Expert Discussion of PERISCOPE – highest ranked ideas
Which skills are needed for purchasing to contribute to sustainability?
• Knowledge: technical knowledge: sustainability knowledge and know-how
• Skills: interpersonal communication skills: listening; convincing and influencing without using power; selling of purchasing: storytelling; celebrating successes; promotional communication.
• Attitude: understanding of the bigger picture, being curious, having overview in the supply chain, looking more to the long term added value than to short term cost efficiency.
• Organizational support: set sustainable KPIs in order to show the contribution of PSM to ‘environmental savings’ (instead of cost savings). Introduce external best practices.
Which skills are needed for purchasing to contribute to innovation / co-development?
• Organisational support: set KPIs for innovation sourcing
• Knowledge: Legal knowledge and business model building
• Skills: storytelling, supplier relationships and strategy skills; supplier development; formulating functional specs; start-ups management; project management; innovation workshop management; financial skills / cost calculation; and IT skills / data analytics; having a customer view; being a team player.
• Attitude: entrepreneurial mindset; is a problem solver; risk taker; deals with uncertainty; understands the bigger picture, is curious, and has overview in the supply chain.
What is preventing companies from being sustainable and innovative?
• Overarching, organisational constraints: not well-organised to tackle this issues; riskaversity; systematic vision is lacking; biased/boxed thinking; not adaptive to learn.
• Purchasing organisational constraints: non-alignment with organisation strategy; not able to balance different KPIs; lack of maturity in the purchasing department; a tool/database to capture both sustainable and innovative supplies in the market are lacking in the purchasing department.