Sourcing enablement

With sourcing now a critical enabling business tool, many leading organisations are motivated to develop and maintain in-house sourcing skills. To do this, organisations need to find the right people and create the processes, methods, tools and techniques, so that the team can be effective and deliver value consistently.

PA works with clients to review current sourcing capabilities and, if necessary, build a new team to deliver. This is underpinned with a deep understanding of sourcing best practice and transfer of PA’s knowledge to the client’s team.

PA enables an organisation to build or refine their internal sourcing capability in two ways:

Blueprint for excellence
PA’s ‘blueprint’ programme reviews an organisation’s sourcing capability and provides recommendations on implementing or improving the enterprise-wide sourcing approach.

The need to make the right sourcing decisions is now a constant for organisations in every sector. Being successful at sourcing is a broad mandate, requiring real in-house capability to: deliver services the business needs; cut through political agendas; be knowledgeable about what the market has to offer; mitigate risk and ensure benefits are realised.

By examining how an organisation approaches sourcing and the processes that are in place, PA helps clients understand their level of maturity in relation to best practice sourcing. PA will define the future sourcing ambition and make recommendations on how to close the gap between current capability and the desired state.

Centre of excellence
PA’s approach helps clients to design and implement a process that manages the enterprise-wide use of sourcing, and licenses PA’s intellectual property of tools, templates and techniques.

The identification of sourcing opportunities happens at many levels and is widespread in organisations. Co-ordinating the sourcing effort and ensuring consistency of opportunity evaluation, risk mitigation and benefits delivery is a real challenge for the larger enterprise.

PA helps organisations to build a sourcing centre of excellence that brings discipline to a critical management undertaking. Working with the client, PA uses its knowledge to: design the governance structure with roles and accountabilities across the whole process; define sourcing policy with approval and authority levels; provide consistent, rigorous tools for each component of the sourcing process; and develop appropriate reporting for measuring, mitigating and managing operational risk. By leveraging PA’s intellectual property an otherwise lengthy process can be expedited for optimum deployment.