FINANCE & SPEND WATCH NOW
Compliance without the boring bits- Episode # 6
Agreeing with Donna, Spencer warns that you only get one shot to make a first impression:“ Suppliers are often willing to give a new digital tool a try, but they’ ve certainly been burned in the past. If you force them to use a bad tool that’ s painful and gives them no value it’ ll damage or at least draw down on your relationship.”
What comes next for procurement If getting modernisation right is about mindset and adoption today, both leaders agree the bigger shifts are still ahead in who does the work and how procurement and finance relate to each other.
“ Procurement and finance are no different from any business function being revolutionised by technology. We’ ll see organisations shifting to higher compensation for a smaller number of more experienced A-players,” says Spencer.“ Because a small team with AI tools can multiply their impact. You don’ t‘ just need more heads’ like in the past because everyone can spin up their own fleet of phantom AI workers.”
Donna sees a parallel shift at the traditional boundary between procurement and finance.“ The wall between procurement and finance is already coming down,” she says.“ Every invoice is the proof point of a commercial decision somebody made upstream, so managing the two in silos has never made much sense.
“ Most large organisations don’ t operate in a single-system world. They have several ERPs, contracts living in separate systems, plus a huge amount of activity that happens completely outside procurement. That’ s the reality. A financial control plane means pulling all of that together, covering the full invoice lifecycle from PO to payment in a single place.”
The thread running through all of this is financial integrity.“ You never trade speed for integrity. Faster is only better if the books stay clean and compliant at the same time,” says Donna. She concludes:“ I think we’ ll look back at today’ s finance organisations the way we look at paper-based procurement twenty years ago. Most routine financial decisions will be made autonomously. But the winners won’ t be the companies with the fastest AI. They’ ll be the ones with the strongest governance around it. That’ s what lets you have both speed and compliance, instead of trading one for the other.” procurementmag. com 63