Breakfast with Procurement

I was very kindly invited to the Iris Procurement breakfast, a good initiative run by the agency to discuss some of the current issues around marketing procurement. On the whole it was a very well behaved affair. Tina Fegent, who runs her own procurement consultancy, believes that marketing procurement is getting a bad press at the moment and you can read more about that on her blog entitled “First Ever Blog”.

Well there are good procurement people and also very poor ones from my experience. Jane Dormer, who is Head of GB Procurement at Coca Cola, said that agencies should invite procurement into agencies to learn more about each other rather than just wait till negotiations start. Procurement professionals are human after all. However as I pointed out (with a rumble of agreement) sometimes we’re not even aware that there has been a change in procurement staff and if it’s a tender we’re encouraged not to speak to them or email them unless it’s through a portal. None of which really gives the impression that procurement are human!  My comment too that marketing procurement staff frequently change jobs was met with some disbelief and ISBA said they had research to show that marketing procurement attrition is quite low. However again there were people in the room who have had similar experiences to my own and indeed I could name four top UK advertisers whose procurement staff changed at least once in less than 2 years and 2 whose staff changed 3 times in the same period. That’s just not enough time to develop a relationship and move it forward, allowing discussions for new ways of remuneration and measurement. There was also a sharp intake of breath when I pointed out I had at times had to help write an RFP/RFI for a procurement manager as they’d just been promoted to marketing services from an unrelated industry and didn’t understand it at all. Which was then born out by a procurement manager who had experienced this herself. She'd had to learn about marketing services "on the job" with no real training from her company. Whilst another mentioned she bought everything for her organisation from travel to stationery to marketing and was now looking at ‘digital’ without a clue as to what ‘digital’ was. Needless to say my business card was passed around.

 But back to Tina’s comment re bad press for marketing procurement. I think she’s right and my experience with procurement could fuel that bad press even more than I have done above. But where would that get us? This isn’t a competition and there shouldn’t be any sides. There’s a group of professional people trying to do their jobs to the best of their ability with the added pressure of this recession. Tina wants us to move forward and stop the negative press but this is only going to happen if agencies and procurement invest in education and training to cover some of the issues. However training doesn’t have to be expensive and time consuming putting a strain on already tight resources. In roughly the same amount of time we spent at Iris discussing the issues and eating bacon baps, we could have a half day seminar covering some of the key points of best practices in procurement, and for agencies, how to build a relationship with procurement. I was unlucky enough not to have worked with Jane Dormer and I say that as she has a reputation for being open and fair. Is that a sharp intake of breath I hear? But like she says, they are human after all.