I just had a little cute discussion about mayonnaise with a dear friend of mine. About how my grandmother would make it and how I would make it. Well, since I love a good metaphor, I saw some symbolism with my day job in procurement: “follow a good recipe, use great ingredients and use a machine” … “follow a good strategy, use good technical specifications and automate”.
Traditionally, making mayonnaise by hand, for the less kitchen savvy, involves a wooden spoon or a whisk and painstakingly countless circles of stirring. This resembles the traditional Excel/Word/e-Mail based manual procurement process. Making mayonnaise using the automated food processor, which by the way, I prefer, easily resembles the e-Procurement process – a lot less effort, quicker and more consistent.
The ingredients to mayonnaise are simple – eggs, salt and oil. It is important to use good ingredients – preferably free-range egg yolks. How good it tastes, requires getting the technical specification of the most important ingredient right. Also, use the right amount of sea salt – after all, the context of why we are doing this it to spice things up. All beautifully brought together by the unsung hero – the vegetable oil; the glue that is the procurement professional. Regardless of how you make it, we can’t ignore the recipe – it’s like the procurement strategy, without which we might very well throw the salt, just any egg yolk in half a litre of oil (in that order) and still expect a thick, fluffy, yellow, tasty mayonnaise.
Unlike my perfect chef grandmother who is no early-adopter – the food processor is my saviour. It makes mayonnaise effortlessly and ensures that it is split-proof. In the procurement world, the role of the e-System (take your pick here) is to ensure successful and efficient completion of the task. It provides the psychological comfort of security, transparency and peace of mind to achieve the originally planned objective – perfect mayonnaise.
