riskmethods and Keelvar: New Year wishes for the procurement solutions and services marketplace 2022

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) runs from mid-December to early January, then 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 in our digital postbox.

So continuing this year’s series of wishes from expert tech and service providers, we hear today from Constantine Limberakis, Senior Director Product & Solutions Marketing at supply chain risk mitigation experts, and a Spend Matters 50ToKnow, riskmethods.

My wishes 2022:

Resilience is a theme that has resonated with many organizations we work with today and an increasingly common theme regardless of the industry. Recent reports have stated that 62% of respondents said supply chain resilience would be a key priority in the wake of the pandemic. But the question is how are organizations going to build this resilience into 2022? Another study found 77% of organizations note collaboration with key customers and suppliers as a key investment or adjustment in planning to achieve greater resilience and agility.

In our opinion, building resilience within the four walls of the organization can only take you so far. In this regard we wish that organizations take on a new level of investment in building resilience that will expand into more collaborative approaches with suppliers and third parties. There are two trends that will continue to expand this need into 2022:

• One is concerns over non-compliance to environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards that have a financial and reputational risk across supply chains. For instance from January 1, 2023, the requirements of the German Supply Chain Act (Lieferkettengesetz) must be implemented in companies with more than 3,000 employees, and from 2024 for companies with more than 1,000 employees. This affects German companies as well as organizations with an entity in Germany. Moreover, the German Supply Chain Act is only one of many legal challenges companies face. The planned EU Directive on Corporate Due Diligence and Corporate Accountability will also add a layer of complexity for companies operating in the EU.
• The other is related to collaboration around understanding n-tier visibility. Research from the Technical University of Hamburg shows that current AI approaches for business relationship mapping often do not satisfy essential requirements on supply chain mapping based on natural language. As the research states, this is due to multiple languages, imperfect and often ambiguous information and limited data availability that exists today. As multi-tier mapping takes on a new level of importance, our wish is that organizations work more closely with tier 1 suppliers to reduce the noise and establish more clarity of these extended relationships through collaborative digital sharing of supply chains on a common platform. This will increase the ability and accuracy to track n-tier, at least tier 2, by validating these relationships with tier 1 suppliers directly.

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

We also hear from Alan Holland, CEO at sourcing automation provider Keelvar, a Spend Matters 50ToWatch.

My three wishes for 2022:

1. Putting Sustainability into practice

Sustainability is becoming a top concern for organizations with supply chains. Companies that are setting high-level sustainability objectives and targets for years into the future, with no concrete roadmap on how to achieve them, risk the label of “greenwashing.” Sourcing will be under greater scrutiny and pressure in 2022 to start to act on those corporate pledges and develop plans, heighten supplier collaboration, and identify solutions to generate reportable results.

2. Recognition of the value of supply chain tech

Procurement is the biggest influencer for how the world consumes goods and services. In some ways, supply chain technology is becoming as (or even more important) than FinTech: FinTech is all about money and how to move money around, supply chain tech is how to move goods and services around. To meet more organizations’ complex sourcing requirements, I wish for automated and optimized decision making through robust systems that can analyze various tradeoffs such as reducing costs, maximizing speed and minimizing carbon footprint.

3. More young talent prioritizing roles in procurement

Procurement is emerging as one of the most important sectors to lead the charge towards a more positive environmental future for our planet, particularly climate change. Ideally in 2022, I wish to see more millennials and Gen Z individuals flocking to supply chain roles to help drive that change. Young talent is far more likely to be attracted to roles that allow them to showcase their digital prowess; it’s yet another reason why procurement’s successful digital transformation is of huge importance.

Thanks to Keelvar and riskmethods, and look out for more solution and services provider wishes/predictions over the next week, with an overall take on the series from our analysts at the end. See more vendor predictions and wishes here.

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.