Purchasing excellence is a lever to improve results in all industries

Result-oriented purchasing concepts are considered to be key corporate success factors. However, only a limited number of companies in the manufacturing and service sectors fully exploit the potential. Wholesale and retail, transportation services, and the metal trade are clearly at the top. Hotels and restaurants are the tail enders.

This is the result of a benchmarking study in which Roland Berger analyzed the purchasing activities of 400 leading manufacturing and service companies in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Four key areas for purchasing optimization were identified:

• Purchasing and materials-cost levers such as process and value analysis or TCO approaches are largely unknown. The savings potentials of global purchasing markets are hardly tapped.
• Organizational structures in many cases show room for improvement. Only about 5% of the companies surveyed have a purchasing representative on general management or board level. Less than 20% of the companies have a clear-cut organizational separation between strategic purchasing and operative procurement.
• Efficient supplier management has only been introduced by a small number of companies.
• Purchasing controlling is in many cases almost non-existent.

Best-practice companies use the opportunities of efficient supply chain management, creative purchasing levers and of a powerful supplier management. To attain best-practice status, a purchasing strategy based on clear-cut objectives for the four action areas is required. To ensure tangible success, this has to be done in collaboration with other organizational units.

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