New Year Insights for the procurement solutions and services marketplace 2023: Flextrack

For several years now, Spend Matters has been collecting and publishing a series of articles about predictions and insights on procurement, supply and services trends for the year ahead from expert tech and service providers in the market.

This year is no different and we’ve framed the subject around “insights,” highlighting providers’ observations from the year they’ve left behind and how they see them 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 Jeff Mike, Head of Workforce Insights and Impact at Flextrack.

Insights on what procurement teams will face in the coming year

We’ve seen tremendous growth in the contingent workforce with non-employees now comprising up to half of the average enterprise workforce. These workers are in the top three biggest spend categories for an organization. They are also key drivers of strategy and overlap with half the company’s risk profile in terms of ESG, DE&I, compliance and more. Increasing macroeconomic uncertainty in 2023, along with long-term skills shortages, will push businesses to find ways to access the most sought-after skills and talent to fuel their enterprises in a flexible way.

Given how strategic this growing worker class is to organizations, technology innovation is finally advancing to help procurement teams — and the enterprises they support — generate the most value out of the extended workforce. More specifically, technologies focused on quickly identifying, accessing and validating skills among all workforce segments will become more mainstream, as will solutions that allow for multi-channel talent sourcing and analytics from a single platform and user experience. These advancements will fundamentally reshape the market because they’ll heighten procurement’s expectations of the technology they rely on to source and deploy non-employee talent.

Procurement teams will specifically look to solutions that can quickly evolve with their needs, empower agility and experimentation, and drive confident decision-making now and for the future. Perhaps most importantly, procurement teams will seek solutions that minimize software developer dependencies and the expense and complexity associated with integrations. This enables the ability of procurement teams to find the best sources of talent for stakeholders while managing costs in an environment of tightening budgets. These technologies will also automate complicated compliance requirements and provide better user experiences for increased adoption among hiring managers.

Considering the uncertain economic outlook and how fast the labor market and business environment can change, these capabilities will be absolutely essential for access to talent, risk reduction, cost savings and competitive advantage in 2023 and beyond.

Thanks to Flextrack for being a part of the series.

Look out for more Spend Matters Insights for the year ahead over the coming weeks.

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.

For granular analysis and comparisons of procurement technology solutions, subscribe to Spend Matters PRO.

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.