But beware: Shooting for goals at face value can sometimes blow up in your face, especially if the goal is trimming money from the purchasing and procurement budget.

Case in point: You’re charged with reducing the purchasing budget by a specific amount, $XXX — without any loss in quality when it comes to suppliers and your purchasing performance.

Managers higher on the food chain often believe this is easily accomplished: Replace those expensive, old suppliers with cheaper, newer ones.

Uh, not this time.

Sure, you’re looking hard for suppliers that will out-perform your current suppliers — but they could very well end up being your current suppliers.

Your criteria remain consistent:

• on-time deliveries
• low rates of material defects
• high supplier service performance
• internal customer satisfaction, and
• lower prices.

Good news: You may not need to search far and wide.

Given the current economic climate, it could be an ideal time for you to negotiate with existing suppliers.

They might be more willing to make certain concessions, rather than lose all of your business.

One note of caution: Be sure you’re keeping track — metrics — against benchmarked performance, to prove in dollars and cents that you’ve saved money and improved purchasing and procurement performance.

One of the biggest problems, some independent budgeting experts conclude, is that budgets serve more to hinder change and innovation than to encourage it.

Budget researchers found many flaws with the basic budgeting process, but these were the highlights:

• Dead on arrival. Only one in five businesses flex budgetary muscle to change course during a fiscal year. With most budgets being considered a “done deal,” 85% of management teams reported spending less than an hour a month talking about strategies. In other words, woe to the manager who racks up costs — even in the name of progress — that weren’t accounted for in the budget. As a result, budgets tend to focus on changes at a snail’s pace, instead of encouraging “big picture” thinking.
• Use it or lose it. How many times have you heard managers (or even yourself) scrambling to spend the balance of budgeted resources. Otherwise, you’ll be scrambling to explain why you really need the same resources in the new budget — or else face the prospect of ending up with less the next time around.
• Play it safe. Who’s heroic enough to go out on a limb, especially when that limb is an unfunded initiative? Risk-takers could be asking for big trouble. Besides, if the gamble pays off, who’s to say your boss won’t step up to take the lion’s share of the praise?
• More, more, more — not better, better, better. Setting operational goals linked directly to budgeting processes can have a nasty little backlash. Sales is rewarded for its ability to move product to customers. That means job No. 2 is convincing customers to buy, buy, buy — especially that slow-moving stuff that’s been gathering dust.
• Ahem, creative, ahem, record keeping. Some pros find themselves “managing outcomes” to keep budget figures under control. In more extreme cases, the manipulation is known as “cooking the books.”

Good intentions to perform “best practices” are focused in three areas:

• spend visibility
• process efficiency, and
• going “green” with procurement functions.

One underlying and somewhat perplexing theme of the survey, done by BravoSolution, was the perception that procurement staffers strongly believed in conducting joint procurement efforts with other departments and using Web-based procurement tools, but surprisingly few businesses actually followed through with the ideas.

The survey gathered information from more than 100 procurement pros.

Some significant findings:

• 59% of those surveyed said they felt their overall procurement process was inefficient or there was room for improvement.
• When asked about the effectiveness of e-sourcing, nearly 90% of Purchasing pros agreed it was faster, less expensive and made it easier to get information for suppliers.

One surprising stat: While there was agreement procurement operations were saving money over last year, nearly half of respondents didn’t know if that was the case or not.

If you’re wondering whether now’s a good time to make the push at your business for greater use of e-sourcing, it’s likely you’ll face a couple of hurdles.

Four roadblocks cited:

• insufficient top management support
• no formal budget
• lack of understanding of potential benefits, and
• internal resistance to change.

How many businesses felt they were on board with “green supply chain” efforts? Only 21%.

Finally, how many procurement pros are sharing best practice techniques with others at their company?

Four out of five say they’ve opened the door, but still have engaged in joint procurement activities. Also, less than half of procurement pros said they were using the Web for core functions, such as collecting supplier responses, managing and tracking supplier performance, and publishing official contract notifications.