Procurement Aligns Buyer Staff to meet Customer Needs

When you think about central Procurement, you likely think of the place you go to get contracts signed.  That is definitely core to what the group does, but that isn't all they can do, and definitely not all they want to be able to do for their partners across UVA.

Procurement's Strategic Sourcing Director Alita Salley has been working with the buyer team to ensure that the structure and experience their team has aligns with UVA's goals and strategies.  With the realignment of some positions and additions of some staff, the team is moving into a model of Category Management.

As Salley explains it, there is a spectrum of activities that fall into the procurement realm, ranging from the thousands of day-to-day transactional purchases the team oversees, on to the more complex strategic sourcing that involves leveraging of purchasing power and strategy, and then the most complex activity, category management.

"Category management goes beyond the administrative functions of everyday purchasing and even the analysis and management involved with specific immediate and mid-term needs," explains Salley.  

She establishes category management as optimal management of a grouping of goods and services that have similar supply and usage characteristics.   The focus areas of Category Management illustrate its value: 

• Customer focus:  analyzing spend data and trends, building business cases and recommendations, developing strong partnerships with key influencers, creating comprehensive contract solutions, ensuring customers leverage contract resources, and maintaining an understanding of key value drivers.
• Product focus: understanding product offerings, defining categories and sub-category breakouts, discovering product alternatives, determining innovative or sustainable replacements.
• Supplier & Market focus: identifying primary suppliers and markets, overcoming barriers to entry, leveraging business growth opportunities, seeking opportunities to use SWaM businesses, establishing emergency response protocols for mission-essential vendors. 

As Procurement transitions out of a siloed structure into their new buyer team structure, stakeholders can expect to see more information on the departmental website and in regular UVAFinance communication channels (like the blog!).  Watch for more details soon!