Circulor’s New Year wishes for the procurement solutions and services marketplace 2022

For several years now, Spend Matters has been collecting and publishing a series of predictions about procurement, supply and services trends for the year ahead from expert tech and service providers in the market. This year, given the unpredictability of events throughout 2020/21, we have been asking solution and services providers about their ‘wishes’ for the year ahead instead.

We’ve framed the ‘wishes’ around how they’d like to see their markets evolve, whether that be in terms of software or service, workforce or talent, suites vs best of breed or even the evolution of partnerships and ecosystems. Themes this year tend to be about sustainable procurement (thinking about COP26 and ESG — see our series on ESG here), antifragility versus the resilience we heard a lot about last year, and optimizing decisions with supply chain analytics and scenario modeling software. However, as you’ll see from some of the answers, we still can’t get away from the urge to form predictions, which is understandable given that many firms are busy aligning next year’s activities with what they forecast!

Our series of wishes will run from mid-December to early 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 the three wishes/predictions for 2022 from:

Douglas Johnson-Poensgen, CEO of Circulor, a young and ascending supply chain visibility vendor that tracks and traces minerals starting at the mine and continuing to the OEM, also a Spend Matters Future 5.

1. The journey to net zero starts right now with a single step

The road to net zero may take up to 20 years for companies in the most polluting industries. Even if some of us will have retired by then, that journey needs to start now. We should start with our most polluting supply chains and measure our inherited emissions. And we should engage our suppliers as partners to find more sustainable ways to reduce our inherited carbon emissions.

2. To become more sustainable, the procurement function evolves into the supply chain function

The collective contribution of all of our supply chains to the carbon emissions we inherit are massive. Sustainability should be a buying criteria alongside price, availability and quality. Procurement professionals now need to use buying smarter as a key lever in reducing their organization’s inherited Scope 3 emissions. This requires the use of data, because you cannot manage what you cannot measure and monitor.

3. Don’t believe your supplier’s greenwashing

We should demand proof of ESG performance with real traceability for raw materials with responsible sourcing concerns or in our most polluting supply chains.

Thanks to Circulor, and look out for more solution and services providers wishes/predictions over the next few weeks, with an overall take on the series from our analysts at the end. See more vendor predictions and wishes here with our analyst commentary from last year.

If you are looking for procurement technology to help with your wishes for 2022, try out Spend Matters TechMatch℠ to benchmark and shortlist providers.

And if you are looking for procurement services providers to help you with your 2022 decisions, look no further than our Procurement Services Market Landscape Directory.