By Fiona Czerniawska.
Once upon a time a group of consultants came up with a whizz-bang idea. “Let’s help cut clients’ procurement costs,” they said, ricocheting off the walls of their meeting room in an excitable fashion. Over the years that followed they criss-crossed the world doing just that: replacing distributed, uncontrolled purchasing with formal, centralised processes that scrutinised, then slashed, hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditure. Happy, even smug, the consultants retired to their luxury penthouses delighted to have added value in such a concrete, measurable fashion. So imagine their surprise when they found themselves some years later subject to these same controls. Go through procurement? Eugh! E-auctions? Eek! Meanwhile the new breed of chief procurement officers rubbed their bureaucratic hands with glee: yet more savings for the corporate coffers.
