购的思考方式的演变并没有转化为实际成果。人才的匮乏使许多公司的改进努力受挫，而其他公司则面临采购与更广泛公司战略之间的不对齐，或是低或误导的期望。
Our global survey of chief procurement officers (CPOs) suggests that the role of purchasing at many companies hasn’t evolved much beyond the function’s narrow, transactional roots as a buyer of materials, components, and services.11.
Nicolas Reinecke, Peter Spiller, and Drew Ungerman, “The talent factor in purchasing,” The McKinsey Quarterly, 2007 Number 1, pp. 6–9.
尼古拉斯·雷内克、彼得·斯皮勒和德鲁·昂格曼，“采购中的人才因素，” 麦肯锡季刊，2007 年第 1 期，页码 6–9。 But some purchasing and supply-management organizations are attracting the attention of CEOs by taking the function to the next level. By integrating their activities more closely with those of their internal customers, some purchasing units have gained sustainable cost reductions in nontraditional areas (marketing or health benefits, for example) where previous optimization efforts have fizzled. Others go further still, using their insights to challenge and enhance manufacturing or administration activities. Finally, some use purchasing as a springboard for innovation, leveraging a broader supply base of tangible and intangible goods to enhance product-development efforts.
我们对首席采购官（CPO）的全球调查表明，许多公司的采购角色并没有超越作为材料、组件和服务买家的狭隘、交易性根源。11. Nicolas Reinecke, Peter Spiller, 和 Drew Ungerman, “采购中的人才因素，” 麦肯锡季刊，2007 年第 1 期，第 6–9 页。 但一些采购和供应管理组织通过将职能提升到一个新水平，吸引了首席执行官的关注。通过与内部客户的活动更紧密地整合，一些采购部门在非传统领域（例如市场营销或健康福利）获得了可持续的成本降低，而之前的优化努力则未能取得成效。还有一些部门更进一步，利用他们的洞察力来挑战和增强制造或管理活动。 最后，一些公司将采购作为创新的跳板，利用更广泛的有形和无形商品供应基础来增强产品开发工作。
While no single company we’ve studied has reached its full potential in purchasing and supply management, a look at the practices of high performers can shed light on what it will take to get there. First, top purchasers adopt a more rigorous approach to talent by simultaneously upgrading their procurement skills and exploring clever ways to connect employees across the organization in a common purpose. Second, these companies set high aspirations and establish goals that balance their vision of the future with a clear-eyed focus on how to achieve it. Finally, top purchasers place a special emphasis on aligning their sourcing efforts more closely with corporate strategic goals, making more of today’s cost-savings opportunities while positioning themselves for greater gains as globalization intensifies. These pioneering organizations are laying the foundation for a better approach to procurement—an approach that average performers shouldn’t ignore.
虽然我们研究的没有任何一家公司在采购和供应管理方面达到了其全部潜力，但高绩效者的实践可以为我们提供实现这一目标所需的启示。首先，顶尖采购者采取更严格的人才管理方法，同时提升他们的采购技能，并探索将员工在共同目标下连接起来的巧妙方式。其次，这些公司设定高期望，并建立平衡未来愿景与实现目标的清晰目标。最后，顶尖采购者特别强调将其采购努力与企业战略目标更紧密地对齐，充分利用当今的成本节约机会，同时为全球化加剧时的更大收益做好准备。这些开创性的组织正在为更好的采购方法奠定基础——这种方法是普通绩效者不应忽视的。
The problem with purchasing
购买的问题
Procurement’s tactical potential as a cost killer is no secret. After all, spending on purchased goods and services can represent 70 percent of a company’s costs, so business leaders have long known that purchasing improvements can directly improve the bottom line.22.
In our survey, for example, we found that the overall sourcing efforts of high-performing purchasing groups generated annual cost savings that were nearly six times greater than those of the low performers. Consequently, the role of purchasing has evolved around the idea of cost containment—say, squeezing external suppliers for price reductions or creating processes to restrain wasteful “maverick” spending. Today, such fundamental practices remain indispensable across a range of supply- and demand-side circumstances (the former largely through controlling prices, the latter through better management of what is purchased). Companies that fail to master these basics typically struggle to reap substantial savings, let alone see additional benefits.
