Frank was introduced to Procurement Leaders in a previous role where the necessity of the membership offering quickly became evident: “I first became aware of Procurement Leaders when I was at Pfizer from some of my European colleagues who had a lot of good things to say about your company. When I joined CBRE, I evaluated different options and determined that we should became members ourselves.” There were multiple elements to membership that Frank saw value in to align procurement practices to CBRE’s aspiration to be a world class company.
I think the timeliness, whether it be the news on the Procurement Leaders website or the materials available in terms of how you review and update strategy on a frequent basis, are really important to me. The frequency of the updates and information is very valuable – a stale market research report that doesn’t cover the same scope, whether it be geographical or whatever, is just not as useful to me. Procurement Leaders Category Intelligence and Strategy Reports have become a regular part of Frank’s workflow and having a line of communication with the experts behind the reports has proved a valuable asset to CBRE’s procurement team;
“Reviewing the category research which parallels projects we might have running this year is really important. We also take advantage of having discussions with the analysts who have done the work on those research reports so we can have somewhat of a Q&A that goes beyond the reports which helps to shape our approach and develop our strategies. For example, we had an acquisition last year that pretty much doubled the volume of spend in a particular category. We had a discussion with a Procurement Leaders analyst and he was able help us identify that our spend had reached a threshold where we were one of the top potential clients in that category. That’s obviously very useful information as we knew we would be a customer of choice and within those negotiations we would have more credibility with what we were asking for.” With the value CBRE receives, renewal of membership isn’t a question; “There is enough evidence that the things we did with our membership over the last year was good enough to renew and to continue to take advantage of the inventory of information Procurement Leaders has, as you do it as well as anyone else in the marketplace. Our membership investment helps our team have more credibility within our business and really raises the function’s contribution beyond managing RFPs and contract negotiations.
With the value CBRE are seeing through membership, Frank and his team are looking to explore the options of increasing their membership level, “Right now we have membership for team members at the senior level but we are contemplating how much more broadly we should use Procurement Leaders. From an integration point of view, the resources available on the site helps the team members who have come from different backgrounds and have had different experiences get to the same level of alignment about the marketplace, fostering trust within the team as we are working from the same information.”
Frank has big expectations of CBRE’s procurement function which Procurement Leaders looks forward to supporting on; “I think that 2016 will be a year that we will be looking at pulling together an enterprise approach to procurement by putting together the talented resources we had before the acquisition with the great new colleagues that have joined CBRE via the acquisition. I’d say by 2017 we will be making a push to be in the top quartile of procurement functions. Additionally, we have our eyes on a World Procurement Award as it would be a great way to externally validate our progression. “