Riportiamo l’articolo di Karthik Rama, Procurement Doctor, comparso sul nostro The Procurement Magazine “Tecnologie e nuove competenze. Le skill di un moderno team acquisti”, anno 6 n.1 Gennaio-Febbraio-Marzo 2020
Struggling with decentralized purchasing processes, little to no contract visibility, high costs and a fragmented supplier base? Want to improve vendor evaluation and reduce lead times.
The procurement function is often undervalued in businesses, not realizing the benefit that strategic procurement can bring. Procurement is more than just buying at the lowest possible price. It encompasses all the processes related to finding the money, getting the money and keeping the money (being money defined in this case as anything that has value for the business).
Procurement has been an area of underinvestment by businesses for years. Purchasing is often understaffed, and the resources are pulled into day-to-day tactical activities, leaving precious little time to focus on strategic sourcing. In other cases, true sourcing skills and expertise do not exist within a company. The good news is that historical underinvestment in procurement means the opportunities are huge and have the potential to make a significant bottom line impact for companies that choose to embrace the journey of a procurement transformation.
The procurement function has developed considerably over the last several years and is evolving daily. Most organizations start with a tactical Purchasing Department, which must deal with all the administrative tasks associated with onboarding of suppliers and ordering. So, procurement is no longer simply a tactical function of the business; procurement today is full of complexity – and many opportunities.
BUT WHY TRANSFORM?
Procurement must now deliver across a much broader set of strategic objectives. Below are a few why’s:
• We need to support the growth of an organization by developing scale-able and future-proof procurement and be ready to support much larger businesses;
• Creating a collaborative approach to procurement, particularly where they were previously acted autonomously;
• Addressing market and economic uncertainty and relentless pressure on margins;
• Providing an effective response to a world of ever-increasing regulation;
• Being the best – using procurement excellence to create competitive differentiation.
WHAT IS A DIGITAL PROCUREMENT TRANSFORMATION?
Digital procurement transformation is a radical approach to procurement process engineering that seeks to harness the full transformative power of digital technologies to drive true step changes in outcomes.
Technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Crowd Sourcing, Live Digital Dashboards can be effectively used for decision making accurately and with speed to support ‘upstream’ while Robotics Process Automation is widely used to drive efficiency and effectiveness ‘downstream’.
Robots interact with different IT applications to enable transaction processing, data manipulations and communication across multiple IT systems. In effect, multiple Robots can act as virtual workforce to process operational and transactional activities. This could allow CPOs’ to rebalance their functions upstream and reducing the focus on downstream activities.
NOW LET’S SEE IF YOU ARE FLY-READ
If you intend to start your digital procurement transformational journey or are in between one and are not sure if you started it the right way, ask yourself the below questions to understand if you are fly-ready to start your procurement transformation.
Business processes
• Have I adopted the right business processes?
• Which part of my process is the weakest?
• How close is my current process to the best in class processes?
System
• How can I optimize my current tool set?
• What are the areas of improvement?
• Do I have the right tools to meet my business process requirements?
Data
• What is the quality of data?
• How is the data managed?
Analytics and reporting
• Do I get timely accurate business relevant information?
Change management and user adoption
• What are user adoption challenges?
• Who are your Change Enabler and Change Defaulter?
Hope you get ready to leave your nest and fly high and reach new heights by taking up the digital procurement transformational journey
