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

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 as 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 Dylan Alperin, Head of Professional Services at Keelvar, software for sourcing optimization and autonomous sourcing provider.

One-size-fits-all vs unique tools for procurement

In 2022 we’ve seen buyers become increasingly dissatisfied with one-size-fits-all P2P solutions that are sub-optimized to fit their specific needs. Everyone today is used to a world of hyper-specific apps customized to niche use cases and broad but shallow tools give a bad experience.

Imagine if you only had one app on your phone that had to do everything; it would be painful and ineffective. We all have dozens (sometimes hundreds) of apps on our phones. People want that experience in the office too — unique tools for unique use cases.

Today everyone is a buyer. Whether it’s in their title or not, the increased visibility we’ve gained into spend, purchasing and supply chain through technology over the past few years has highlighted more than ever the fact that everyone in your company is making purchasing decisions on a regular basis.

Everything from travel, hotels, office supplies, shipping, spare parts, MRO and more is often being purchased by stakeholders in the business and not by procurement practitioners. Even with the best policy and procedures you’ll never be able to train and monitor all of these individual purchasers.

Automation is leading the way into unlocking the barrier between these activities and the procurement process. Now everyone can follow procurement methodology and guidelines without having to know the process or knowing it’s happening. Empowering individual stakeholders to run fully autonomous requests for proposal/quotations is allowing teams to expand their spend under management, reduce maverick spend and improve satisfaction with the buying process.

This removes procurement as a bottleneck and frees their time up to work on more strategic activities like ESG, Risk Management, Supplier Relationship Management or tackling new categories.

Thanks to Keevlar for being a part of the series, and look out for more insights for the year ahead.

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.