The role of procurement professionals in industrial projects: organisation, roles, and tasks for professional project procurement

This thesis deals with the involvement and role of procurement professionals in industrial projects. The role of procurement in industrial organisations with continuing operations has attracted considerable attention over the last several years; however, the role of procurement in industrial projects is rather under-researched. The literature review undertaken confirms that existing procurement literature based on continuous operations is in itself consistent and describes in depth the organisational principles as well as the role of procurement. From a project management point of view, procurement is mainly considered a transactional task, and remarkably few project management standards consider procurement at all. To overcome this gap, a Procurement Project Involvement Matrix has been developed in this thesis from the literature. This matrix defines, with examples, four possible project types in which procurement experts might be involved: an engineering project, a product development project, a multidisciplinary project, and a project portfolio. Based on these four project types, the research analyses what procurement experts do and what they should do. This thesis develops an integrated framework based on four interdependent research steps. The framework then allows the definition of the appropriate procurement tasks for all procurement job levels in relation to the project type. In addition, as both the procurement organisation and leadership tasks are of significant importance, a Project Procurement Organisation Model is developed. In general, the project procurement job tasks framework as well as the Project Procurement Organisation Model will help to implement, improve and audit the involvement level of procurement in projects. The thesis draws its findings from the analysis of a wide range of data. First secondary sources, such as job advertisements, public training programmes and presentations held at the BME (German member of the International Federation of Purchasing and Supply Management) symposium, were accessed. This was followed by an in-depth analysis of four consulting projects performed by the researcher in a project-based environment. The thesis concludes with a qualitative survey performed by means of interviews. Figure 1 summarises the thesis and provides an overview of the research, including references to the entire study. The numbers in the speech balloons below reference the appropriate figures. Even though the arrows suggest a sequential flow of the research, in reality the individual steps are interdependent, as shown in Figure 3 on page 9.