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

Continuing our series of New Year wishes (rather than ‘predictions’) for the procurement, supply and services market for the year ahead (read more about it here), which runs from mid-December to early January, today let’s hear today from Rujul Zaparde, Co-founder and CEO at Intake-to-Procure solution provider Zip, one of Spend Matters’ Future 5.

Wishes come from expert tech and service providers in the market; at the end of our series our analyst Bertrand Maltaverne will wrap up with his own take on the key themes that emerge. Wishes are published in no other order than when they are received through our digital letterbox.

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

My three wishes 2022:

1. Employee culture and experience matters more than ever before

The role of procurement exists for a reason. It’s not there to have people tear out their hair or curse someone’s name because it’s just ‘that hard’ to get a contract signed, a vendor paid or a software reviewed by security and legal. This is why in 2022 employee and stakeholder experience will increasingly become a top priority for procurement professionals. This will manifest in three ways:

• Creating a seamless buying experience for anyone in an organization who needs to make purchases
• Enabling visibility into the processes the procurement team has put into place
• Speeding up the time it takes to get every employee what they’ve asked for from their procurement partners

2. Procurement professionals as trusted advisors

2022 is the year procurement professionals will truly become ‘internal enablers.’ Much too often we see procurement teams that are tightly focused only on cost savings. However, procurement professionals’ number-one goal has to shift into becoming trusted advisors across their organization — to enable the business and protect it from risk. Procurement teams should no longer be referred to as the ‘spend police’ or the ‘internal auditors.’ They should first and foremost be referred to as the team enabling and facilitating a seamless buying experience. Once this trust is built with stakeholders across the organization, issues like rogue spend begin to diminish and internal stakeholders loop in their trusted procurement and sourcing advisors earlier in the process.

3. Procurement operations professionals will be highly sought after

Much like we saw over the last decade or so with marketing and sales operations, it’s now procurement’s turn. We think 2022 is only the beginning for a ripening of the procurement operations role. Procurement leaders will increasingly carve out a budget and headcount for someone solely focused on and responsible for measurement, technology and enabling world-class employee and stakeholder experiences.

A few additional thoughts:

While in 2022 we don’t expect to see a surge in procurement organization headcount, forward-thinking, strategic procurement and sourcing leaders will look to intuitive, flexible digital solutions to improve employee experience and provide visibility without the need for extensive change management.

With the increasing number of stakeholders involved in any purchase process (e.g. data security, legal, IT, etc.), it’s critical for procurement to provide clear visibility into the cross-functional process for the requester. Visibility is the initial step to establishing trust with the business and branding procurement as a business enabler, not blocker.

Thanks to Zip, and look out for more solution and services provider 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.

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.