采购作为成本削减者的战术潜力并不是什么秘密。毕竟，购买商品和服务的支出可以占公司成本的 70%，因此商业领袖早已知道，采购改进可以直接改善底线。22. 例如，在我们的调查中，我们发现高绩效采购团队的整体采购努力所产生的年度成本节省几乎是低绩效团队的六倍。 因此，采购的角色围绕成本控制的理念而发展——例如，向外部供应商施压以降低价格或创建流程以限制浪费的“特立独行”支出。如今，这些基本实践在各种供需情况中仍然不可或缺（前者主要通过控制价格，后者通过更好地管理所采购的内容）。 未能掌握这些基本知识的公司通常难以获得可观的节省，更不用说看到额外的好处。
For many companies, however, average proficiency in purchasing and supply management masks a troubling problem: purchasing hasn’t grown beyond its transactional origins. Talent shortfalls are the largest factor in this problem. Most companies consistently overlook the role of talent in purchasing. At one consumer-driven European company, for instance, the purchasers’ lack of marketing savvy prevented any meaningful and productive dialogue with marketers as the two groups attempted to define a new sourcing strategy. Indeed, senior executives found that constructive conversations between the parties were impossible until the company hired several purchasing managers with backgrounds that gave them a better understanding of their internal customer’s needs.
然而，对于许多公司来说，采购和供应管理的平均水平掩盖了一个令人担忧的问题：采购没有超越其交易起源。人才短缺是这个问题的最大因素。大多数公司始终忽视了人才在采购中的作用。例如，在一家以消费者为驱动的欧洲公司，采购人员缺乏市场营销的敏锐度，导致在两组试图定义新的采购策略时，无法进行任何有意义和富有成效的对话。事实上，高级管理人员发现，在公司聘请了几位具有更好理解内部客户需求背景的采购经理之前，各方之间的建设性对话是不可能的。
Low aspirations and a transactional mind-set are another problem. At one consumer product manufacturer, for example, procurement’s historical emphasis on transactional activities (mainly handling purchase orders) contributed to management’s unwillingness to entrust purchasers with the wider set of centralized outsourcing opportunities they might otherwise have “owned.” These responsibilities were instead left scattered inefficiently among several business units until a broad reorganization effort eventually addressed the problem.
低目标和交易心态是另一个问题。例如，在一家消费品制造商中，采购部门历史上对交易活动（主要是处理采购订单）的重视导致管理层不愿意将更广泛的集中外包机会委托给采购人员。这些责任反而在几个业务单位之间低效地分散，直到一次大规模的重组努力最终解决了这个问题。
An interrelated difficulty occurs when purchasers’ activities are misaligned with company strategy. Among poor performers this problem starts when companies fail to involve purchasing in the early stages of strategic planning. The ill effects appear throughout the organization. One large European company, for instance, was more than two years behind in its efforts to incorporate a product innovation that had been widely adopted by rivals. For the most part the problem was that the company’s purchasers had a single-minded focus on price, which created tensions with the supplier responsible for the innovation, making collaboration impossible. At another company an absence of English-language skills among purchasers had, over time, made the group organize its activities according to the nationality of its suppliers rather than by the type of goods being purchased. This structure prevented the company from optimizing its supply base to reduce costs—a goal that had become strategically important—while also making it hard for purchasers to gain category-specific expertise and thus credibility, with internal customers. Likewise, at a company where a major restructuring called for lower costs, purchasers saved money on a business unit’s IT spending only to find that poor alignment with the finance group’s priorities prevented the savings from reaching the company’s bottom line. The business unit’s IT budget remained unchanged, though it should have been reduced to reflect the savings.
