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Suzanne Harris

Vice President, Strategic Sourcing and Procurement
First American

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Practitioners-Only Day—The Road to 2020

Friday, February 9th, 2018

09:15 Finding a Common Ground Between Hard and Soft Savings Requirements

Solving the disconnect between finance, who only wants to see bottom-line savings improvement, and sourcing, who believes that any costs taken out of a contract should be considered savings, is a perennial headache for procurement practitioners. In this working group, you’ll put your heads together and develop strategies for potentially solving this conflict.

•Why doesn’t a standard definition for savings exist across departments and organizations? Should there be one?

•Reinvestable vs harvestable savings- should you only take on projects that will be recognized?

•Changing incentive structures so procurement has reason to tackle soft savings

•Methodologies for tracking savings

•Getting procurement, finance, and the stakeholders in alignment- can it be done? Should it?

10:45 Information Technology

With every department in your company spending some of their budgets on IT, each with different needs and different processes, it’s important to have a unified and coherent program. Discuss during this session:
• Developing relationships with the IT Stakeholders and getting the CIO’s buy-in
• Understanding future needs- not just current ones
• How product lifecycle and upgrade cycles impact the cost and buying process
• Exploiting your sourcing knowledge to show how it dovetails with their category expertise
• How the emergence of cloud and SaaS platforms impacts sourcing strategy
• The interplay of IT with other indirect categories- who owns the project?