Why investing in procurement makes organizations more resilient

Journal article

The Covid-19 pandemic has made clear something that we’ve known for a while: Efficiency alone does not make for good strategy. The pandemic and the financial crisis of 2008 demonstrated the potentially catastrophic dangers of just-in-time strategy—and have highlighted the need for one that might better be called just-in-case, which puts much more of an emphasis on resilience. That’s only going to become more important now that the public sector owns so much debt in private firms. So how can companies most effectively make this switch? By thinking of procurement in ways that involve a focus on creating resilient multi-relational networks rather than linear supply chains. This kind of thinking, in fact, can lead to procurement’s actually becoming strategy.

Authors: Ramirez, R; McGinley, C; Churchhouse, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Publishing
• Journal: Harvard Business Review
• Publication date: 2020-06-17
• Acceptance date: 2020-06-15
• ISSN: 0017-8012
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR