Is Procurement a BMX?

Last week at Cirtuo’s Procurement Forum in Dubrovnik, I had the chance to do a “Fireside Chat” with Travis Johnson, Senior Director International Procurement & Technology Enablement at Walmart International. Our topics were a gentle stroll via category management, the role of technology, what makes for successful tech implementation, how we measure ROI of digitising procurement process and his experience using Cirtuo to support category management.

Yet amidst this stroll, Travis told a story that really stuck in my mind.

He related how, as kids in the 80s, he and his brother were out in the woods tackling a course of paths and jumps on their BMXs, which culminated in the biggest jump after which a skid stop was required to avoid hitting a bank. Travis did just fine but his brother’s final leap saw his handlebar detach from the bike as he took off… well, you can imagine the outcome (and good news everyone lived to tell the tale).

Travis’s point was that for the sake of tightening one nut on the BMX, the whole endeavour ended in failure.

His question was whether securing success is actually about managing all the little details? 

By details we mean stakeholder’s business requirements, legislation, risks, supplier market intelligence, commodity prices, supply chain availability, business objectives, team capabilities etc…

My question to Travis was this: “If Procurement was a BMX, now it’s a smart connected e-Bike with electric gears and servo assist disk brakes so, is it even possible for Procurement to attend to the hundreds of connected details that now comes with this new complexity without the support of digital and AI?”

What do you think?

ps   Scroll down for his reply ↓↓↓

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Travis’s reply: “Yes – we do it through advanced technologies like Cirtuo. Its ability to help us deliver the value of governance allows us to do more with the same amount of resources.”