Procurement Professionals need to be whiter than white. Our characters and our function need to be unimpeachable for us to gain and keep the trust of our stakeholders, our organization and the world at large.
In the film, The Taking of Pelham 123, John Travolta’s baddie faces off to Denzel Washington’s “gooddie”. I use the word in inverted commas as we find through their negotiations that DW had taken a bribe from a manufacturer for making a purchasing decision go in their favor. People got killed and hurt because of this decision. In this instance DW was a key stakeholder and not the Lead Procurement guy on this, but if the Procurement guy did their Due Diligence Process properly or at all, they would have (maybe) picked up on the fact that the supplier’s goods were defective thereby saving countless lives down the track. The downside is we would not have had another brilliant movie with DW and JT. See it if you haven’t done so already.
Back to the process of Due Diligence (DD). The DD Process needs to be as detailed as possible as its purpose is to uncover and solve as many potential failures/issues and bear traps on both sides of the table. Like the Weighted Scoring Matrix, it should have all the pertinent areas of investigation that each of the key stakeholders need to inform their decision. Also, like the WSM, ask your stakeholders to draft some of the "must haves" so that they can feel and be part of the process. This is a step that cannot be overlooked if everyone is to own the decision.
The DD, as part of the Procurement Toolkit, it is worth its weight in gold.
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