Process and Best Practice Content

Spend Matters welcomes this guest series from Sean Harley, co-founder and CEO of LUPR.

Part 5 of this series on developing the business case for investing in supplier relationship management (SRM) capabilities focuses on assessing stakeholder satisfaction with current SRM practices. When SRM is neglected, the speed of contracting, supplier responses to performance issues, and the ease of collaboration between all parties — suppliers, procurement and internal stakeholders — tends to suffer. The best way to identify key pain points is to conduct thorough surveys of both your suppliers and internal stakeholders. This will help you understand the wider picture, highlighting common threads that harm your ability to work effectively with suppliers.

As we explored in the first part of this series, a successful digital transformation is defined by certain characteristics. These characteristics touch the core processes of the business, which means that driving a digital transformation requires changing the core systems of commerce as well. And there’s no better way to start reforming core business processes than taking a digital approach to managing your contracts. With the strategy clear, the next step to enabling digital transformation is to understand the key aspects of a digital contract lifecycle management (CLM)system. Knowing these three key concepts will get you up to speed, and putting them to work will create the business and technical foundations you need for a successful digital transformation.

As general awareness about dynamic discounting and supply chain finance grows among practitioners, procurement groups are increasingly pushing their technology providers to offer early payment capabilities. These organizations are primarily seeking to strengthen their supply base, relieving the DPO stretch that has plagued small suppliers as of late while also improving their own working capital.

But while enthusiasm for such programs has grown with buying organizations and their technology providers, suppliers have been the reluctant missing piece to the early payment puzzle. To encourage the full spectrum of suppliers to fully adopt early payment, the parties offering these programs must team up explain the benefits in the supplier’s language, providing a seamless, flexible and fast experience that creates win-win scenarios for everyone involved.

Spend Matters welcomes this guest series from Sean Harley, co-founder and CEO of LUPR.

In this post in our series on developing the business case for investing in supplier relationship management (SRM) capabilities, we focus on reducing supplier risk. Supplier qualification (SQ), a subcomponent of SRM, enables your organization to identify suppliers with weak quality management processes, thereby minimizing your exposure to supplier noncompliance with safety, insurance, environmental and security requirements. In addition, SQ facilitates root cause analysis with suppliers performing poorly.

Cybersecurity was much more than a buzzword at ISM2018, as procurement professionals packed several related sessions earlier Tuesday to learn more about how they can build a defense against this intangible threat.

Throughout these presentations, a common theme emerged. Procurement may be facing numerous cyber risks as it expands its supply base complexity and adopts interconnected software systems, but it never does so alone. Rather, procurement sits at the nexus of a large number of actors who all have a stake in the security of their IT operations.

To make the best purchasing decisions possible, procurement organizations need current and accurate data about the categories they manage. But limited time, resources and accessible market data have hindered procurement’s ability to meet this standard on its own. This is why third-party supply market intelligence has become an invaluable tool for businesses as of late, with a majority of companies now using at least one or more external SMI resource.

IT and telecommunications outages; cyber attacks; and loss of skilled employees are the top three causes of supply chain disruption, according to the Business Continuity Institute (BCI)’s ninth annual Supply Chain Resilience Report, released this month in partnership with Zurich Insurance Group. Although these three causes of disruption are expected to remain highly relevant in the next 12 months, companies should also keep an eye on new laws or regulations, which are expected to act as a source of disruption in the next five years.

Centralization of sourcing operations and overall spend has literally been at the center of debate in a number of ways for procurement practitioners.

A few months ago, our editor at large Sydney Lazarus answered a reader’s question on the very topic. In her reporting on whether centralizing or decentralizing sourcing structures of procurement organizations is the way to go, she wrote that “company size, location, expansion rate, purchasing category and industry are all factors that affect whether a more centralized or more decentralized structure is better.”

Several of those factors played into two case studies from BuyerQuest focusing on how a large quick-service restaurant corporation and a CPG organization used e-procurement technology to confront their centralization challenges.

Today’s enterprises can no longer rely only on traditional intermediaries for sourcing and engaging talent. This is especially the case when it comes to the specialized, often scarce skills of high-end knowledge workers. At the same time, businesses need low-friction, low-overhead, end-to-end and often project-specific processes that can support speed, flexibility and agility — often enabled by emerging technologies. Technology, however, is just one part of the puzzle. At least as important — if not more so — is initiating and sustaining change inside the enterprise. Adopting new talent models is not about making incremental improvements to your existing approaches, much less disrupting them entirely. Instead, it’s about ushering a new and potentially transformative innovation into the enterprise.

In our previous article, we posted a question to services procurement practitioners: Is it time for “SOW Lite”? Simply put, businesses do not currently have the tools they need to take advantage of the badly needed talent available that the gig economy, freelancers, independent professionals and small, specialized service providers offer. The concept of SOW Lite proposes a lifecycle process that “runs from sourcing, through contracting, on-boarding, project management, and all the way to invoicing and payment.” To help take this concept from question to practice, I reached out to Michael Matherly, CEO of Sourcing for Services LLC, to continue the discussion on the next stage for SOW and how technology providers could support the area.

As a senior economist and risk expert at Coupa, Ahmad Sadeddin is in a good position to see what companies do well and not so well in terms of risk management. Unfortunately, companies are being put to the test more frequently these days, as risks become more numerous and unpredictable. In this second half of our pre-webinar interview with Sadeddin, the risk expert discusses common risk-related misconceptions, challenges that Coupa’s clients have faced and one recent risk success story that impressed him.

Are companies paying more attention to risk as they become more sophisticated, or are risks so numerous nowadays that risk management has become a bigger priority? If news headlines are any indication, we are all in need of a few contingency plans. And if you — as a business or as an individual — don’t even know where to start, well, you’re not alone. From hurricanes and earthquakes to Brexit and the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), what is one supposed to look at first?