Bimodal Procurement

In the rapid changing business environment, procurement functions, like IT and other business support functions, needs to fasten their processes effective and efficient to stay align with the firms’ strategic objectives or time to market reasons.

While some types of purchases are very complex and high cost (strategic), some of them are easy and low cost (transactional) according to CIPS¹.  To achieve the goals in time and add value to business, procurement processes can be designed in a bimodal² approach.

Strategic purchases take time and cost, in those cases engagement and collaboration of internal and external stakeholders are important. In those cases, agile methods can be applied. SCRUM teams consisting of key stakeholders such as Procurement, Finance, Business and other interested units’ members can be assigned as a Project team. While engagement of key stakeholders is important, the members of the agile team representing stakeholders should have ability and acumen on their areas.

On the other hand, transactional purchases with low cost and low importance can be processed by procurement units in traditional way, also KANBAN methodology can be applied within the procurement teams as well.

Cem Danyal Arslan

¹ CIPS: Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply https://www.cips.org

² According to Gartner “bimodal is the practice of managing two separate but coherent styles of work”. https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/bimodal