Purchasing and supply: filling roles where authority decides

Three levels under one title

Operational purchasing works inside given rules: it orders to the needs of production, watches confirmations and dates, handles expediting and deviations. It decides how, not from whom.

Inventory planning sits between purchasing and production. It determines how much of what should be available and when, and carries the consequences of both errors — stopped production and money needlessly tied up in stock.

Strategic purchasing selects suppliers, negotiates terms and carries responsibility for supplier risk. It calls for a different kind of person and is usually remunerated differently as well.

What this page does not do is put figures to those levels: no specific amounts are stated here. Orientation by occupation and by region is published by the Czech average-earnings information system (ISPV), operated by the Czech Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (MPSV).

Sector knowledge, and what can be learned

Industry convention: knowledge of a particular commodity group — steel, plastics, electronic components, packaging — carries real weight. Someone who has bought castings for years understands where problems with dates and quality arise, and that is not quickly made up.

A company’s own specifics: the particular enterprise system, the approval rules, the history of supplier relationships. A candidate cannot know any of that in advance; it is a matter of onboarding, not of selection.

The practical consequence for a brief: asking for commodity knowledge makes sense, while asking for knowledge of the system usually narrows the pool of people for no good reason.

Where purchasing meets quality and logistics

Purchasing does not work in isolation. On supplier complaints it overlaps with quality management, on imports with customs and transport, on planning with production.

For recruitment that means establishing which part of those interfaces falls inside the role. A company where the buyer handles complaints and supplier assessment themselves is looking for a different person from a company where that agenda is run by quality.

What selection can actually verify

In purchasing, the skills most talked about are the hardest to verify. Negotiation cannot be read from a CV, and general questions about it do not help.

More usable is to have the candidate describe concrete situations rather than to ask about skills in the abstract. The answer shows whether they think in the context of the operation or merely administer orders.

What a selection process can establish:

• A description of a specific supply failure — what they did, whom they involved and how it ended
• Experience with the commodity group in question
• The scope of independent decision-making in their previous role
• Experience with supplier evaluation and supplier audits
• Language ability, where foreign suppliers are involved

Supplier risk as a skill in its own right

Purchasing is judged on price but revealed by how it handles failures. Working with supplier risk is what separates an experienced person from someone who can only place orders.

It covers watching a supplier’s financial condition and the ability to recognise warning signs — in the way a supplier communicates, or in dates that gradually slip.

Industry convention: in supply chains with documented quality, supplier evaluation and supplier audit are often part of the role. The scope varies by sector and by what customers require; it is not a statutory duty of purchasing, but for many customers it is a contractual condition.

What to look for:

• An overview of where the company depends on a single supplier
• A fallback prepared for critical items
• Supplier evaluation, and how regularly it is done
• Reacting to dates that gradually slip, rather than waiting for the delivery to fail

How to describe the role in a brief

The most reliable way to clarify a brief is to answer one question: what does this person decide alone, and what do they submit for approval? The answer defines the role more precisely than any job title.

Add which commodities are involved, whether suppliers are domestic or foreign, and who the counterpart inside the company is.