Purchasing: Can we bridge the gap between strategy and daily reality?

A lot has been said about strategic purchasing: it contributes to the firm's strategic dialogue, acquires important resources from outside the firm, and plays a vital role in the achievement of the firm's long-term goals. Practice, however, demonstrates the difficulty of translating these intentions into daily reality. In this article, we identify the path between strategic intentions and sustained performance based on a combined quantitative and qualitative research methodology with an embedded level of analysis, including the firm and category level. The implementation of strategic purchasing leverages the liaison role of purchasing when connecting external suppliers with internal clients and ensures the development of purchasing's learning capabilities so that results do not erode over time. We identify key pitfalls to proceeding along the path: no time for reflection, a lack of scale, a lack of scope, and unaligned incentives. Consequently, we present practical guidelines to purchasing managers for avoiding these pitfalls and developing dynamic capabilities, which are vital in times of continuous and unpredictable change. (C) 2014 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.