People centric Business Development via hi-potential talent in Procurement
Our mission
· Supporting Procurement Leaders and future Purchasing & Procurement Leaders and their key teams to reach sustainable positioning and major impact at Board level.
· Developing careers and career paths for high-potential talents in and beyond Purchasing & Procurement and External Resource Management.
Who we are
Our company has been active since 2002. We operate under several entities and brands in the field of Purchasing & Procurement and External Resource Management/Collaborative Ecosystems.
Our Procurement network includes 50,000 professional buyers across all sectors and regions. We assess, recruit and train/coach Procurement professionals and organizations worldwide and transform/develop existing or new companies and projects through the establishment of multinational teams and ecosystems with relevant skills. We operate in and for the private and public sectors and are committed to societal, social and sustainable entrepreneurship.
Context / Challenge
Procurement represents an average volume of 75% of the turnover of a company, and its suppliers’ & partners’ ecosystem represents 90% of the potential know-how and human capital of the company in its market.
Despite the growing criticality of their role and the significant potential for value creation of their teams, a vast majority of Procurement Leaders are still not present on the Board of their companies, reducing their ability to have a sustainable impact on their company’s health and on the development of their own careers.
Scope / Potential
Over the last 20 years, we (Buyers) have managed to create a solid first base of knowledge and recognized expertise in Strategic Procurement and its significant potential to create value for the company’s stakeholders. Professional training has exploded (in France alone, there are more than 40 universities and business schools offering specialized Master’s programs – making it the world’s number 1 in proportion to the number of professionally trained buyers), as has the integration and acceptance of Procurement as permanent players in addition to the traditional functions of the company.
But this progress has a price – many organizations now recognize the role and potential contribution of the value of Procurement, but still keep it at a largely operational level, without direct representation at the Board level or access to the company’s strategy and its direct commercial action, limiting it in many cases to a cost optimization role and the image that results from it.
While there are examples of CPOs (Chief Purchasing Officers) who have made the leap to a COO or CEO role, these cases are still rare and are mainly limited to new Internet-based companies, which build their model on the agility and power of their supplier & partner ecosystems.
There remains therefore a largely untapped potential for development, both in large multinationals and corporate organizations as well as in family businesses and start-ups, via well-proven global value creation of effective management of external resources, combining actions on both “bottom line” and “top line”. And there is a growing number of high-potential leaders, both among existing CPO’s and among junior Procurement talent, who have the capacity to transform these challenges and said potential into real economic impact on the market, and to act beyond the traditional boundaries of sectors, organizations and cultures.
Our goal
Our goal is to develop and continuously support a global community of high-level Procurement talent (senior and junior) facilitating their future focus action and the resulting value creation, thus enabling existing and future Procurement Leaders to evolve towards a recognized C-level positioning and to have a stronger sustainable impact, both for their companies and our economies, and incidentally for their careers.