e-Procurement: From Strategy to Implementation

The Changing Role of Procurement Specialists

One key area of change is that of the traditional purchasing role and the changes to traditional centralized versus decentralized purchasing strategies. They may essentially become one, at least for MRO, except for a small number of overseeing procurement specialists. This elimination of labor and reduction in cycle time can and will be enormous in terms of savings.

One thing that is certain is that the role of the purchasing professional will change dramatically over the next few years (see Figure 4.1). There is a good deal of speculation as to what this role might become. Certainly, any position that currently deals with paper-based transactions will be gone, and depending on how extensively a company ...