A moment of clarity
“Procurement needs to evolve its value proposition. Outsourcing has a new platform. COEs are increasingly serving as the delivery model.”
Sometimes I’m not sure I actually learnt English at school, given the way it is spoken now. It’s me that’s wrong though, financially speaking at least. People spewing garbled jargon certainly do earn more than I do.
But maybe this is important. One buyer leaving a perplexing presentation at this week’s eWorld Purchasing & Supply conference agreed with me that the higher stratosphere of consultancy littered their talk with unintelligible terminology. Procurement is about saving money, getting more for what you do spend, and influencing the firms you buy from.
It comes into sharp focus if you look at buying for charity – every penny saved allows you to help more people, or help people more. But it’s true everywhere. In government the challenge is obvious – to help reduce the deficit so your kids don‘t need to pay so much of it. In companies, cash is still king as bank lending remains restrictive – saving and getting more from spending keeps your workforce in jobs.
Any field is bound to attract its fair share of jargon. And I’m not having a pop at consultants per se. If you’re going to do procurement better, you need to study it. But the real challenge for the profession is reaching out to those outside – colleagues in other departments and the people you buy from. The danger of too much jargon is that they stop listening as soon as you start talking.
So here’s a challenge. What’s a better word for a ‘value proposition’?
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Theoretically, procurement should not throw jargon onto users or other interested parties so that there is no ambiguity. In real life, especially when faced with elegant users or suppliers, procurement practitioners using no jargons will be looked down onto. It is just “a tooth for a tooth”.
I think professions are full of jargons. I suppose the basic principle of any new phraseology is to describe a phenomena more precisely and very often it is created for and directed at distinguished group of professionals, more so in academic environment rather than applied theories. Procurement is constantly trying to reinvent its own discipline and this culture reflects its aspirations.I don’t think it is ‘tooth’ for ‘tooth’, I think it is a natural development of a discipline and the definition of ‘value proposition’ is well known amongst buyers. And I am afraid there is no better expression for unique value that business can deliver to its customers in order to secure business. It is not a matter of what language one have learnt at school but that the one is aware that language is an ever changing phenomena.
Lindsay, you nailed it. Jargonism. Spiraling word massage. Layers of folks talking in circles about what artisans do.
Procurement needs to evolve ways to clearly map what it plans to deliver. Then deliver.
Procurement pros are category artisans. They make the short and long term value happen through foresight, analysis and relationships. Better, richer mappping tools would allow the artisans to bridge the communication gap with stakeholders that the jargonizers fill now. True for many professions I suspect.