Sustainable Solutions for SCM

be used to give a quick overview of the assessed unit for the management, it might be designed as a self-assessment that covers only some topics. Whereas when the assessment is used to support the general alignment of strategic procurement, it should cover a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the unit that is performed by external assessors to foster best-practice sharing. • Assessors: The assessor is the key role during the process. Not everybody can do this job, so it is useful – besides preparing a detailed job description – to train people for it. A training program should be worked out and entry requirements should be defined. After completion of the training the assessors usually gain rights in the form of the permission to conduct assessments under defined circumstances and their status is valid for a certain period of time. • Initiative: Initiative for an assessment can stem from repeated complaints of other departments, again peculiarities in KPIs or a continuous assessment cycle. The assignments must then be integrated in the assessment schedule, which has to be agreed on with the stakeholders. • Information gathering: This is the core part of most assessments and usually consists of three sub-components: definition of minimum requirements to be met for an assessment to be considered as valid; definition of the exact procedure used for information gathering with respect to sources, timetable, questions and definition of an evaluation strategy after all information is collected and compiled. • Learning: Learning in this context means answering two main questions. Firstly: how to identify what is worth learning and how to utilise the newly gained knowledge? This knowledge mainly refers to best practices, unknown by the assessor team at the time. They have to be collected, validated and should have some influence on future assessments or versions of the model. The other question to be answered is: how can the existing knowledge in the group be shared to improve the performance of the assessed unit? To support the learning process a feedback and a subsequent tracking process have to be established and tools such as a best practice database and a workflow-tool to track the implementation of defined measures can be used. • Measures: After all information is gathered and evaluated, and a maturity level is assigned, measures have to be developed in order to improve the assessed units skills and capabilities. The defined improvement measures should meet some basic requirements (adequate level of detail, business case, responsible etc.) and maybe even only stem from validated and beforehand permitted persons or units. • Implementation: The implementation of measures requires a motivated team in the recently assessed unit and knowledge on their side on how to effectively do so. A strategy and an implementation path must be developed. Capacity planning is also necessary to support implementation by defining realistic measures and/or support the unit in terms of the provision of an implementation team. Electronic tools such as webinars have in some cases proved to be important enhancers for the implementation process in the form that they help the building of a community of practice and an exchange of good practices.

70

Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs