A procurement bench strength program needs aggregated data to build a winning team:

CPOs globally are aware of the talent imperative to procurement transformation. Building a balanced bench is key to procurement transformation – ensuring the CPO has a team that possesses the skills and experience required to fulfill an increasingly demanding role in the success of the organization.

1. Building a balanced bench is key to procurement transformation

7 Benefits of building procurement bench strength:

1. It helps to identify and recognize existing strengths
2. Identifies development opportunities to strengthen the bench
3. Identify key competencies
4. Supports development programs to bridge the gaps
5. Provides the data to plan for or well-balanced bench.
6. Helps to boost employee engagement and retain valued employees.
7. Demonstrates to your employees that they play a vital role in the success of the organization.

These make for compelling reasons for a CPO to build procurement bench strength.

2. 10 steps to implement a bench strength development program

But, how can CPO’s develop their program appropriately? Here are some essential pointers to guide your journey in building sourcing bench strength:

1. Quantify the core competencies of your firm since its competitive position edge depends on those skills.
2. Prioritize these capabilities and corresponding task according to their order of importance for the role.
3. Do the current job descriptions align with the core capabilities?
4. Communicate the importance of the planned bench strength development program, why you are doing it and highlight the mutual benefits and address any employee concerns.
5. Conduct a competency assessment to determine the skills gaps of your current bench.
6. Based on the skills gap analysis create a development plan for the employee or role in need of improvement.
7. Plan for the application of skills. When you are building the development plan, it is critical to think beyond training and towards application:
   • Employees require hands-on or practical experience to utilize their skills and knowledge. Without this, the value of the training will be rapidly lost.
   • Plan for multiple delivery formats such as e-learning, virtual classes, classroom sessions, coaching and mentoring to strengthen knowledge retention and learning.
8. Plan for employee engagement:
   • Discuss training progress, effectiveness, and application opportunities.
   • Setting performance goals
   • Integrate the development program into the employee appraisal system that can recognize your high performing employees and facilitate remedial action for lower performing employees tied to career advancement opportunities. Recognition will enable you to retain the most competent and hard-working staff.
9. Decide how you will measure the effectiveness of a development program? Can you measure learning and progress with hard data?
10. Decide what reports you will need, who will need them, and how they will access the data to provide organization-wide visibility across multiple dimensions?

iProcure Bench provides the most comprehensive data where you need it – at your finger-tips.

Building a well balanced bench is key to procurement transformation

iProcure Bench makes these steps easy for you. You can develop procurement bench strength efficiently with market leading analytics, reporting and visibility into the development needs of your procurement team bench.

Nuff said…

If you would like to book a demonstration of how iProcure Analytics can help you build the bench strenth of your procurement team you can book one here