E-PROCUREMENT SOFTWARE and experienced significant savings in employee time and energy output , others have been slow to unburden themselves from manual processes . This means there may still be many procurement professionals who are unaware of the advanced solutions available to them .”
Simon Whatson , Vice President at Efficio , who has nearly 10 years of procurement experience and is a senior leader responsible for selling and managing international teams of consultants and client resources agrees with Reddy , adding : “ The evolution of technology is moving at a break-neck pace , but the adoption by businesses , and procurement in particular , has been slow and still significantly lags behind the pace of adoption in our personal lives . “ We still see lots of procurement teams carrying out processes manually , despite the technology we have
available . As consumers , we have easy , convenient ways of buying products in our private lives , like food , clothes and even holidays via apps or websites . However , when you step into the business environment , the experience of being a buyer is very different . In general , we have not enabled our procurement processes with technology .”
Exciting and impactful developments It seems AI ’ s impact on procurement is inescapable , with most of the figures mentioning it as the most exciting and impactful development .
Jack Macfarlane , Founder and CEO of leading e-procurement software provider , DeepStream , explained why : “ Undoubtedly the integration of AI has had the most significance and generated the most excitement . AI has enabled predictive analytics that has empowered companies to accurately
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