当采购活动与公司战略不一致时，会出现相互关联的困难。在表现不佳的公司中，这个问题始于公司未能在战略规划的早期阶段让采购参与进来。其不良影响遍及整个组织。例如，一家大型欧洲公司在努力整合一项已被竞争对手广泛采用的产品创新时，落后了两年多。问题的主要原因在于该公司的采购人员过于专注于价格，这与负责创新的供应商之间产生了紧张关系，使得合作变得不可能。在另一家公司，采购人员缺乏英语能力，随着时间的推移，使得该小组根据供应商的国籍而非所购商品的类型来组织活动。这种结构阻碍了公司优化其供应基础以降低成本的目标，而这一目标已变得战略重要，同时也使得采购人员难以获得特定类别的专业知识，从而在内部客户中建立信誉。 同样，在一家进行重大重组以降低成本的公司，采购人员在一个业务单元的 IT 支出上节省了资金，却发现与财务部门的优先事项缺乏良好对齐，导致这些节省未能反映在公司的利润上。该业务单元的 IT 预算保持不变，尽管应该减少以反映节省。
Value beyond the core 核心之外的价值
Some companies, though, are escaping such pitfalls and getting more from their sourcing operations. These high performers tend to extend the influence of purchasing within their organizations by closely linking its activities to those of its internal customers, product developers, and other functional groups in order to discover new ways of adding value.
一些公司则避免了这些陷阱，并从其采购操作中获得更多。这些高绩效公司倾向于通过将采购活动与内部客户、产品开发人员和其他职能组的活动紧密联系，来扩大采购在组织中的影响力，以发现增加价值的新方法。
Enter nontraditional categories
输入非传统类别
Top sourcing organizations excel, first, by extending their activities into areas that have gone unnoticed in the past or areas that have proved too difficult to optimize. Consider a government agency where purchasers helped the HR staff benchmark the agency’s benefits plans against alternatives. After analyzing the historical costs of the existing plans, the agency’s sourcing group teamed with HR to develop and assess various options jointly and to test their appeal with employees before adopting a new plan. Purchasers brought to the project their analytical expertise and their skills in assessing suppliers and negotiating with them, while HR formalized the design. The resulting plan was approximately 7 percent cheaper than its predecessor and received a 25 percent higher satisfaction rating from employees.
顶尖的采购组织首先通过将其活动扩展到过去未被注意或难以优化的领域而表现出色。考虑一个政府机构，在那里，采购人员帮助人力资源部门将该机构的福利计划与其他选择进行基准比较。在分析了现有计划的历史成本后，该机构的采购团队与人力资源部门合作，共同开发和评估各种选项，并在采用新计划之前测试其对员工的吸引力。采购人员为项目带来了他们的分析专业知识以及评估供应商和与其谈判的技能，而人力资源部门则对设计进行了正式化。最终的计划比其前身便宜了大约 7%，并获得了员工 25%的更高满意度评分。
At another company the intelligent use of purchasing helped rein in rising legal costs by separating legal services into commoditized segments (including paralegal and research needs) and creating sourcing strategies for each individual segment. Meanwhile, the company introduced systematic performance metrics—such as indemnity averages—and created an independent general-counsel office staffed with lawyers trained in purchasing basics. Through these measures the company consolidated its provider base to 9, from 900, capturing significant savings in the process.
在另一家公司，智能化的采购使用帮助控制了不断上升的法律成本，通过将法律服务分为商品化的细分领域（包括法律助理和研究需求），并为每个细分领域创建采购策略。同时，该公司引入了系统的绩效指标，例如赔偿平均值，并成立了一个独立的总法律顾问办公室，配备了接受过采购基础培训的律师。通过这些措施，该公司将其供应商基础从 900 家整合到 9 家，从中获得了显著的节省。
Challenge the business system
挑战商业系统
In addition to uncovering hidden value, some purchasers work closely with others within their organizations to challenge and improve the way they deliver products or services to market. At a European conglomerate, for example, purchasers drove a push to outsource more manufacturing activities. By benchmarking the company’s capabilities against those of outsiders to identify outsourcing partners and by subsequently managing the resulting relationships, the company reduced the level of in-house manufacturing by 30 percent and significantly improved its times to market. Moreover, in one case the company found that sharing a supplier improved a historically thorny relationship between two business units.
