Process and Best Practice Content

Digital transformation is making it easier for procurement organizations to “do more with less,” according to newly released research from The Hackett Group consulting firm. However, as bluntly stated in its 2019 CPO Agenda: Building Next Generation Capabilities report, “Procurement’s transformation agenda is poorly aligned with its most critical development priorities.”

The procurement industry, according to the report, remains under pressure to act on its critical development priorities for 2019, including improving analytical capabilities, aligning skills and talent with business needs, leveraging supplier relationships, enhancing agility and achieving true customer-centricity.

Procurement has come a long way from the 1980s, when it was simply a transactional function, up until today, when talk of artificial intelligence, blockchain, RPA, process mining and rapid self-service are all the rage.

Recently, Pierre Mitchell, chief research officer of Spend Matters, had a chance to sit down with his old friend and former colleague Michel Janssen, chief research guru of Everest Group, a research and management consulting firm based in Dallas, Texas.

In this second episode of their video series, watch as both CROs explore how the role of procurement has changed over the years, from buying at the lowest price, to total cost of ownership, to ever more complex layers of risk mitigation & value creation — and what it all has to do with "Minority Report."

One day you wake up and realize that you’re nearly 10 years into a procurement career (which you never expected, considering your English literature degree) and you’ve never been to a SIG conference. That changed this week as I headed down to Amelia Island, Florida, for the Spring Executive Summit. And I learned a few things that Spend Matters readers should know.

Last week, I attended Tradeshift's new “Innovation Summit” series in London. It was a short event, lasting only an afternoon, and obviously one intended to test the waters to the receptiveness of both the format and the location, but an interesting one nonetheless.

From a vision perspective, Tradeshift is almost dead-on in terms of what the platform of the future has to look like, and from a marketing perspective, it makes perfect sense. But when there are still a large number of organizations using Excel and email, and a larger number still who remain on first-generation best-of-breed procurement applications, it's hard to sell a true “Procurement 3.0” solution approach when the majority of the world hasn't even caught on to “Procurement 2.0” solutions.

After a Spend Matters' team went to the ISM 2019 conference last week in Houston, I recapped the event in an earlier post, but today I want to focus on two more sessions, one titled "Procurement Hacks" and the other about sustainability, given by HP Enterprise. And I have a special shoutout for Katie Smith, who discussed a procurement digital transformation case study for HERE Technologies.

Procurement leaders want their purchasing decisions to be driven by lessons and insights gained from their organization’s order history data. Gone are the days where the post-purchase data was used only for accounting and reconciliation purposes.

With thousands of employees buying on Amazon Business, procurement organizations realize that they can do more with this data. However, to tell a story from their procurement data, organizations will need to invest in business intelligence (BI) engineers, data scientists and dedicated teams of IT personnel. Machine learning (ML) continues to be just a buzzword for these professionals, as they do not yet see the benefits of ML in their everyday decision-making.

The Amazon Business Analytics portal provides the tabular order history data by various pivots, including orders, refunds and reconciliation reports. While this acts as a good mechanism to look up specific details about an order, customers told us that they spend multiple hours each month to understand the data and gain insights into the spend patterns of their organization. Customers heavily relied on the CSV download feature to continue to their analysis. They essentially needed to gain BI from their data.

To help solve this problem, we partnered with Amazon QuickSight to bring BI to organizations’ Amazon Business order data.

A small Spend Matters team descended on ISM 2019 conference this year in Houston (next year is in Boston, where I live!) and I wanted to share some thoughts on the event and a few of the great sessions there.

What happens when two chief research officers of two esteemed research firms sit down together for a video series chat? The viewer is in for a treat — an insightful series of video discussions on digital procurement transformation and the state of procurement overall. Recently, our own Pierre Mitchell, chief research officer of Spend Matters, had a chance to sit down with his old friend and former colleague Michel Janssen, chief research guru of Everest Group, a research and management consulting firm based in Dallas, Texas.

We recently introduced you to this year’s Coupa Benchmark Report, “12 KPIs to Drive Profitability and Growth with Business Spend Management.” This unique report, based on nearly $1 trillion of actual operating data from businesses around the world, outlines 12 key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you measure and increase your organization’s business spend management (BSM) maturity.

Across the categories of source-to-contract, purchasing, invoicing, and expenses management, there are countless opportunities to assess and analyze your organization’s progress towards BSM maturity, but the 12 KPIs Coupa has identified are especially important.

Why? Read on!

Caldwell Hart has taken on the greatest challenge of his career, and he is thriving. As the very first CPO of MKS Instruments, a global manufacturer of advanced equipment with 6,000 employees and nearly $2.5 billion in annual revenue with a major focus on R&D, he has to draw on all of his 20 years of experience in procurement and supply chain management to support 10,000+ products across their lifecycles. This is not a tale of transformation but rather of procurement enabling growth — rapid growth.

Although global GDP grew a healthy 3.1% in 2018, the year finished with a rocky fourth quarter. Against this backdrop, GEP has released its 2019 Procurement and Supply Chain Management Outlook, which predicts a tough business climate ahead, but one that can be addressed with advances in procurement technology.

I spend a lot of time in product demos, discussing product features and functionality with the analyst community, digging into technology, and harassing our pre-sales team. I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge about purchase-to-pay software – more than you probably want – but what I’ve also learned is that there are some slippery providers out there. They might deliver a slick demo, but there’s quite a bit of information they’re not telling you, and only one party stands to lose in that situation: you. Keep reading for some examples of how our competitors have offered creative storytelling instead of the truth about what their product can and can’t do.