Free Online Procurement Courses

1. Effective Practises for Sourcing, Purchasing and Procurement

In one of our most enrolled courses, you will learn everything from negotiating with suppliers to seeing how you can drive significant cost savings.

2. Understanding Supply Chain Ecosystems

An effective procurement manager or officer must know how complex supply chains work, especially for perishable or imported items. Sign up for this popular course and take your procurement knowledge to the next level.

3. Introduction to SAP

SAP is a program that helps manage procurement through supplier relationship management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Understanding SAP will give your procurement career a significant boost. Click to see more free SAP courses.

Yes, because every service or product you purchase involves a procurement process, whether very small-scale and localised or complicated and global. Procurement clerks or managers deal with everything from supplies of perishables in a supermarket to spare parts for airlines. They must assess suppliers, products and services for quality and work with them according to their department’s budget. In addition, they need to understand logistics, regulatory oversight and how to deal with a crisis such as a late delivery or a fall in production.

In addition, procurement administrators must implement contracts and ensure that suppliers abide by them. This role is crucial as no business can thrive without being able to sell products or services reliably. Experienced procurement officers who can show excellent results are in high demand worldwide.

Procurement can be stressful as time, money and jobs all rely on you having the right products or services in the right place at the right time for the right budget. In a crisis, you need to be quick-thinking and cool-headed. For example, if you are in charge of spare parts for an ambulance service, you need to be able to locate them and get them to the scene of a breakdown as quickly as possible. You also need to know precisely how many parts you have spare, what they cost to replace, how soon the next breakdown will occur, and where to source them.

Procurement officers need the following combination of skills and attributes:

• Attention to detail
• Decisiveness
• Logical thinking
• Knowledge of contracts and logistics
• Communication
• Relationship building and maintenance
• Technical knowledge of their industry
• Problem-solving
• Crisis management
• Forward planning
• Understanding of costings, budgets and profits