Agile Digitalization in Procurement

The world is changing and we are late.

We live in a context where everything is changing fast, where the companies are not investing anymore in creating new needs, instead they are just investing in optimizing what we have, make more with less.

Furthermore, there is a new reality. Products’ lifetime is increasingly shorter, and this trend will remain.

Due to these two facts, companies are continuously changing, making uncertainty the new normality.

That is why transforming from the Waterfall to Agile process helped many companies, for some years already, to keep selling products and not perish. This illustration helps understanding what Agile means.

This mindset and way of working is quite new in the pharmaceutical world and even newer in procurement departments. This journey is being challenging for all of us.

If we want to adapt ourselves in this new way of thinking, to be inside this Agile mindset, is necessary to have a strong digitalization in our departments. Some years ago, we were buying a number of references and we were planning from one year to another. Now, sometimes, we do not even know the product or service that we will buy the next quarter.

We need this digitalization to start doing different things. It does not make sense anymore be thinking in PO’s, invoices, signing contracts or RFP in Excel files. We should be understanding the market, helping in our top line to define the business needs. And we have to move away from waiting for the needs towards co-creating them.

But, are we prepared? Do we have the right profiles to do it? Are we ready to leave our old job?

I think that is not an option, as I said it is a must. We have to re-invent ourselves and keep doing it because the old procurement does not exist anymore, although we are still the ones that have to provide cash, innovation and technical solutions to our companies.

Artículo por Anna Trunas, Head of Procurement Roche Diagnostics, MIP promoción 2010.