Being a purchaser means having the right to define the needs, problems and solutions you want your suppliers to address. However comfortable this feeling is, there is always that grain of doubt whether you have really succeeded in posting all the right questions that will capture the full capabilities of your suppliers.
A couple of years back, Nordea, one of the leading financial services providers in Scandinavia invented an alternative cure to this headache. Within the IT area they gave the right to define the problems to the supplier community. On their website, presentations made by different managers across the group were made available to potential suppliers. To be considered as a supplier you were required to go through a screening process. The supplier was supposed to; based on publicly available information, define the 5 most important initiatives where Nordea would benefit from engaging the supplier in question, and include this in an “application” to Nordea IT purchasers. Twice a year, the IT purchasing function reviewed the “applications” provided by the suppliers, and the most promising initiatives were brought up for further discussions with the supplier.
By inviting the suppliers to the table, sharing detailed yet publicly available information, Nordea created an opportunity to drastically improve technology driven innovation. This does for sure not remove strategic planning for the purchasing agenda, but it is in an efficient means of unleashing the creative power of your supplier base.