除了发现隐藏的价值，一些采购人员还与组织内的其他人密切合作，以挑战和改善他们向市场交付产品或服务的方式。例如，在一家欧洲综合企业中，采购人员推动了将更多制造活动外包的进程。通过将公司的能力与外部公司的能力进行基准比较，以识别外包合作伙伴，并随后管理由此产生的关系，该公司将内部制造水平降低了 30%，并显著改善了市场交付时间。此外，在一个案例中，该公司发现共享供应商改善了两个业务单位之间历史上棘手的关系。
Purchasers can also directly support the goals of other functional groups. Some companies already use sourcing hubs in low-cost countries as beachheads to generate additional sales in those markets. Top purchasers take such collaborative efforts much further. At one casual restaurant chain, for instance, purchasers teamed up with the sales unit to devise a way to manipulate dynamically the menu items consumers see. If shrimp became relatively cheaper to source than beef in a given week, for example, the sales staff could quickly position menu items featuring the former more prominently, and vice versa, thus directly influencing customer demand in response to changing conditions. This approach allowed the chain to maximize profits and minimize the risk of supply disruptions associated with key ingredients.
采购者还可以直接支持其他职能组的目标。一些公司已经在低成本国家使用采购中心作为跳板，以在这些市场中产生额外的销售。顶级采购者将这种协作努力推向更远。例如，在一家休闲餐厅连锁店，采购者与销售部门合作，想出了一种动态调整消费者看到的菜单项的方法。例如，如果某一周虾的采购成本相对比牛肉便宜，销售人员可以迅速将包含虾的菜单项更显著地展示，反之亦然，从而直接影响客户需求以应对变化的市场条件。这种方法使得该连锁店能够最大化利润，并最小化与关键原料相关的供应中断风险。
The ability of high performers to expand their horizons can have strategic implications as well. For example, spiking fuel prices prompted one airline to initiate a procurement-led review of its jet fuel usage. The airline’s sourcing unit partnered with engineers to form a team whose analysis subsequently persuaded senior managers to invest in fuel-saving winglet extensions for the company’s fleet of older aircraft. This move shaved annual fuel consumption by 3 to 5 percent and extended the operating range of the company’s aircraft by more than 125 miles (200 kilometers), making new routes possible.
高绩效者扩展视野的能力也可能具有战略意义。例如，燃料价格飙升促使一家航空公司启动了对其喷气燃料使用的采购主导审查。该航空公司的采购部门与工程师合作，组建了一个团队，其分析随后说服了高级管理人员投资于为公司老旧机队增设节油翼尖。此举使年燃料消耗减少了 3%到 5%，并将公司飞机的航程延长了超过 125 英里（200 公里），使新航线成为可能。
Stoke the innovation engine
激发创新引擎
Suppliers have always provided critical fuel for innovation—serving, for example, as a potential source of valuable insights and technologies that support product and process improvements. Purchasers serve as a fundamental link between a company’s supply base and the rest of its value chain. Some companies exploit this connection quite effectively. P&G, for instance, has made notable progress on its ambitious target to source a high percentage of its products from outside the company. Its purchasers played an important role in nurturing the early development of the company’s popular SpinBrush—an inexpensive, battery-powered toothbrush brought to P&G by outside inventors who had modeled the product on technology they’d used earlier to create a battery-operated, spinning lollipop. Apple, for its part, harnessed its supply base to outsource much of the development of the iPod’s hardware and software. Even the idea for the device was brought to Apple by an outside entrepreneur, Tony Fadell.
供应商一直为创新提供关键的动力——例如，作为支持产品和流程改进的宝贵见解和技术的潜在来源。采购人员作为公司供应链与其价值链其他部分之间的基本纽带。一些公司有效地利用了这一联系。例如，宝洁公司在其雄心勃勃的目标上取得了显著进展，计划从公司外部采购高比例的产品。其采购人员在培育公司受欢迎的 SpinBrush（由外部发明者带给宝洁的一种廉价电池驱动牙刷）早期开发中发挥了重要作用，这款牙刷的设计灵感来自于外部发明者之前用于创造电池驱动旋转棒棒糖的技术。苹果公司则利用其供应链，将 iPod 硬件和软件的开发外包出去。甚至该设备的构思也是由外部企业家托尼·法德尔带给苹果的。
Certainly, few companies have extended their innovation models so radically, and in many cases they would not be wise to do so—a company’s approach to innovation must reflect its industry, its unique strategy, and its competitive position. Still, forward-looking purchasers can work closely with suppliers to spur product and process innovations that save money and even offer strategic advantages. At one high-tech company, for example, purchasers worked intensively with a supplier to adapt the software menus that governed a key piece of capital equipment used in manufacturing. This effort, part of a broader lean-manufacturing initiative, ultimately freed the valuable time of the operators of the equipment, who could then support an important expansion of the plant.
