New Year Insights for the procurement solutions and services marketplace 2024: The Classification Guru

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 Susan Walsh, the founder and MD of The Classification Guru.

Focus on people before GenAI

2024 will continue to focus on the hype around Gen AI. It promises so much, and everybody else is doing it, so we should too …

The reality is however, that for many procurement and supply chain functions, they are not there in terms of the basics of people, process and technology yet — something that has come up time and again when it comes to discussions around digital procurement that I have chaired in 2023. Oh, and of course data quality!

Before jumping into a potentially catastrophic situation with Gen AI tools or other trendy technology, which by the way will NOT magically solve all your problems, you have to get people, your stakeholders and users, on board first. Process and technology will 100% not work if you don’t focus on this first. And it can take time: not everyone is accepting of change at the same pace. How many projects have you heard fail because they didn’t engage the key stakeholders at the very beginning, costing millions of dollars?

Take a step back. What is the end goal? Will this technology help you achieve this? Or is there a better way to achieve the outcome that doesn’t involve the latest technology?

So while I know that using technology such as GenAI will be used widely to improve efficiencies, save time and possibly people, what I really hope for in 2024 is a focus on data quality, people, process and then technology.

Will it happen? Probably not. But I will keep banging the drum!

Many thanks to The Classification Guru for being a part of the series. Read our senior analyst’s take on the key themes from the series here.

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