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The global development towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the so-called Industry 4.0, is steaming forwards. Where cyber-physical systems connect the physical and digital world, allowing for demand identification, without the need for direct human intervention. Further, Artificial Intelligence supports various parts of operative and strategic purchasing. The new purchasing environment forces purchasing professionals to develop new skills. Research is needed to identify appropriate skill sets. Based on a World-Café method with 82 purchasing professionals, a list of 32 essential future skills in purchasing is composed. Further, the identified skills are ranked and assigned to the roles of the direct and indirect material purchasers.
Professional roles, including specific skills for each role, are a step towards higher professionalism and maturity within purchasing and supply management (PSM). The global development towards increasing digitalization, Industry 4.0, globalization, and increasing attention for corporate social responsibility force change within the purchasing organizations. Here, PSM's professional roles and skills are a good starting point to manage these changes by redefining professional roles organized by specific skills and responsibilities. For this reason, based on a systematic literature review and three World Cafés with 29 purchasing professionals, this study compiles a list of Industry 4.0 professional roles and skills in PSM.
To increase maturity within purchasing and supply management (PSM), future purchasing skills are needed based on the technological development towards Industry 4.0. Past research, eg, the work of Bals, Schulze, Kelly, and Stek (2019), started to address this issue based on literature review and interview studies. However, a detailed description of these skills is missing. Utilizing a real-time Delhi study with 45 experts within the PSM field, nine future purchasing skills have been elaborated. Identified skills connect to the maturing and emerging technologies within purchasing and provide a guideline towards Industry 4.0 in purchasing based on a human-centric perspective.
Assessing serious games within purchasing and supply management education: an in-class experiment
(2021)
This paper focusses on effective teaching and learning methods in the context of a larger project that aims to align objectives in higher education with employer requirements in the field of purchasing and supply management (PSM). The reason is that little is known about which specific skills and competencies of PSM professionals are needed outside academia and which learning objective higher education should incorporate to meet the practical PSM requirements of firms and organisations. Practice as well as literature share the understanding that PSM professionals need a well-balanced mixture of knowledge and soft-skills: the merely explicit know-what (codified knowledge), know-why (theory), know-how (method) and inter- & intrapersonal soft skills.
Purpose
Procurement professionals widely use purchasing portfolio models to tailor purchasing strategies to different product groups’ needs. However, the application of these approaches in hospitals and the impact of a pandemic shock remain largely unknown. This paper aims to assess hospital purchasers’ procurement strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of factor-market rivalry (FMR) on strategies and the effectiveness of purchasing portfolio categorizations in this situation.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative study of hospital purchasing in the Netherlands is supported by secondary data from official government publications. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 hospital purchasers at large hospitals. An interpretative approach is used to analyze the interviews and present the results.
Findings
The findings reveal that product scarcity forces purchasers to treat them as (temporary) bottleneck items at the hospital level. The strategies adopted largely aligned with expected behavior based on Kraljic’s commodity management model. Adding the FMR perspective to the model helped to further cluster crisis strategies into meaningful categories. Besides inventory management, increasing supply, reducing demand and increasing resource coordination were the other common strategies. An important finding is that purchasers and governments serve as gatekeepers in channeling FMR, thereby reducing potential harmful competition between and within hospitals.
Social implications
The devastating experience of the COVID-19 pandemic is unveiling critical weaknesses of public health-care provision in times of crisis. This study assesses the strategies hospital purchasers apply to counteract shortages in the supply chain. The findings of this study emphasize the importance of gatekeepers in times of crisis and present strategies purchasers can take to assure the supply of resources.
Originality/value
No research has been conducted on purchasing portfolio models and FMR implications for hospitals during pandemics. Therefore, the authors offer several insights: increasing the supply risk creates temporary bottleneck strategies, letting purchasers adopt a short-term perspective and emphasizing the high mobility of commodities in the Kraljic commodity matrix. Additionally, despite more collaboration uncovered in other studies regarding COVID-19, strong rivalry arose at the beginning of the pandemic, leading to increased competition and less collaboration. Given such increased FMR, procurement managers and governments become important gatekeepers to balance resource allocation during pandemics both within and between hospitals.
This paper uses the findings from a literature review and series of expert interviews to develop a richer and Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) context-specific perspective of the different key techniques, tools and principles that can be used to develop gamified learning to enhance the skills required by PSM professionals in dealing with current and future challenges, such as the transformation to Industry 4.0. It also provides further details of the different stages of implementing gamified learning, which can enhance the success of any such provision.