While Joel does not disagree that COVID-19 was a turning point, he does highlight that it has been a growing pressure built up for years, with most organisations never fully redesigning procurement as the world changed around them.
“ Global supply chains were already more connected, more outsourced, more technology-dependent and more exposed to geopolitical and supplier risk. COVID-19, shortages, inflation, cyber risk, transportation disruption and changing trade conditions showed that procurement could no longer wait for a request, process it manually, and report on the problem afterwards,” says Joel.
In the last two years alone, companies have been bringing a different generation of procurement solutions to market, connecting intake, contracts, spend, suppliers, risk, workflow, data and AI into one operating environment.
“ To me, that is the real shift,” says Joel.“ The old systems digitised transactions. The emerging systems are starting to digitise decisions.
“ Legacy procurement became unsustainable when the speed, volume and complexity of the outside market exceeded the organisation’ s ability to understand and respond through manual work. The pandemic exposed that gap, but the gap had been building for decades.”
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