Sourcing and procuring IT hardware is a difficult and effort intensive job, and it only gets harder the larger your organization grows. But there are ways to get around some of the biggest challenges in this space – and some tips and tricks that will inevitably make your life easier.
The Biggest Challenges in IT Procurement
Procuring IT hardware or services for your enterprise organization is difficult no matter how much knowledge or experience you have in this department. These are some of the challenges that raise the bar of difficulty.
- Minimizing risk. Every IT procurement specialist’s job includes some level of evaluating and minimizing risk. What steps can you take to minimize risk in each transaction for your organization, and how do you even define risk in this context?
- Maintaining process consistency. “Dark purchasing” is the pejorative title for purchases made outside of normal IT procurement processes. It’s important to maintain process consistency throughout your organization if you want to avoid this.
- Improving transparency. Ideally, your IT procurement leaders will have full transparency into each bid and transaction. This way, parties can be held accountable and the organization itself can ensure each process is being accurately followed. How do you improve transparency?
- Tracking data accurately. Similarly, it’s important to track data accurately. You should be able to keep tabs on your company’s spending, its IT equipment acquisitions, and more, all in one centralized location that serves as a single source of truth (SSoT).
- Reducing costs. Technology is expensive – and costs keep increasing. Every piece of equipment you purchase for your IT department should be justifiable in its value, and you should work to remain well within budget for new purchases. How do you find a way to reduce costs without making sacrifices or underspending on some of your most important acquisitions?
- Failing to adapt. Your organization is constantly changing. New technology is constantly emerging. Even your IT procurement department goes through consistent changes. If you fail to adapt to all these new variables, you’ll set yourself up for failure.
- Dealing with supplier issues. A number of supplier issues can stand in the way of your IT procurement, from supply chain issues and raw material shortages to legitimate security concerns. Dealing with vendor and supplier issues is sometimes half the battle.
How to Solve the Biggest Challenges in IT Procurement
So how do we address these challenges?
These are some of the best strategies:
- Work with a specialist. One way or another, your organization should be working with an IT procurement specialist. Depending on your current size, budget, and IT equipment needs, that could mean working with a managed IT services provider who can do the procurement on your behalf or hiring someone on your IT team with specific procurement experience. When you have someone, or a team of people who have more familiarity with IT procurement, you’ll typically see better overall results.
- Create thorough processes (and train your employees). IT procurement rarely goes well when your approach is largely improvised. If your employees aren’t trained, or if they don’t have consistent processes to follow, they’re going to follow their own instincts – and disrupt the consistency and success of your procurement endeavors. The solution to this is to create thorough processes that all your IT procurement staff members can easily follow. You should follow this up with education and training, so you can feel confident that each member of your organization is competent enough to follow these processes. If the processes fail, that’s okay – it just means you have to make a few changes.
- Vet your suppliers carefully. Due diligence on your suppliers is critical if you want to maintain security, build better relationships, and have more reliable parties with whom you can transact. You need to have measures in place to vet your suppliers carefully. This isn’t a step you can afford to skip.
- Buy used and refurbished when possible. One easy way to save on costs when procuring new IT equipment is to consider buying used or refurbished whenever possible. Oftentimes, IT assets depreciate quickly, despite preserving their core functionality for many years; buying last year’s model, rather than this year’s, could save you a ton of money, especially at scale.
- Continually reevaluate. Make a concentrated effort to continually reevaluate your IT procurement processes. Have the core challenges facing your organization changed? What new things have you learned? Do your IT employees have recommendations for how you can change things up for the better? The more open you are to ongoing improvement, the better.
IT procurement will always be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be a massive hindrance. With dedicated specialists, through processes, appropriate due diligence, and flexibility, every organization can improve its IT procurement department.
