How Procurement Is Optimized for the Wrong Decision

Procurement exists to reduce organizational risk.

Standardized evaluation criteria create fairness, consistency, documentation, and accountability. At the same time, price, delivery reliability, supplier stability, compliance, and total cost of ownership all deserve careful consideration.

The problem is that these systems work best when every product being purchased serves the same purpose and recognition programs rarely do.

For example, a company may have hundreds of routine employee awards while also maintaining one annual Chairman's Award that becomes the defining symbol of its culture.

Those are fundamentally different purchases; one is operational and the other is strategic. When both are evaluated using identical scoring criteria, important details disappear, such as:

These factors are difficult to assign to numerical weights, yet they are often the very reasons recognition programs exist. 

The answer is to recognize that not every award performs the same business function and to not ignore procurement.

A flagship award should be evaluated as a brand asset, and routine recognition should be evaluated as an operational program. Those are different decisions requiring different success criteria.

The organizations with the strongest recognition programs understand this distinction, and are not buying trophies, but instead are investing in corporate symbols.