Modern procurement has undergone so much change in recent years, it is finally achieving recognition as a true strategic business enabler. Empowered by data-driven insights and digitised systems and tools, procurement occupies a unique position at the heart of an enterprise’s operations, supply chains and growth. How are leading companies creating sustainable digital capabilities and how do companies do this at scale?
The Digital Insight team decided to take a deeper dive into this fascinating area and assembled an incredible panel of digital procurement CEOs to find out more and share procurement’s relationship with data, intelligence (and its maturity), as well as the opportunities emerging from these insights and the technology that captures them too. You can watch the full video discussion here…
The panel covered…
Data in procurement
- With more access to data in procurement than ever before, how does this differ from 5-10 years ago?
- Where is this data coming from?
- What does this mean for the role of procurement?
Evaluating and dealing with risk
- Is there more risk in the supply chain now than ever before?
- How has evaluating risk changed for better or for worse?
- Are the risks becoming increasingly dynamic and changing?
Opportunities in procurement
- With the capturing and understanding of data, is this now a unique opportunity for procurement, to act as an “intelligence hub” across multiple domains from risk to sustainability and cost to innovation?
- How do we capitalise on this opportunity?
- What role will ProcureTech vendors/players have in this?
- How important is it for business to adopt a continuous approach with respect to the data that they gather on their vendors and how do they feed this data into their digital procurement platforms?
Joining The Digital Insight were…
Ilya Levtov (CEO Craft)
Craft serves large companies (Fortune 100, FTSE 100) and government entities with comprehensive insight and intelligence on their supply chains.
Success doesn’t happen overnight
“…the challenge and struggle that a lot of enterprises are finding themselves in is how to filter down and get to the right answers. The only thing we’ve seen reliably successful is to take a spirit of experimentation and curiosity and not to be hell bent on getting the answer or a positive ROI for the CPO next month, but to say, it’s going to take some back and forth. That’s the way we personally love to work with clients. We say: there’s a ton of stuff you know, there’s a ton of stuff we know, but we’ve got to work together and iterate with different data sets, different models, different risk models, in order to come to the right answers. It’s going to take some time, but we will make progress if you take a medium to long-term view. That’s when you’re going to get those answers and those models working… not overnight.” Ilya Levtov (CEO Craft)
Aleksandr Yampolskiy (CEO Security Scorecard)
Security Scorecard pioneered the way in which it collects all kinds of data points from all over the world and how it uses those data points to reduce them to a score representing the likelihood of a company to suffer a data breach. Security Scorecard is utilised by over 1,500 plus top enterprises all over the world to hold their suppliers and third-party vendors accountable, and to make insurance underwriting decisions.
Now is the time for procurement!
“Now is actually a great time to be in procurement. Procurement is being disrupted through the proliferation of new types of information and data that enable us to make better decisions. For the first time, it makes it possible for procurement to move from being a support function, to being a business enabler and a value creator at the forefront of the innovation. It’s a very exciting time to be in the procurement space today.” Aleksandr Yampolskiy (CEO Security Scorecard)
Cynthia Figge (CEO CSRHub)
CSRHub is a big data platform and one of the largest aggregators of structured ESG data, covering companies worldwide.
Risk in the supply chain
“…risk has gone up dramatically in the supply chain, at least from an ESG or sustainability perspective. Some of the data has been backward looking, in other words, if there is some great disruption or something bad happens, then there are news ripples and that is important. But now where I’m seeing companies shifting is they really want to know about a company’s performance across all these dimensions of environment, social and governance, so that there can be some sense of predictability and an ability to screen across actual performance issues in advance of some kind of a bad event. We’re seeing a demand for that data and that understanding of the suppliers in the value stream: are they really measuring up? Are there some risks there in terms of what we can see around performance and benchmarking?” Cynthia Figge (CEO CSRHub)
Lance Younger CEO of ProcureTech
ProcureTech are building the digital future of procurement. Solving the most pressing social, environmental and economic challenges requires new thinking and a new platform for procurement leaders, entrepreneurs and the digital procurement ecosystem.
ProcureTech is home to the ProcureTech100 – the definitive global 100 pioneering digital procurement solutions.
Together with ProcureTechSOURCE and ProcureTechEXPERTS, they will accelerate, smarter solution selection and digital procurement ecosystems that will empower procurement transformation.
The tipping point of procurement
“…We’re at a tipping point for procurement in terms of a transformation, which began at the start of this decade. Most procurement functions, if you were to assess them from a digitalisation or data perspective, will score three to four, maybe five (out of ten). You have one or two that are leading lights, but I think that procurement overall is struggling to keep up with the changes in data access and data proliferation and not because of the technology, but because of the people. We don’t have enough people with the right skills to be able to help procurement transform at the pace at which we need it to change.”
