I’m back!
For the better part of the past year, I’ve been setting up a finance & accounting shared services centre in India. During this time, I have gained a much deeper understanding of the transactional bedrock underlying supplier relationships.
I started my career as a lawyer reflecting on contractual nuances and I now find myself at the rock face attempting to extract the waste nuance from the ore. I’ve always known that decisions made at the outset of a supplier relationship can increase the cost of transacting with a supplier by ten-fold but now I really know it!
I said in the post below that I would “recommence when I again have something to say” and I now feel that I do: As I indicate in my note on the right, I now view HR as the best model for a P2P function to use when describing their role within an organisation; the only difference being that HR professionals deal with staff and P2P professionals (or Contract Capital Managers as I indicate in the updated title of my blog) deal with third party suppliers.
I’ll explore this topic in greater depth over the next few weeks.
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In black, I hope!
Good to have you back Doug and you have nailed the analogy with HR.
I fully agree that there are so many parallels; indeed the relationship between a client and strategic vendor are very similar to that between a manager and their direct reports.
Rich
Hi Michael, when I write my next post, I’ll wear a schoolgirl’s uniform (any reader who fails to get the AC/DC reference please do an image search for “Angus Young”).
Hi Richard, I’m not surprised that you support the HR analogy. When I first saw your software many years ago, I was surprised to see that you had two product lines: one focused on procurement and one focused on HR, with a common codebase underneath. I’m surprised no longer.