For several years now, Spend Matters has been collecting and publishing a series of articles about predictions and insights in procurement, supply and services trends for the year ahead from expert tech and service providers in the market.
This year is no different as we’ve framed the subject around “insights,” highlighting providers’ observations from the year they’ve left behind and how they see these observations shaping the year ahead.
This series will run from mid-December to mid-January, then our analyst Bertrand Maltaverne will wrap up with his own take on the key themes that emerge.
In no order of preference, other than by the date they dropped into our digital letterbox, today let’s hear from Sheldon Mydat, CEO and founder of Suppeco.
Procurement’s higher ground
As technology grabs the flatlands of an increasingly automated and transactional function, an evolving procurement capability will settle into the “higher ground,” where newly honed relationship skills will seek out strategic gains in key areas of relationship-based co-resilience as well as a relationship-driven sustainable supply chain.
Hard coded relationships
Relationship value at the top line — innovation, meaningful collaboration, shared R&D, shared values and thought leadership to name a few — will become increasingly empirical and substantive in output nature, and thus will be more likely to be “banked” contributing to hard coded annual value targets alongside more traditional contract savings targets.
Relationships are the backbone of success for ESG in the supply chain
Relationships, in terms of driving visibility and resilience in the supply chain, have now earned their prominent status (ironically thanks to the pandemic). Imposing ESG legislation upstream into the supply chain will continue to prove ineffective. Whereas collaborative engagement deep into the supply chain will prove to be by far the most meaningful approach capable of achieving the required results.
Now, we hear from Prashant Dubey, Agiloft’s new Chief Strategy Officer.
Procurement will take control of contracting processes
Next year we will see procurement leaders take control of their contracting destiny. Traditionally, procurement teams have been focused on items directly related to price, volume mix or service levels associated with a core product or service. However, risk is the principal driver for legal departments and terms related to data privacy, cyber security and compliance are often the focus. Those differences and associated complexity cause bottlenecks in the purchasing process and have made it difficult for procurement professionals to focus on actions that have historically measured the effectiveness of their organization.
Because of the differences between what procurement and legal teams care most about, most large procurement organizations are now taking control of their contracting process and are launching major initiatives to create global contracting centers of excellence enabled by CLM. This will create more productive relationships between legal and procurement departments and accelerate the contracting cycle. Ultimately, this will create a less adversarial relationship between legal and procurement. While enabling procurement professionals to focus on category management, vendor consolidation, supplier diversity and economic leverage – the business metrics they should be measured on.
Thanks to Suppeco and Agiloft for being a part of the series.
If you need to find the right procurement technology and provider for your business needs next year, Spend Matters “Procurement Technology Buyer’s Guide” and TechMatch can help.
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And if you are looking for procurement services providers to help you with your 2023 decisions, look no further than our Procurement Services Market Landscape Directory.
Thank you for reading this series. Keep an eye out for the final wrap up from our analyst Betrand Maltaverne coming soon.
