The global professional body for people who buy goods and services and manage supply chains, with its headquarters in Peterborough.
The Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply, or CIPS, is the professional body for people who work in procurement, the job of buying the goods and services an organisation needs, and in supply chain management. Every hospital, school, factory and shop depends on someone choosing suppliers and making sure goods arrive on time and at a fair price. CIPS was formerly called the Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply. According to Wikipedia it has over 64,000 members in 180 countries.
CIPS received its Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth II in 1992, and since 2014 it has offered members Chartered status. To qualify, members complete a continuing professional development programme and pass an ethics test. The institute's stated purpose is to promote and develop high standards of professional skill, ability and integrity among everyone involved in procurement and supply chain management. We did not find a longer mission statement in the pages we could read.
The institute's headquarters is WestPoint in Peterborough, and it has offices and partnerships in other parts of the world, including Hong Kong, Ghana, the Middle East and North Africa, India and Australasia. CIPS members work in every part of the UK, in industries from construction and health to retail and government, and procurement staff are needed by employers across the country.
CIPS publishes the monthly magazine Supply Management, produced with the publisher Haymarket, and hosts the CIPS Futures Podcast about procurement and supply chains. It also has a linked charity, the CIPS Foundation, which promotes education in purchasing and supply. The institute offers services to non-members as well as members. Its approach to ethics is central: the ethics test is a requirement for Chartered status, and the institute positions procurement as a profession with standards to uphold.
People working at CIPS do many kinds of jobs. They include staff who develop and mark qualifications, membership and customer service teams, event and publishing staff, policy and research specialists, digital and data teams, and international development and partnership managers. Procurement itself is a career worth knowing about: it combines maths, negotiation, ethics and an understanding of how global trade fits together, and CIPS qualifications show how the profession is built. Working at CIPS is a way of seeing that whole picture from the centre.
Website: www.cips.org
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