What is different between a procurement officer and a buyer ? What are their major roles in the FMCG Industry ?

Procurement and purchasing are two words that are used interchangeabily. A procurement officer, also called a purchasing officer or manager,are all  responsible for identifying external services providers for the purpose of purchasing goods, and services for the organisational use. A procurement officer should have undergone the training in the field and have an indeapth knowledge of the professional ethics in all his or her dealings. Procurement is concerned with stratedy mapping for the procurement department, procurement planning, sourcing, evaluating and possibly the actual purchasing goods and services.

The Buyers, Purchasers or Procurers then does the acquisition,  assess the quality, speed of delivery and amount of potential purchases but evaluating and always adheres to procurement ethics. So in essence procurement is quite broader in scope and strategic than buying. Buying, purchasing and acquisition is quite routine as in the retails , FCMG mainly has buyers, lots of them and maybe just one or two procurement officers. Procurement officers, handles even issues on ascertaining long term framework agreements, contracts, set quality standards with suppliers and service providers, while as the buyer will be just transacting on the ordering and delivery of the goods and services.

Buying is routine in nature, hence calls for low level planning while procuremet is strategic. It is easy to train a buyer on the job than a procurement officer. Procurement officer's roles are broader, strategic and also includes a lot of management, including risk management, market analyisis, forecasting among other strategic roles, not forgeting leading, organising and controlling. Procurement Officer plays an advisory role on procurement processes, tendering process and other ethical code of conducts for effective and efficient procurement within an entity. Buyers mainly comes when it comes to buy and source to ensure availability of required goods and services while activities prior to acquisition are not really of interest to them. Transactions entered by a buyer are of low value while a procurement officer is higher value. However depending with organisations, some organisations do not really consider the two to be different, but I strongly believe that they are different in terms of responsibility and accountability.

• ·         Buying  and procurement are quite identical functions and in most of the cases no distinctions is made between the two. The functions are overlapping and require similar set of skills.

  However, if we have to go for the distinction between the two, we may say that procurement is a broader function and  mostly concerned with sourcing,  and evaluating the offers. while purchasing is specialized function and involved into obtaining products and services.