Procurement Intelligence Unit

Gathering procurement intelligence is one thing, but are the companies that are active in this area doing enough to ensure that, once collated, the data gets to the right people at the right time?

It's a question well worth asking because, at a time when the global economy is so unstable, getting vital information out in a timely manner to procurement organisations spread in diverse locations around the globe has rarely been as important.

By its very nature the kind of data that market intelligence gathering teams are collecting is, more often than not, only of use for a finite period of time. And such is the current volatility in the commodity and currency markets that the window of opportunity to seize on the information, and do something useful with it, is possibly narrower now than at any time in recent history.

This was a subject I recently touched on with Neil Deverill, former CPO of Anglo-American, who cited the example of an individual who had come up with an extremely innovative way of gathering market information.

It was, in Deverill's words, "a wonderfully efficient way of getting the intelligence in." Problems, however, arose when the information was pushed out to category managers who were insufficiently trained and experienced to put the data to the best possible use.

Herein lies the key. The intelligence available to procurement is only valuable and worthwhile if those receiving it are able to use it to gain the business a tangible advantage. Failure to do so will, to all intents and purposes, render both the intelligence gathering process, and the subsequent actioning of that intelligence, irrelevant.

Of course, the more sophisticated the market intelligence, then the more highly trained those receiving that intelligence need to be. And there's little doubt that those companies that already have well-established market intelligence processes in place find themselves at a significant advantage over those just starting out on a journey that could potentially be both long and arduous. In future posts I'll be taking a look at some of the market intelligence approaches being adopted by various cross-sector procurement organisations. 

In short, procurement needs to gather the right information and provide it to the right people within an organisation that, in turn, needs to ensure uses it before it gets old.

At first glance, that seems a potentially onerous chain of events - however, once the right people start receiving the right information at the right time, that intelligence comes into its own.