2. Objective - Change

The initial situation of the purchasing team that existed in 2017 was not unusual. What was unusual, however, was the approach and the pace of change that the team was to undergo as part of the program. Within just two years, a reactive competence and mindset focused on process execution was to be transformed across the Group into professional purchasing with excellence and relevance acceptance. As a framework, an interlocking program was needed that, in addition to the necessary development of purchasing itself (function, organization and systems), focused primarily on the development of the team. The team needed to be given the space and input to develop into a team with a design and consulting mindset. The focus was on strengthening personal and social competencies in order to achieve real action competence on this basis with the help of targeted development of methodological and technical competence.

A sequence of six two-day PRO-active training sessions served as the backbone of the program: They were primarily designed and conducted - in addition to the lead trainer and the management team - by the ten co-coaches established within the team itself at the start of the journey.  But the real innovation of the program lies in the mix of formats and events beyond the six trainings. In addition to more traditional leadership and team development modules, impulses from experts and consultants, workshops and personal coaching, more than 30 training and support formats have developed over the three years. Driven by the team, they are the actual success formula for change. The formats are supplemented by a variety of intelligently selected leadership impulses and management tools, but without compromising the program's basic DNA, which is predominantly based on self-organization.

The key to the change we achieved, both internally and externally, was the establishment of a consistent learning culture with equal weighting of interpersonal "Mindset Excellence" and technical "Procurement Excellence" in the program. Only by dovetailing the focus on people and attitude with the focus on structure and processes was it possible to achieve change at this speed. Under "First Who, then What", the change journey started with the right team and the right structure, supplemented by selective recruiting with a clear guideline: "Hire for attitude - train for skill". In this way, strategic HR and change management not only became a living leadership task for purchasing management, but PROactive became the actual driver of change.  Those responsible at Burda are rightly convinced by this transformation, and so the media company also made it into the final round for this year's Innovation Award of the German Association of Materials Management, Procurement and Logistics (BME) with this program.

Consistent customer focus has been a core issue for procurement from the very beginning. This becomes clear in unusual formats.

"This is how I negotiate even better": Training courses with this title are familiar to many on the market. But which purchasing department offers one of its core competencies to its customers as a training course? An unusual idea, one might think. What could convince them better than to experience for themselves in a training course how well the buyers have mastered negotiating? So well that you can learn something from them. Or so well that you can leave it to them altogether.

In PROactive, the six customer-oriented roles of purchasing were trained, designed and further developed to ensure the necessary flexibility of action demanded by the customer by applying agile methods (function & organization). In dry runs, the buyers practice their "appearance" before negotiations or customer meetings and optimize content and expression by means of collegial consultation.

Elisabeth Varn, Managing Director of Burda Magazine Holding, is also enthusiastic about the results of the transformation: "Purchasing editorial services such as images is a sensitive issue for any publishing house. In the past, it would never have occurred to us to involve procurement in this area. But Burda Procurement managed to convince us that it not only understands our business processes, but can bring us different and better deals with negotiating power."

The management created a successful change management. It combined necessary behavioral changes with changes in content via innovative communication and interaction formats with qualification programs and unusual formats for cross-functional collaboration. This created sustainable motivation that is visible, measurable and tangible - procurement is again relevant in the Burda Group.