
Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Sergii Dovgalenko, CPO at JSC Ukrainian Railway.
During these times of Industry 4.0, many companies have substantially progressed on the path toward digital transformation. Fellow procurement colleagues operate their new shiny source-to-contract suites, P2P and SRM tools. However, one critical aspect of digitalization sometimes remains forgotten or insufficiently addressed — data integration.
The procurement value chain spreads well beyond the S2C cycle — it starts from planning and goes all the way to supplier performance and risk management. Even if your chief architect is a genius, and managed to build the fully integrated digital pipeline of planning, budgeting, sourcing, contracting, material management, P2P and SRM modules, where tasks freely flow from one section to another, data integration may remain a challenge. This guest post examines the importance of understanding data integration.