It is not a new topic but it has been more and more discussed – even in procurement – what should you do yourself and what should you outsource? If procurement is only seen as an administrative service (as accounts payable, wrongly, for so many years has been seen as) then the math is probably what decides – outsource or not. Then, with the wrong baseline, cutting administrative costs is the aim rather than optimizing business and business services, and probably with a lot of headache as a result. No? The discussion about the possibility to loose control might get lost and the discussion with finance and possibly not only the low hanging fruit (wage arbitrage etc) is even more important.
At Source to Pay Summit 2014 Ulrika White from Gambro, now merged with Baxter, moderated a discussion about outsourcing your sourcing capacity. If looking as simple spend reduction within a category is it and getting wage arbitrage when outsourcing (as with AP) it might not seem that challenging but take into account that most procurement people know – or are learning – that what seems as a simple decision might not be. What seems to result in cost reduction might not. And thus Ulrikas discussion is very valid and gained a lot of interest.
In the below interview we asked Ulrika what was discussed and what her view of what was said was. Enjoy! And if you want to see and hear hours of material from the Summit, simply go to the Post Summit Page and place your order