Courting disaster
13 September 2012
When senior managers decide to buy expensive machinery without consulting their purchasing colleagues, the results can be costly. Neil Fuller recounts a cautionary tale
Disastrous capital acquisitions have long been a source of fascination to me, largely because I come across so many in the course of my work. What intrigues me is the way that senior management expect procurement staff to cut costs and then take the most cavalier attitude to capital acquisitions, wasting vast sums of money.
This, of course, is not true of all...