Over the weekend, my wife shared with me that one of her high-school friends was interviewing for a category/vendor-management position focused on professional services and IT spend. The job would report up to the CPO of the organization (rather than to IT, as such roles often have in the past, at least indirectly). I did a quick check of our market-segmentation database. It turns out that the company, a supplier in the automobile and truck manufacturing industry, is in the top 10% of organizations we track in this market from a procurement, supply chain, and IT-sophistication standpoint (in Geoffrey Moore terms, they’re a classic “early adopter”). The fact that such an organization plans to invest in a senior category manager in this area should not be surprising, but far too few organizations assign senior supplier/vendor-management resources to these categories today.
I’d argue that there are a few tips that procurement organizations less sophisticated than this one can take with regard to this area. In addition…