当然，很少有公司如此激进地扩展其创新模型，在许多情况下，这样做并不明智——公司的创新方法必须反映其行业、独特的战略和竞争地位。尽管如此，前瞻性的采购人员可以与供应商紧密合作，推动节省成本的产品和流程创新，甚至提供战略优势。例如，在一家高科技公司，采购人员与供应商密切合作，调整了管理制造中使用的关键设备的软件菜单。这项工作是更广泛的精益生产倡议的一部分，最终释放了设备操作员的宝贵时间，使他们能够支持工厂的重要扩张。
Getting there 到达那里
Although several organizations are making considerable strides along the lines discussed above, none has reached its full potential in any one area, let alone all of them. Still, a look at how these purchasing standouts are distancing themselves from the pack can offer insights into the skills and approaches necessary for achieving wider success in purchasing.
尽管一些组织在上述讨论的领域取得了相当大的进展，但没有一个在任何一个领域达到了其全部潜力，更不用说所有领域了。不过，观察这些采购杰出者如何将自己与其他组织区分开来，可以为实现更广泛的采购成功所需的技能和方法提供见解。
Connect purchasers to the business
将采购者与企业连接起来
The role that talent plays in successful sourcing cannot be overemphasized. In most industries the application of commercial negotiation tactics accounts for as little as 20 to 30 percent of the impact available from purchasing improvements. The rest comes from managing product specifications and demand—practices that purchasers learn as a result of deep functional and category expertise, their ability to apply it across a broad range of circumstances, and their understanding of the company’s wider aims. Recognizing this reality, top companies start by filling key purchasing positions with people who have a deep understanding of vital spending categories—for example, carbon composites for an aerospace company or marketing for a telecommunications company. By exhibiting a strong hiring bias toward experts, these companies improve procurement’s credibility among internal business units and create an environment that nourishes collaboration. The best purchasing groups aggressively recruit such professionals from within the ranks of their own companies, by finding, for example, a talented development engineer to manage the company’s sourcing of electrical components or a senior IT professional to develop strategies for sourcing the company’s technology. No matter where companies find these experts, our evidence suggests that the benefits of hiring them are significant (Exhibit 1).
人才在成功采购中的作用不可过分强调。在大多数行业中，商业谈判策略的应用仅占采购改进带来的影响的 20%到 30%。其余的影响来自于管理产品规格和需求——这些做法是采购人员通过深入的职能和类别专业知识、在广泛情况下应用这些知识的能力以及对公司更广泛目标的理解而学到的。认识到这一现实，顶尖公司首先通过填补关键采购职位来聘用对重要支出类别有深刻理解的人——例如，航空航天公司的碳复合材料或电信公司的市场营销。通过对专家表现出强烈的招聘偏好，这些公司提高了采购在内部业务单位中的可信度，并创造了一个促进合作的环境。 最佳采购集团积极从自己公司的内部招募这样的专业人才，例如寻找一位优秀的开发工程师来管理公司的电气元件采购，或寻找一位高级 IT 专业人士来制定公司的技术采购策略。无论公司在哪里找到这些专家，我们的证据表明，雇用他们的好处是显著的（见图 1）。
Better people, better results
更优秀的人，更好的结果
更优秀的人，更好的结果
证据表明，投资于更多战略买家会带来显著回报
Top sourcing groups also use systematic talent-development programs that help purchasers beef up their commercial acumen and establish relationships with internal customers. For promising university recruits, this training might take the form of a rotation program offering a variety of operational experiences. For long-term staff, some companies create special training programs. One large logistics conglomerate, for instance, suspected that a lack of relevant skills in the central purchasing group was hampering its interactions with an important business unit. The conglomerate therefore created a two-year “training academy” that offered high-potential candidates classroom training, workshops focused on specific product categories, and individualized development plans. The company also established strict criteria to ensure that purchasers running sourcing projects had appropriate functional knowledge in addition to skills in project management, communication, and leadership. Today the company’s purchasers are seen as peers by the business unit (indeed, purchasing employees have been poached to fill some of its leadership roles), and cooperation between purchasing and internal customers has improved dramatically.
