New Year Insights for the procurement solutions and services marketplace 2024: Zip

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

This year we’re highlighting the customer demands, market movements and advances in procurement tech that are exciting the world of solution providers, how they expect them to shape the S2P landscape next year and how they plan to respond to them.

Our series runs from mid-December to mid-January, then our senior analysts will wrap up with their own take on the key themes that emerge.

In no order of preference, other than by the date they arrived in our inbox, today let’s hear from:

Nick Heinzmann, Head of Research at Zip, provider of e-Procurement and intake management solutions and one of Spend Matters 50 Procurement Providers to Watch.

Gravitation towards suite solutions, greater intake adoption, regulatory headwinds for AI and a brand new age for ERP

In the wake of 2023’s economic challenges, 2024 heralds a steady growth in procurement, with organizations gravitating towards suite-centric strategies over traditional best-of-breed solutions. With the pendulum swinging this direction, the shift toward consolidation not only paves the way for an influx of product suite providers but also renewed interest in foundational ‘back to basics’ practices such as e-sourcing. Industry stragglers will need to quickly adapt and start integrating these procurement tools into their tech stacks.

However, as organizations simplify through consolidation, one key solution stands to sweep the procurement landscape in the coming year: intake. As intake becomes more widely adopted within the procurement space in 2024, intake-to-pay will eclipse legacy procure-to-pay and source-to-pay as the preferred business process. Intake will continue as its own category, and it will become an essential component of procurement, embedded at a faster pace as vendors look at intake as a single front door for any and all source-to-pay processes. As vendors increasingly treat intake as the cornerstone of the source-to-pay cycle, this evolution will spotlight firms solely reliant on the older procure-to-pay approach, nudging them to either incorporate intake with existing partnerships or seek alternative avenues to enhance the efficacy of their processes.

Generative AI has taken 2023 by storm, but after its limelight, the technology will face regulatory headwinds in the new year, causing businesses to tread more cautiously into 2024. The looming regulations and mounting security concerns are prompting organizations to hit the brakes on wholesale adoption. While pilot initiatives will be numerous, many may not achieve the desired outcomes, tempering enterprise enthusiasm. As the AI evaluation intensifies, vendors will face heightened scrutiny. Yet, this scrutiny could pave the way for a more data-centric, user-friendly application landscape.

Lastly, ERP solutions will shift more rapidly than they have before. This next evolution of ERP will take center stage, emulating the strategies of Salesforce’s customer-centric model and Workday’s employee data approach; organizations will be looking at a similar shift towards a more inhouse approach for procurement. The current landscape sees vendors bridging the gap between ERP functions and procure-to-pay solutions. While ERP will persist as the primary accounting and financial record-keeper, enterprises will hunt for a new standard for B2B interactions. As consolidation persists, the realization that ERP can’t singularly manage vendor processes will crystallize.

Many thanks to Zip for being a part of the series. You can read our in-depth analysis of Zip’s solution here. You can also read our senior analyst’s take on the key themes from the series here.

If you need to find the right procurement technology provider or service for your business needs next year, try Spend Matters TechMatch for a free rapid shortlist.

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As always, reach out to discover how Spend Matters can help with your new year commitments and wishes.