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Professionalism and sourcing

Last week during our TPI conferences in Asia-Pacific, I found myself discussing the concept of professionalism of sourcing with a number of people. The main things that I noticed were that people were aware of the relatively short history of sourcing as a key management tool yet were also adamant that there is a growing need to create a concept of professional sourcing.
Written by Michael Rehkopf, Contributor

Last week during our TPI conferences in Asia-Pacific, I found myself discussing the concept of professionalism of sourcing with a number of people. The main things that I noticed were that people were aware of the relatively short history of sourcing as a key management tool yet were also adamant that there is a growing need to create a concept of professional sourcing.

One key element that has started to emerge in that vein is the eSCM models (eSourcing Capability Model) from Carnegie-Mellon (I need to note that one of my TPI colleagues was a co-author of this material). I am not going to discuss the details of eSCM here, rather what is interesting is that it represents an attempt to bring a degree of professionalism to sourcing.

I'm intrigued as to whether readers of this blog believe (a) that professionalism is necessary at this stage of the evolution of sourcing as a management tool and (b) what would define professionalism?

I'll look for some feedback (either as comments to this blog or e-mail directly to Michael.Rehkopf@tpi.net) and then talk about this more in the next blog.

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