Challenges of Purchasing Teams during the COVID-19 Global Health Crisis

As a result of dealing with global or internal crises, the role of the purchasing function usually increases. For example, facing the pandemic health crisis, the purchasing teams were forced to act in an agile way in order to deliver the expected value within the organizations. On the other hand, there are continuous challenges for the purchasing teams, coming from the supply chain, market uncertainties, spending management, potential misalignment, or changing priorities within a company’s objectives. This paper is a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews addressed to eight purchasing executives from the local banking organizations (in Romania). The study focuses on the challenges the purchasing teams have faced in the last period and the potential solutions that were applied to ensure continuity and success within their organizations. It was demonstrated that the complexity of the purchasing teams’ activity has been exacerbated during the health pandemic crisis and there were identified strategies for the potential future crises.