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

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 through January, and 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 Richard Hogg, CEO at Vizibl, a provider of supplier management solutions and one of Spend Matters 50 Procurement Providers to Watch.

Meaningful supplier relationships are mission-critical

Enterprise organizations have never before been faced with so many threats, on so many fronts. From mounting geo-political tensions, a global cost-of-living crisis, and changing consumer demands, to global supply chain crises, rampant Scope 3 emissions, and even a pandemic, recent years have seen the challenges to enterprise businesses grow and multiply, and this trend certainly did not slow down in 2023.

In the face of these obstacles, the procurement professionals we work with are finding their work increasingly central to the survival of the business. It has never been more important for them to balance cost, quality, efficiency, ensure supply chain continuity, and attract external innovation to promote business continuity and growth. What’s more, their businesses are increasingly tasked with balancing this growth against the pressing sustainability agenda, with an urgent imperative to decarbonize their value chains, end to end.

Organizations cannot fulfill these new demands and retain competitive advantage without strengthening their ties to their supply chain and forging deep collaborative relationships with key suppliers and partners.

Compounding these pressures, we see buying organizations are fighting to be front and center to a relatively small group of key strategic suppliers that serve similar businesses across the globe. Every single buying organization is now competing for the attention of each of these suppliers, and to access the supplier’s best people, innovations and resources, each supplier in turn needs to fundamentally believe that the buying organization is an attractive client, worth their investment, and worth prioritizing over others. As a result, we’ve seen significant increases in investments in supplier engagement programs across the later half of 2023, with no expectation of this slowing down as we go into 2024.

My advice to procurement leaders as we head into 2024 is to double down on those mission-critical relationships, remembering constantly that your business can neither be sustainable, resilient, nor competitive, without those very suppliers.

The time is now, and the stakes could not be higher.

Many thanks to Vizibl for being a part of the series.

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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Access Spend Matters dedicated ‘Artificial Intelligence in Procurement’ page for more AI insights.

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