Procurement should be continuously pursuing cost and efficiency gains across the wider organisation(s) and the supply chain, through activities such as:

• Working innovatively and collaboratively with suppliers and stakeholders/business partners to identify opportunities for supply chain improvements, and putting action plans in place to fully explore and deliver the identified opportunities
• Measuring every aspect of procurement from source to pay and where possible, benchmarking against similar organisations

Creating a formal Continuous Improvement Team/ Working Group to regularly meet and review on-going initiatives and identify new opportunities can be a good step towards increasing awareness and engagement.  Having a process in place to allow informal ideas to be raised and recorded from all areas of the Organisation will also be of benefit. 

Effective contract and Supplier Management (CSM) is a fundamental driver of continuous improvement from a procurement / supply chain perspective. Where an organisation has a fragmented or informal approach to CSM it may be necessary to build a business case to lay out the associated risks and missed opportunities and to highlight the benefits of embedding CSM across the organisation. A Business Case template to help justify the case for embedding CSM can be used.