SUPPLY CHAIN When he first arrived at the College Board , he was faced with a procurement function that he describes as primarily tactical . The emphasis of the organization ’ s procurement was based on processing paperwork , i . e . purchase orders and contracts .
During the two years Hughes has been with the organization , he has embarked on a journey of changing the perspective of what procurement can do for the College Board to a strategic role .
“ Procurement can be a window into the marketplace to ensure that we are optimizing the value from the relationships we have with our external suppliers and internal stakeholders . Ultimately , we want to ensure those relationships are leveraged to the greatest advantage of college board through either vendor consolidation , focusing on category management .
“ The results so far have shown that we been able to drive savings for the organization , and we can bring business and market intelligence to our stakeholders that create better opportunities when working with suppliers .”
It is through a refocused approach to working with suppliers that has been one of the biggest components of the procurement transformation . Prior to Hughes ’ s transformation mission , the “ tactical ” approach to procurement saw a large portion of the existing procurement team spend limited time negotiating with and establishing relationships with suppliers and more time spent pushing paperwork through systems .
Upon seeing this , Hughes kickstarted this transformation by reorganizing both the department and the way in which the people in procurement worked . Hughes wanted to transition the focus from a transaction by transaction basis to a category management approach , with sourcing team members assigned specific categories that they are responsible for across the entire organization . We reorganized the procurement team by shifting resources out of the operations side over into the sourcing side , providing us with greater bandwidth to handle more sourcing events . We also trained the people
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