Policies with Teeth

The road to procurement policy is paved with good intentions. However, policies often fail upon implementation as they lack the substantial bite to gain traction. When it comes to policies, actions speak louder than words as they are intended to initiate and ultimately perpetuate behavioral change. There are several ways to put teeth in procurement policies to mitigate the challenges of implementation and adoption.

The key to procurement policy development is to take the user into account. Every employee of an organization who is empowered to purchase goods or services on behalf of the company is a procurement policy's target audience. Odds are, the average reader of policies/procedures would prefer a highly condensed and targeted version to facilitate absorption. This presentation will, among other things, discuss why it is important to be comfortable with employees knowing the rules first and understanding the operating procedures later.

Daniel Abichandani currently is a consultant with Deloitte Consulting, but he also has held several positions working directly for companies and organizations, including the Ministry of Government Services for the province of Ontario for which he managed end-to-end, province-wide procurements and projects that included secure document destruction services and corporate card services. As a consultant, Mr. Abichandani led various sourcing and asset management solutions for public sector entities including the Federal Canadian Government, the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care’s Ontario Laboratory Information Systems (OLIS), the Workers’ Safety and Insurance Board, BC Hydro and Canada Post. He also developed procurement policies and procedures for Ontario Buys.

Among his private sector work, Mr. Abichandani led various sourcing strategies and supplier enablement solutions for the First Caribbean National Bank Scotiabank, Genzyme, and Future Shop as part of post- acquisition integration activities with Best Buy. He also led the spend analytics and strategy team for a large biotech firm, to identify waves of sourcing initiatives that led to significant cost savings.

All of these projects have given Mr. Abichandani a breadth of experience in sourcing and procurement, procure-to-pay transformation and project management.

Christopher Johnson has experience as a consultant in both the public and private sectors. His particular areas of expertise include cost reduction, planning software, process improvement and spend analysis. In his role as consultant, he performed an analysis on federal government spending, targeted a 25% process improvement for a large hospital provider, and implemented supply chain planning software for a premium wine/spirits/beer company. Prior to his current position as a consultant with Deloitte, Mr. Johnson served as an analysis for a mid-market private equity company in Toronto. In this role, he was responsible for performing preliminary analysis on potential investment opportunities and growth potential.

This will be a streaming-only presentation. You will listen to the presentation through your computer, using either the speakers or a headset. You will be able to ask questions by typing them in the appropriate field during the presentation.

Before the day of the event, you will receive an e-mail containing the URL to access the presentation. The e- mail also will contain a link for you to use in testing your computer’s compatibility with the Microsoft Live Office platform. Please be aware that, if you have not used this platform before, you may need to download software in order to access the presentation.

To register for this event, please use this link to provide us with your name and e-mail address. A day or two before the event, you will be sent an e-mail with instructions for accessing the Web seminar. Please note that you will not receive an automatic confirmation e-mail after you register.

The deadline for registration is 5:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time on Monday, June 4, 2012.

If you have any questions, please contact Lynn Marstiller, ISM Affiliate Support, at lmarstiller@ism.ws.