Buying steel in the 2020s has become a game of multiple skills and challenges, but ultimately, relationships and communication matter most, said speakers at the MBI Stahltag conference in Frankfurt on Tuesday.
“There was a time when a buyer only needed to buy steel,” Martin Brückner, managing director of conference organiser MBI Infosource, said in his opening speech. “Today, they need to know about emission trading, geopolitics, CBAM, artificial intelligence, and more; and, by the way, eventually they need to ask for the price.”
Provokingly, he said that “in Germany, we have the cleanest steel in the world, but no more customers who can afford it”. Brückner pointed out that “steel procurement will remain a people’s business. It takes trust, and a sense of judgement: Is the mill salesman being truthful about high capacity utilisation and long lead times, or is he only fibbing?”
A similar conclusion was drawn by Hans Boot of consultancy DDVC. “After all, man is an animal of communication,” he said at the event attended by Kallanish. “People want to talk with one another, and not only on [Apple calling application] FaceTime.”
This conclusion complemented several ideas he presented on artificial intelligence, which could help procurement, but is not yet extensively used. “The technology is there, we just need to train for it,” Boot said. The same is true for digital procurement platforms. Boot advocated a “Just do it!” approach. “I see people consider trying it, but after half a year they still talk about it, rather than giving it a try,” he observed.
He also addressed the widening range of tasks being taken on by purchasing departments. “In the future, the buyer will be more of an optimiser of supply chains, and will be called supply chain manager,” Boot said.
Moreover, he recommended that industry recruiters of Generation Z should consider people’s soft skills – “another term nobody used 20 years ago”.
