Best practices for procurement leaders
PROCUREMENT ANALYTICS
How can data be sourced in procurement functions ? Explaining that the sources for procurement data can come in the form of structured and unstructured data from diverse internal and external sources , Gottesman highlights that one of the key data sources for futureready procurement operations is automated technologies that can be adjusted to demand needs . “ This is an important way to reduce costs , and ranks as one of the critical factors in the digitisation of business processes ,” says Gottesman . “ Procurement leaders have reported impressive strides in automation with the per cent of procurement executives reporting widespread or full-scale automation in their organisation having increased five times over the past three years .”
Another key procurement data source identified by Gottesman is “ in AI and how businesses use the data coming from a specialised human-machine workforce
Best practices for procurement leaders
“ I firmly believe that procurement should lead a business spend management solution . It is really , really critical . Yes , we need to engage with other senior leaders such as the CFO , the CIO , and other cross functional leaders . But what I often see is that practitioners let this decision be done or be led by other functional areas , such as finance , such as IT . So finance often thinks about AP automation to digitalise the finance process ,
while IT often thinks about it from a ' I will plug something in within the existing ERP ', both of them theoretically make sense , but when it comes down to it , it ' s a procurement decision , and procurement should lead endto-end sourcing all the way down to settle . If you don ' t , you ' re going to leave value on the table and you ' re going to end up with a suboptimal outcome .
“ So I really want to encourage procurement to lead business spend management solutions . It results in greater effectiveness , it reduces your risk , it gives you that real end-to-end visibility , and of course with the power of community intelligence you ' re going to continue to extract more value out of the spend that you manage .” procurementmag . com 73