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

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 Prashant Dubey, Chief Strategy Officer and Research Chair of Agiloft.

CLMs are central to the CPO transformation

Chief procurement officers have moved deliberately from being tacticians who execute ‘3 Bids and a Buy’ to become stewards of ‘Risk-optimized strategic category management.’ Many have realized that such a change requires contract lifecycle management (CLM) platforms that are ‘data first’ yet operate with an understanding that contracting is fundamentally a human-centric business process. As a result, 2024 will see a deliberate move by CPOs to acquire (and fund) data-first CLM technology as a critical enterprise business system rather than a legal tool.

Successful procurement professionals will leverage CLM to remove traditional buy-side process bottlenecks at the front and middle of the contracting process. Intake of business requests and requests for legal support are two sub-processes at the headwaters of inefficiency and potentially adversarial interdepartmental interactions. Procurement has become better at ‘systems thinking’ and will use this lens to fix these two inter-departmental workflows so that the entire contracting process will increase in efficiency this year.

CLM systems that take an ‘agree and thrive’ approach, which recognizes the power of contract data in executed contracts, contracting process data, decision support data and contract performance data, will be highly sought after by CPOs, who are one of the most enlightened executives to recognize the power of contracting data.

You can read our in-depth analysis of Agiloft’s solution here. Many thanks to Supplier.io 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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