Purchasing is not an island

Procurement projects are our specialty at ADCONIA. We see procurement as the nucleus of the upstream and downstream supply chain with significant levers for sustainability, cost management and digital transformation. Together, our employees can look back on over 100 years of experience in more than 300 projects in procurement and supply chain.

However, as much as our heart beats for procurement, we are also always aware that although it is an important part of the company, it is ultimately only one part. It is a service provider for the operational units, an upstream influencer for processes in accounts payable and a mouthpiece for external business partners. Purchasing is not an island. This is the reason why purchasing projects should always involve all relevant stakeholders.

Cross-functionality as a success factor

A practical example: We were commissioned by a client to assess and optimize its commercial processes. In a first step, we focused on the relevant organizational units named to us and conducted isolated departmental workshops to identify individual (sub-)processes in order processing for workshop and facility management, purchasing, financial accounting and controlling. The fields of action identified in this process clearly showed that consistent data and interfaces in particular offered potential for optimization.

For this reason, we changed our perspective in the further analysis and subsequent definition of future target processes: Instead of continuing to think in terms of departmentalized sub-processes, a cross-divisional end-to-end model was developed together with a cross-functional team from the customer, incorporating end-to-end processes. This means that instead of „workshop external services“, „purchasing procurement“ or „accounts payable invoice processing“, the future processes will be „order to payment“ or „purchasing to payment“, mapping all integrated stakeholders, including interfaces and synergies.

By forming a cross-functional project team and promoting cross-functional collaboration between purchasing, financial accounting, operational areas and IT, it was possible to ensure that all relevant aspects were considered and to break down silo thinking. The joint collaboration enabled an efficient working method and ultimately made a decisive contribution to the success of the project thanks to its holistic approach and the inclusion of the different qualifications and experience of individual team members.

PMO in cross-functional projects

The central coordination and control of a cross-functional project is part of the project management office (PMO). In addition to project-related performance monitoring and risk minimization, its main task is to promote and maintain communication and transparency in the project so that there is always the same level of knowledge across departmental boundaries and a comprehensive understanding of the project objective, content and status.

Agile methods such as Kanban or Scrum have proven particularly effective as tools for implementation. These dynamically strengthen the collaboration of the cross-functional team by reducing dependencies between the participants and making working methods more flexible. They demand and promote regular exchange within the team and continuously adapt to progress and findings in the project. The PMO itself plans work packages, moderates the overarching exchange, supports the project participants in their work and maintains an overview of the overall project.

This applies to a large number of projects, but particularly to those in procurement due to the large number of upstream and downstream interfaces: cross-functional project teams, which help to break down insular thinking and bundle a wide range of skills and experience, have established themselves as an extremely effective method for the sustainable implementation of projects.