There’s a shift happening in manufacturing as prosperous companies are increasingly focusing on outcomes, rather than solely on products to drive profits and growth.  In the past, it was sufficient to strive to meet each individual segment’s needs. But now, outcome-centric organizations are targeting and tailoring value propositions to each individual customer. To achieve this, companies must have a strong partnership with their customers so that they know them well enough to understand the specific outcomes they’re seeking.

None of us is as strong as all of us. And that’s true for all walks of life -- whether you’re playing tug of war, donating to a charity, or trying to come up with a creative solution. The more bodies and -- more importantly -- the more minds you can string together will exponentially increase your chances of reaching your goal. And the world of procurement is seeing this more than ever as it is crowd sourcing to help uncover innovations and solutions to help solve its growing needs. As job responsibilities continue to pile up, even the most elite buyers cannot keep up with every trend, best practice, and new regulation. They’re seeking out “the crowd” and becoming much wiser because of it.

Prime Advantage and riskmethods recently collaborated on a webinar for Prime Advantage Members highlighting some of the biggest threats in supply chain management today. The session was hosted by Bill DeMartino, General Manager of North America for riskmethods. A variety of topics were covered, including supply chain management myths, challenges, and solutions.

At the recent Prime Advantage Spring Conference, supply chain expert Dr. Russell Morey held a professional development session tackling the current issues in purchasing and supply chain management. According to Dr. Morey, the skillset required to be successful in this arena is changing. More than ever before, a premium is being placed on analytical, negotiation, and conceptual skills. Procurement professionals need to be adept at understanding costs, navigating supplier relations, and have a firm grasp on domestic and global markets.

When a company’s engineering department is being stretched to its limits, this can have a debilitating effect on the organization. For one, this constrains the number of projects that can be in full-process at any given time. This in turn stifles production and innovation, which can weaken a company’s bottom line and decrease its competitive advantage. Limited engineering resources also leads to engineers having to work on administrative tasks rather than being able to stay dedicated to their core manufacturing competency. This creates a ripple effect throughout the organization as procurement isn’t able to source in the most effective way possible without thorough feedback from engineering. This causes management and executives to find themselves in a constant state of scrambling to assess where resources should be imperfectly allocated.

Procurement professionals are always striving to not only make better decisions, but to make them more rapidly. The level of intelligence purchasing departments can attain on precisely where supply chain risks lie, as well as on the most cutting edge solutions to dealing with them, will dictate how successful they are in reaching these goals. According to Spend Matters, as supply chains become increasingly global, the possible threats become more and more of a moving target.

How can purchasing departments stop adding to the densities of procurement and better leverage technology and skills to make the whole process less difficult? That is the million dollar question that Procurement Leaders explores in its 10-part series, “Making Procurement Simple.” Never before have purchasing professionals been called on to do so much with this level of ambiguity on which routes to take to get it all accomplished. This often leads to solutions that create more questions than they answer and add more tasks than they subtract.

“We have this tendency to make things smarter and smarter,” so says, digital visionary, Kevin Kelly, in his recent TED Talk about how artificial intelligence will spawn the next industrial revolution. Artificial intelligence is already doing many tasks way better than a human can do today. It’s analyzing x-rays in hospitals, combing through legal documents, and flying planes, all more effectively than we can do ourselves. It gives us the ability to think differently which in turn leads to new creations and new jobs.

At the Prime Advantage Fall 2016 Conference, professor Steven A. Melnyk of Michigan State University presented on the new type of leader required for the supply chain of the future. According to Melnyk, today’s supply chain is a result of investments made in the past. However, tomorrow’s supply chain will be a result of investments made today. And to make sound investments, we must be able to improve on our ability to forecast and project.

One of the biggest challenges purchasing professionals are met with every single day is locating enough resources to meet the demands of the job. It seems like procurement is being asked to do more and more each passing year, causing it to further stretch the resources it currently has at its disposal. Buyers are then forced to come up with creative and innovative methods to corral this predicament. Some of the savviest procurement professionals will tell you, the easiest way to get some much needed help is to join a group purchasing organization.