This unit is designed to focus on the procurement management practices and techniques and their effect on the performance of the supply chain. It relates the procurement strategy to the alleviation of problems encountered in real world business today. The key concepts addressed are the strategic role of procurement, the rational of procurement activities, the framework of basic procurement decisions, the sequence of the procurement activities, purchasing procedures, documentation and records, purchasing and information systems, specifying and assuring the quality of suppliers, the importance of the INCOTERMS, matching supply with demand, sourcing/ outsourcing, contrasting approaches to supply, controlling prices and costs, negotiation, purchasing research, performance and ethics, volume contracts and stockless purchasing, measuring and evaluating the purchasing performance, customer order cycle, integrating order purchasing and the company’s logistics MIS, e-procurement, and finally, analysing in depth how purchasing is planned, organised, conducted and controlled in a shipping firm, categories of expenditures, independent execution of purchasing versus centralised purchasing, key sequence and responsibilities of the purchasing activities in a shipping firm and on a ship, direct purchases of provisions on a ship level, emergency purchases on a ship level, the normal purchasing processes and sequence of activities, the market scouting, the vendor management and inspection, the purchase requisition management & the inventory verification, the purchase order and the contracts management, the invoicing and payment, the importance of the “letter of credit” tool in international purchases, the disposal of unnecessary items from the stores and spares inventories of the ships, the measurement of the performance of the purchasing activity in a shipping firm and the construction of KPIs.