First, I wanted to congratulate SAP and its Intelligent Spend team for making Wednesday’s online event happen so soon after its coronavirus-driven decision to cancel its annual event in Las Vegas. Kudos, too, for the professional and informative presentations and very usable infrastructure, which included immediately available recordings.

Now for my conference report: I spent a good part of the morning “attending” virtual sessions (with my services procurement filters turned on, of course). I had expected to hear a more specific update on the SAP Fieldglass solution suite. However, solution migration and integration seemed to be the main themes of the day, as the SAP Intelligent Spend movement continues its process of integrating solutions, like SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass, onto a single cloud platform, through CIG (Cloud Integration Gateway) on top of HANA (an application appliance in-memory database).

Yesterday we began our conversation with Mark Webb of Future Purchasing about whether category management has had its day or is still as critical to delivering value as it has always been. Mark mentioned the ROI and benefits it can bring, and qualified that by saying that of course, you can measure benefits in many ways: Attractiveness as a function – “this is really important today, especially for the millennial worker who wants more than just tactical sourcing as a career. Having the time to develop strong category strategies allows you to look at a range of value levers you can apply to a category, in a systematic way that can be proven. It’s a creative process that uses fresh data sets and strategic tools to generate as many areas of opportunity as possible. At the start of the process you might have 2 or 3 ideas which can grow [...]