The Lean Procurement Canvas
The Contract on One Page
Deconstruct
Your Partnership
on 1-Page
Discovery and documentation of Strategic Sourcing Cases take too long to write, are seldom updated, almost never read by others, and often lead to missunderstandings.
When you're going really fast and under conditions of extreme uncertainty, you need dynamic models, not static plans.
The Lean Procurement Canvas replaces long and boring requirement and tender documentations with a 1-page, that takes 20 minutes to create and gets read.
The Lean Procurement Canvas by Mirko Kleiner is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Inspired by the lean canvas of Ash Maurya and the Business Model Canvas from Alexander Osterwalder a new adapted version was designed for purposes such as strategic sourcing, sales, partner assessment and partner management.
Typical Results reported by Organizations using the Canvas
20min
Definition of Strategic Outcomes & Guard Rails per Case
60min
100%
From Request
to Proposal in Sales
Overview, better Alignment, Risks & Dependency Mitigation
100%
Collaborative, early & continously Involvement
The Basics
The Lean Procurement Canvas is divided in 2 main areas:
1. Green / right-hand side: The buyer or customer
2. Blue / left-hand side: The partner or vendor
The starting point is the expected outcome/WHY, . to be truly customer centric we need to understand the customer needs/WHAT, before we start thinking about solutions/HOW. Filling in The Lean Procurement Canvas is done collaboratively with all key customer/stakeholders/vendors driven by the cross-functional team/WHO.
Learn more about each section and download The Lean Procurement Canvas - Cheat Sheet in your language:
HOW
WHY
Partner
facing
Focus
Customer
facing
WHO
WHAT
The Cheat sheet gives you the needed guidance what
questions to answer per section.
Please note: ESG and other important topics are included from the start.
The Premium Community Membership grants access to advanced Contents such as the official Book, Downloads and Community Events. Everytime you take one of our Certification Courses the Premium Membership is prolonged by another year.
Membership Content
To get access to this membership contents we need your contact details. Therefor register for a Basic Community Membership while checkout or sign up for our Premium Membership and get access to all our contents.
The Basic Membership is FREE of charge.
“The Lean Procurement Canvas is an Agile Contract”
Is 1 Page really enough for e.g. a $ 1 bn Sourcing Case?
Obviously not, we usually end up having a lot of attachments. Furthermore we’d “Slice the Dice”, break down the $1 bn Sourcing Case in smaller Chuncks and focus to the most promising Outcomes / Hypothesis first. In other words The Lean Procurement Canvas could also be scaled to different levels of a huge case. Furthermore it is always a nice summary for the whole, or just a dice, that shows the dependencies between the sections. It is, however, important to note that depending on the context of the case, there are a significant variety and volume of attachments.
Attention: All of the attachments are living documents or hypothesis!*
The Canvas a
Risk Mitigation Framework
The Lean Procurement Canvas not only revolutionizes procurement practices but also functions as a robust risk mitigation framework. By offering a visual and structured approach, the canvas enables organizations to proactively identify, assess, and mitigate risks inherent in procurement processes. Its systematic layout empowers teams to collaboratively address potential disruptions, fostering a culture of risk awareness and resilience while ensuring smoother and more successful procurement outcomes.
The canvas mitigates 4 key areas of risk:
Business or Partner Risk - If the WHY and WHAT sections of the canvas do not match the proposed solutions / products / services (HOW) of the vendor/partner, this indicates that we don’t really have a valid solution and this is not the right vendor/partner.
Condition Risk - A strong fit on cultural, technical, legal and non-functional conditions would indicate a strong potential vendor/partner fit, whereas, weak alignment on these areas would suggest a poor partner alignment.
People Risk - The LAP process enables us to get to know the people we will be working with through its participatory nature. The canvas provides a place to capture those experiences and in LAP this is part of the evaluation criteria. If we don't like the people we might be working with, both in delivery and leadership, then we may be engaging with the wrong vendor/partner.
Future Risk - If the partner is a perfect fit now, but shows no potential for our future ambitions, then perhaps this is not the best vendor/partner.
In LAP, the cross-functional team monitors all these risks iteratively. At least every time it's updated. Sometimes this is during the shortlisting process, sometimes it is during the contact with the shortlisted suppliers, and sometimes it happens that we have to exclude a supplier even during the workshop in the big room.
The canvas helps to keep track of these risks.
The following is a summary of currently known and applied uses for the Procurement Canvas:
Sourcing - The Canvas optimizes the entire supplier selection process from idea to contract and takes it to a new level.
Account Management Tool for Strategic Partners - After sourcing the Canvas has been seamlessly used as an account management tool - both on the buyer and supplier side - to monitor and plan the partnership more effectively in an iterative way on a single page.
Assessment of an existing partnership - Although most procurement organizations have supplier management tools in place, they often lose sight of the big picture. The Canvas offers the ability to quickly (\<1 hour) assess an existing partnership with all the benefits of leveraging diversity by involving all relevant people.
Modeling a Partnership's Should State - Sometimes an existing partnership develops in the wrong direction. The Canvas can help to model the "should state" of the partnership collaboratively, with all the internal and external people in less than an hour.
1 Page Proposal - Vendors have been inspired by the power of LAP and have started to use it in reverse. The canvas is an effective tool for an initial proposal, but also as a tool for a validation workshop with all key stakeholders. We usually have the ambition to close a deal in less than 1 hour!
1 Page Contract - As we've learnt, the canvas covers all the information needed for a contractual framework. Startups or more disruptive companies started to use the canvas as an Agile contract, skipping the translation into further legal documents.
However you use the Canvas, remember that it's never about the tool, it's always about the conversations, communications and alignment that we create with it!
Application Areas of the Canvas
The Lean Procurement Canvas is a living document that is collaboratively updated by the cross-functional team throughout the product lifecycle. It was originally designed to solve the problem of complex strategic sourcing cases, but it can have a much brought application including a partner management tool!
Start with the Canvas in your favorite online Whiteboard Tool
The Lean Procurement Canvas has become an official Template in the 2 most popular online whiteboard tools miro & mural. Start with the template today, it’s FREE!
miro.com
mural.co