顶级采购团队还使用系统的人才发展计划，帮助采购人员增强商业敏锐度并与内部客户建立关系。对于有潜力的大学招聘者，这种培训可能采取轮岗计划的形式，提供多种运营经验。对于长期员工，一些公司创建了特别培训项目。例如，一家大型物流集团怀疑中央采购团队缺乏相关技能，妨碍了与一个重要业务单位的互动。因此，该集团创建了一个为期两年的“培训学院”，为高潜力候选人提供课堂培训、针对特定产品类别的研讨会和个性化发展计划。公司还建立了严格的标准，以确保负责采购项目的采购人员具备适当的职能知识，以及项目管理、沟通和领导能力的技能。 今天，公司采购人员被业务部门视为同事（实际上，采购员工已被挖走以填补一些领导职位），采购与内部客户之间的合作显著改善。
Top companies also actively link purchasers with other groups in their businesses. Some rotate key personnel through engineering, manufacturing, marketing, or quality-management roles, while all forge partnerships between purchasers and these areas by creating standing cross-functional teams. These teams, led by purchasers and organized along spending category lines, form the backbone of a company’s sourcing activities. They could, for example, define the specifications of necessary products and services, create sourcing strategies, and conduct supply and market analyses. Following this approach, one large European manufacturer created more than 50 such teams, charging them with uncovering savings opportunities and developing new sourcing strategies. Within nine months the insights, analysis, and commercial thinking these teams generated were responsible for €100 million in savings—and such results aren’t atypical. Indeed, we estimate that employing cross-functional teams can nearly double the impact of a savings initiative (Exhibit 2).
顶尖公司还积极将采购人员与其业务中的其他团队联系起来。一些公司在工程、制造、市场营销或质量管理等角色之间轮换关键人员，而所有公司通过创建常设跨职能团队来在采购人员与这些领域之间建立合作关系。这些团队由采购人员领导，按支出类别组织，构成公司采购活动的骨干。例如，他们可以定义所需产品和服务的规格，制定采购策略，并进行供应和市场分析。采用这种方法，一家大型欧洲制造商创建了超过 50 个这样的团队，负责发现节省机会和开发新的采购策略。在九个月内，这些团队所产生的洞察、分析和商业思维为公司带来了 1 亿欧元的节省——这样的结果并不罕见。实际上，我们估计，采用跨职能团队可以使节省倡议的影响几乎翻倍（见图 2）。
The power of teamwork 团队合作的力量
跨职能团队可以将节省计划的影响几乎翻倍
The US state of Illinois jump-started its recent purchasing transformation by hiring a group of experts in areas such as health care, employee benefits, the contracting of services, IT, and knowledge management. After receiving intensive, “boot camp”–style training in purchasing, these experts led teams that helped save nearly $300 million over two years. To share information across agencies and departments, one of these groups, the new knowledge-management team, created a Web-based tool to bring together data on supplier capabilities, industry performance, and purchasing tools.
美国伊利诺伊州通过聘请在医疗保健、员工福利、服务合同、信息技术和知识管理等领域的专家，启动了其近期的采购转型。在接受了密集的“训练营”式采购培训后，这些专家领导的团队在两年内帮助节省了近 3 亿美元。为了在各机构和部门之间共享信息，其中一个团队，即新的知识管理团队，创建了一个基于网络的工具，以整合供应商能力、行业表现和采购工具的数据。
Shoot for the moon, but start on the ground
瞄准月球，但要从地面开始
The best sourcing groups strive to transform their roles within the organization, and this effort starts with high aspirations. Within high-performing sourcing groups, for example, employees are far more likely to view cost reductions as a vital (though not sufficient) stepping-stone to a wider impact than are their counterparts in low-performing groups. Top performers view purchasing not only as the commercial conscience of the organization but also as its competitive eyes and ears.
