As a result of growing internationalization, rising complexity due to greater product varieties, growing procurement budgets and decreasing vertical integration, the challenges for CPOs have increased significantly during the last years. With budgets beyond 50% of the total company cost, the responsibility of the procurement department has developed further than the yearly price haggling. Purchasers now take responsibility for supply chain efficiency, product development-time or Marketing-efficiency and must collaborate with suppliers in order to exploit cross company saving potential.

In many companies the setup of the procurement organization does no longer meet the requirements, necessary to cope with the changing environment.

Depending on the integration in superior structures, procurement volumes and variety, international dispersion of the supply markets, to name a few, Cuppers Consulting identifies for its clients, in the first step, the appropriate strategic organizational setup.

In the second step we define the internal organization of the procurement department and the responsibilities, strictly separating strategic and operational activities, clearly defining the interfaces to all other departments in the company and those to collaboration partners and suppliers.

Cuppers Consulting defines processes and procedures in order to ensure an optimum integration of the procurement into the supply chain, focusing on the optimization of supply security, quality, stock rotation, logistics and the collaboration with the suppliers.

Step number four deals with the derivation of the job requirements, their comparison to the capabilities of the existing personnel and the initiation of trainings and eventual recruiting.

In order to ensure optimum performance of the procurement Cuppers Consulting installs a controlling system based on KPI’s and performance measures for each of the involved personnel.