This blog post summarises how the role of purchasing has changed fundamentally in recent years. It shows why modern purchasers have long been more than just orderers and negotiators and what skills are in demand today, from product group and risk management to data and ESG expertise to digitalisation and AI. At the same time, it highlights the consequences of these expanded requirements for training, recruiting and the strategic development of purchasing organisations.

In discussions with customers, a company’s purchasing department is still seen as the people who are responsible for placing orders as quickly as possible and who can also negotiate discounts. Even though this image is slowly changing, basically every employee in a company claims that anyone can do purchasing.

If you look at the tasks involved in modern purchasing, the requirements profile has been expanding continuously in recent years. A brief formula for the requirements profile of a purchasing employee today is: „Category + Data + ESG“. The ideal candidate is a commercial employee who also has a basic understanding of technology and can demonstrate in-depth knowledge of product groups, risk, data, sustainability, negotiations, communication, stakeholders and international supply chains.

Translated into a job profile, every job advertisement for a purchasing employee today should include the following tasks:

• Develops product group strategies that, when assessed for resilience, compliance and TCO, result in the best possible purchasing solution
• Conducts regular audits that fill the Supplier Risk Cockpit with bottlenecks, financial/geo/ESG risks, and has clear playbooks in place for failures
• Has a basic understanding of legal matters and can use this to draft and negotiate contracts with indexation, multi-sourcing options, flexible capacities and exit clauses
• Understands how to establish a traceability backbone with regard to EUDR/LkSG/CSDDD, including data model and evidence
• Develop dashboards that provide management with clear and precise information, including the current monetary effects of its work and risk parameters for short-, medium- and long-term planning
• Targeted communication to convince internal and external stakeholders of the successes of procurement
• Regularly optimises purchasing processes and automates where it makes sense to do so
• Is aware of the necessity of master data, processes and data interfaces for successful AI use, uses AI applications independently
• Regularly reduces expenditure on materials and services to increase the company’s competitiveness

These requirements not only call for further training for the company’s own employees, they also represent a major task for human resources departments. This mix of talent and skills demands an intensified recruiting/upskilling process to ensure that purchasing departments do not lose out to marketing and sales.

ADCONIA – Out of the ordinary.