最佳采购团队努力在组织内转变其角色，这一努力始于高远的抱负。例如，在高绩效的采购团队中，员工更有可能将成本降低视为实现更大影响的重要（尽管不是唯一的）垫脚石，而低绩效团队的员工则不然。顶尖表现者不仅将采购视为组织的商业良知，还将其视为竞争的眼睛和耳朵。
However, these groups back such lofty aspirations with a pragmatic approach to achieving them. Typically, the transition to achieving such a mind-set begins when a CPO works closely with the CEO and other senior executives to set (and subsequently meet) aggressive, organization-wide savings targets. While it may seem counterintuitive to start with costs only to move beyond them, it’s important to recognize that many low- and even average-performing purchasing units either don’t set such targets or else create uncoordinated ones—for example, applying goals across a smattering of spending categories or business units. This mind-set often results in blurred accountabilities, a diminished sense of urgency, and, consequently, unrealized or unsustainable results.
然而，这些团体以务实的方式支持如此崇高的愿望。通常，实现这种思维方式的过渡始于首席采购官与首席执行官及其他高级管理人员密切合作，以设定（并随后实现）激进的全组织节省目标。虽然从成本入手再超越成本似乎违反直觉，但重要的是要认识到，许多低效甚至中等效能的采购单位要么不设定这样的目标，要么设定不协调的目标——例如，在零散的支出类别或业务单位之间应用目标。这种思维方式往往导致责任模糊、紧迫感降低，因此，未能实现或无法持续的结果。
By contrast, when CPOs collaborate with other senior managers to champion goals that cross organizational and product line boundaries, the savings potential not only is greater but also creates an opportunity for purchasers to establish credibility with other business units. The large European manufacturer mentioned previously, for example, is following this path. After setting a goal to reduce spending on purchased goods by 13 percent, and supporting that goal with a robust, cross-functional initiative, the CPO observed that the purchasing group’s relationships with business units improved and that its broader aspirations gained traction. As the initiative proceeded, the benefits of working more closely with suppliers early in the design and manufacturing process became clear, and senior engineers who had initially resisted the changes began to come around. Indeed, less than a year into the change, the CPO found that several top engineers from key business units had actually applied to join the new purchasing group.
相反，当首席采购官与其他高级管理人员合作，倡导跨越组织和产品线边界的目标时，节省潜力不仅更大，还为采购人员与其他业务单位建立信誉创造了机会。例如，之前提到的大型欧洲制造商正在走这条道路。在设定了将采购商品支出减少 13%的目标，并通过一个强有力的跨职能倡议来支持该目标后，首席采购官观察到采购团队与业务单位的关系改善，且其更广泛的愿望获得了支持。随着倡议的推进，早期在设计和制造过程中与供应商更紧密合作的好处变得明显，最初抵制变革的高级工程师们也开始转变。实际上，在变革不到一年时，首席采购官发现几位来自关键业务单位的顶尖工程师实际上已申请加入新的采购团队。
For one mobile-telecom company, heightened aspirations arrived along with a new CPO, who immediately and publicly assumed responsibility for the lion’s share of cost reductions identified in a new restructuring program. After meeting the target, the unit set about transforming its role from the company’s buyer into a cross-functional partner and has, along the way, gained responsibilities that would have been unthinkable just four years before—including decision rights for the company’s handset portfolio.
对于一家移动电信公司，随着新任首席采购官的到来，提升的期望随之而来，他立即并公开承担了在新重组计划中确定的大部分成本削减责任。在达到目标后，该部门开始将其角色从公司的采购者转变为跨职能合作伙伴，并在此过程中获得了四年前难以想象的责任——包括对公司手机产品组合的决策权。
Align purchasing with strategy
将采购与战略对齐
As the mobile-telecom company’s experience suggests, once high-performing sourcing groups establish a track record of value creation and become collaborative peers within an organization, they can begin to realize their broader strategic potential. This new role must be codified by the CPO and other senior managers and communicated throughout the company so that the responsibilities and decision rights of the group are understood and embraced by the business units. Of course, the details of the sourcing unit’s new responsibilities will vary with the company’s strategic aims—for instance, is the company pursuing innovation-led growth or outsourcing its manufacturing to compete with low-cost competitors? The answer to such questions will determine how purchasers identify, manage, and interact with suppliers.
