A strong supply chain is an essential aspect of running any startup business. After all, you want all the necessary resources to come in smoothly. And here, your procurement team plays a significant role. As such, you would want them to do their job effectively. But how do you effectively do that? Let’s look closer.
The Importance Of An Empowered Startup Business Procurement Team
Before we go into the nitty-gritty of empowering your procurement team, let’s explore why doing so is a great idea. Here are some of the benefits you can gain from creating a more empowered procurement team.
Improving The Efficiency And Preparedness Of The Procurement Process
Procurement can be a notoriously complicated process, what with all the stops that your team needs to make to bring in supplies. An empowered team can more effectively perform the work at these stops. Additionally, they become well-prepared in dealing with changes in the process.
More Effectively Deal With Supply Issues
Different supply issues can have a significant effect on the procurement process. For instance, a slight disruption in the release of a particular material can shut down your supply chain. Here, an empowered team can act quickly on what to do instead of waiting for the instructions from management.
Paving The Way For Innovation In Your Startup Business
When running a startup business, you will often face plenty of competition. To get an edge over these other businesses, you need to innovate. Procurement is one of the areas where you want to see that innovation. And an empowered team can help you effectively develop and implement any innovation you want here.
How Your Startup Business Can Empower Your Procurement Team
Empowering your procurement team requires a significant amount of effort on your part. Here, you need to develop a culture that will support such development. That requires some internal and external elements.
Internal Elements
In the case of internal changes, you want your procurement team to have all the info they need to make the right decisions. You would also want them to know how to use this information correctly. As such, you want to focus on these areas.
- Training: You would want both a predefined training plan for the whole group and a personalized one to help each member with their specific skill sets.
- Access to knowledge: Beyond internal knowledge repositories, you should also allow your members to connect with external training opportunities.
- Coaching and mentoring: Encourage your team members to share their knowledge and expertise with other members.
- Rewards and recognition: Give your procurement team enough incentives for them to adapt to these changes.
Implementing these internal changes requires a significant amount of investment. However, once you have these in place, your team will become more confident in tackling procurement challenges with these.
External Changes
Beyond the internal reforms, you would also want to provide external support for your procurement team. The goal here is to make it easy to apply the above changes to their daily work. For this one, you need to consider the following.
- Structure changes: Think about how you can bring the procurement team closer to major decision-makers within the company for faster response.
- Documented roles and responsibilities: Your organization should be clear and transparent about the specific jobs and roles in the company.
- Delegation of responsibility: You should have a clear process on how responsibilities are shared from the top down. Emphasize ownership coming from those at the bottom of the organization.
- Participation: Your team would be free to participate in all procurement activities and provide their input on these activities.
- Communication: A well-established communication strategy will help your procurement team stay connected with other departments that might also be involved with the process.
Keep in mind that these external changes are not only for the benefit of the procurement team. Other departments would also be affected by these changes. Thus, you want to develop them such that all the departments benefit from them.
Nurturing Stronger Supplier Relations
A particularly vital aspect of empowering your startup business procurement team is helping them develop a stronger relationship with suppliers. After all, they are the ones who will be facing these suppliers most of the time.
Help your team develop better communication strategies for these suppliers. For instance, you want a system that will make it easy for them to prioritize specific suppliers in the communication lines. That ensures that your team can quickly respond to inquiries and other concerns.
You also need to help your team become more proactive when dealing with supplier risks. Prepare all the resources they need like risk reports and studies. These help them better grasp the risks involved and what they can do to mitigate them. You would also want to do this in real-time to help them see the trends.
How Virtua Outsourcing Can Help Your Startup Business Procurement Team
One major challenge your procurement team will face is handling a growing number of suppliers. As your business expands, you will need to bring in additional ones and have more engagements with existing ones. This situation can potentially overwhelm your team. Virtua Solutions is ready to help here by providing your team with the support they need.
The first form of support that we provide is added personnel. Here, our virtual assistants can augment your current team capacity. They are highly skilled in inter-company engagements, ensuring that your team can coordinate properly with multiple suppliers. With that, your main team can focus on engaging more higher-priority clients.
Arming Your Procurement Team With Expertise
Beyond additional personnel, we can also help your team develop better supplier engagement strategies. This is crucial, as various trends can impact your supply chain significantly. With that, your procurement team needs to adapt quickly.
Our team can handle the work of tracking these trends and changes. We will then work with your team to devise ways to ride these trends. Our VAs’ experience comes into play here, as we can develop strategies that will better match your unique supplier relationships.
Give Your Startup Business Procurement Team The Power With Our Help
Your procurement team plays a vital role in the continuity of your startup business. Give them the power they need to keep your supply chains going with the help of the right partner. Contact us today to learn more.