Digitalisation will radically disrupt Procurement processes over the coming years, as it is a mechanism that promises new levels of Procurement performance. Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) must find out which tools best match the requirements of a particular company to escalate it to new levels, whlist creating new insights.
Well-positioned Procurement teams could negotiate suitable prices to adjust their planning immediately, or replace suppliers when supply unavailability outcomes happen, or help suppliers recover from declining-quality levels by identifying obstacles beforehand and detecting the starting point of them more precisely.
Many CPOs are now sure that big data and advanced analytics are crucial for future advances in Procurement implementation. However, CPOs are still questioning which of the innovative digital solutions will generate genuine value today; so, they are looking at Digital Procurement to make value from many new apps in the future.
How do companies generate real value from this data?
In this digital world striking the market each day, many CPOs make attempts to shape an uncomplicated framework to bring about exceptional value concept throughout Digital Procurement and advanced analytics to make a real difference to company performance.
Two wide-ranging areas:
· Tools that identify and create value support to the strategic-sourcing process through the use of Artificial Intelligence and self-learning methods.
Advanced collaborative sourcing begins with solutions that pull historical purchase order (PO) an invoice data, and creates a spend cube, such as a) Category strategy workflow; b) Category analytics solutions; c) Business collaboration portals; d) Supplier x-ray.
· Tools that avoid value leaks
o Value leakage is still one of the principal-overlooked sources of Procurement impact, in particular for those enterprises with global manufacturing and service footprints.
o An ERP transactional system to manage the procure-to-pay (PTP) process and performance management systems (digitalisation and big data analytics.)
o PTP process workflow solutions use the vast amount of order and invoice-transaction data available to support value generation in necessary operational activities.
o Automated compliance management will act as an ever-alert supervisory body, scanning every Procurement transaction, both from structured ERP systems, and unstructured sources, like invoices or expenses, to identify and quantify the leakages to actively drive solution.
o Advanced compliance management is mainly useful in the case of large-high-value outsourcing contracts, which are often managed by complex legal contexts, lots of individual service policy agreements, and KPIs.
o Advanced analytics solutions will spot noncompliance in transaction acquisitions where manual analyses won’t be enough (e.g. in maintenance, repairs and operations (MRO) transportation, freight, parcel services; hotel or taxi spend.)
o Performance management systems integrated with the supplier x-ray solution that gathers procurement-relevant supplier data such as cost, lead times, capacities, inventories, gaps, and risks, along the whole value chain - the kind of multi-tier supplier's visibility.
o Procurement performance, both as a unit or as an individual category level, would be a meaningful opportunity to grow by using digital tools, which allow CPOs to manage progress and results to control group, category, and individual performance on a real-time basis, granting Category managers to firmly take action right away when issues arise, and to push or force suppliers to make progress.
All these processes will increasingly happen in the Cloud, and will significantly reduce processing time and effort, and automatically pull out all these conditions from contracts through machine reading to match them against nonstop flows of invoices, supplier activity, and performance data. All stakeholders will then be warned about compliance violations and business impact.
To decide which of these solutions are suitable for you, enterprises must recognise the value drivers offered, as well as their potential impact on their processes.
Three areas to start locking up the benefits of the end-to-end digitisation, advanced analytics, and automation.
1. Conduct a detailed diagnostic of your company present-tool panorama.
2. Establish the demand for action built on an explicit collection of KPIs.
3. Appreciate the chances put on, whether from existing tools or means even now to be built up.
Summing up: many of the tools mentioned above make available a more in-depth analysis and to generate more impact. Only the capable, talented people would drive their real value; therefore, start training them to open up the potential of Digital Procurement solutions today, that will take your company to the next value level.
Dave Food
Prophetic Technology
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