随着移动电信公司的经验表明，一旦高绩效的采购团队建立了创造价值的良好记录，并在组织内成为协作伙伴，他们就可以开始实现更广泛的战略潜力。这一新角色必须由首席采购官和其他高级管理人员进行规范，并在公司内部进行沟通，以便让业务部门理解并接受该团队的职责和决策权。当然，采购单位的新职责的具体细节将根据公司的战略目标而有所不同——例如，公司是追求以创新为驱动的增长，还是将制造外包以与低成本竞争对手竞争？对这些问题的回答将决定采购人员如何识别、管理和与供应商互动。
Once the sourcing group’s mandate is clear, CPOs can actively engage with other senior executives in the early stages of strategic-planning activities to properly align purchasing with company strategy—and begin applying sourcing expertise in a variety of circumstances. For one North American retailer, for instance, a major purchasing initiative gave the company the financial leeway to pursue a broader restructuring plan that included revamping the appearance of its stores and enhancing its marketing approach. One aerospace company’s purchasers supported a divisional spin-off by managing the difficult contractual issues involved in disentangling the unit from the company while also protecting the purchasing synergies that the new entity represented as a supplier.33.
For more about the role of purchasing in mergers and acquisitions, see Timothy L. Chapman, Jack J. Dempsey, Glenn Ramsdell, and Trudy E. Bell, “Purchasing’s big moment—after a merger,” The McKinsey Quarterly, 1998 Number 1, pp. 56–65.
一旦采购团队的任务明确，首席采购官（CPO）可以在战略规划活动的早期阶段积极与其他高级管理人员互动，以正确地将采购与公司战略对齐——并开始在各种情况下应用采购专业知识。例如，对于一家北美零售商来说，一项重大采购计划为公司提供了财务灵活性，使其能够追求更广泛的重组计划，包括改造商店的外观和增强其营销方法。一家航空航天公司的采购人员通过管理与将该部门从公司中剥离相关的复杂合同问题，支持了部门的分拆，同时保护了新实体作为供应商所代表的采购协同效应。33. 有关采购在并购中的作用的更多信息，请参见 Timothy L. Chapman, Jack J. Dempsey, Glenn Ramsdell 和 Trudy E. Bell 的“采购的重大时刻——在并购之后，” 麦肯锡季刊，1998 年第 1 期，第 56–65 页。
Finally, given a high-performing sourcing unit’s role as a bridge connecting different groups within the company, it can even support organizational change. The European manufacturer, for example, had suffered heavy losses in a core business area as a result of the dot-com collapse and subsequently needed to instill a stronger commercial mind-set among its engineers to cut costs. The CEO found that the procurement-led cross-functional teams provided an excellent mechanism for successfully communicating management’s new message throughout the company while simultaneously preparing it to compete in the new environment.
最后，考虑到高效能采购单位作为连接公司内部不同团队的桥梁的角色，它甚至可以支持组织变革。例如，这家欧洲制造商在核心业务领域因互联网泡沫崩溃而遭受了重大损失，随后需要在其工程师中灌输更强的商业思维以降低成本。首席执行官发现，以采购为主导的跨职能团队为成功传达管理层的新信息提供了一个极好的机制，同时也为公司在新环境中竞争做好了准备。
A few companies are making major strides in creating a better approach to procurement. By emulating these practices, other companies might begin the process of transforming their purchasing organizations from mere corporate buyers into a powerful, competitive weapon, which adds value far beyond cost savings.
一些公司在创造更好的采购方法方面取得了重大进展。通过模仿这些做法，其他公司可能会开始将其采购组织从单纯的企业买家转变为一种强大而具有竞争力的武器，这种转变所带来的价值远超成本节约。