Introduction Strategic trends and challenges for purchasing

Abstract

The purchasing of material and services has undergone significant change since the middle of the 1980s. There has been a complete switch from purchasing being a traditional, reactive administrative function to becoming active cost management. In many companies, purchasing has been responsible for cost awareness being established comprehensively throughout whole organizations. Successful approaches such as reverse auctioning, target costing, value creation or supply chain management — all of which were considered innovative, in their time — were often initiated in purchasing departments and first gained widespread acceptance there.