By definition, procurement represents the process of obtaining goods and services from preparation and processing of a requisition to the approval of the invoice for payment. As Robert Monczka specifies in the book Purchasing and Supply Chain Management, purchasing is responsible for acquiring all the materials needed by an organization, and it is the function responsible for issuing purchase orders and initiating the flow of materials.
Outsourcing can be defined as “the strategic use of outside resources to perform activities traditionally handled by internal staff and resources”. According to Griffiths D., “outsourcing is a strategy by which an organisation contracts out major functions to specialized and efficient service providers, who become valued business partners”.
The series of parallel sessions of the second day was opened with the presentation “Measuringsocial issues in sustainable supply chains”, brought by PhD candidate Payman Ahi, of the University of Toronto and Cory Searcy, Associate Professor and Director of the Industrial Engineering Program at Ryerson University.
“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement.” – H. James Harrington, CEO of the Harrington Institute.
Across the years, companies have traditionally and exclusively measured their success in terms of financial achievements. In the rapidly emerging business world it appeared the need for a much broader range of measures, in order to keep companies and organizations on track into achieving their goals. This is how the fulminating interest in dashboards, scorecards and KPIs can be explained, and Procurement and Supply Management is no different.
A recent Aberdeen Report, released in March 2011, acknowledges that the increased complexity of global supply chain has affected the performance of many organizations through longer lead times, excessive pipeline inventory and the need to control downstream and upstream logistics.