Procurement Leaders | World Procurement Awards 2017
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This year’s World Procurement
Award nominees aren’t just
innovative – they’re visionary.
It’s because of procurement
leaders such as these nominees, that
the profession now has a seat at the
table. These are the people who have
been pushing the industry forward
and creating business impact for
companies around the globe. These
are the people who are making
procurement awesome. It wasn’t
always this way, however.
Transition from transaction processors
Procurement professionals received
purchase orders (POs) and got
them to suppliers. Purchasers used
physical catalogues to find the
items they needed to buy, and most
did not have a central system for
tracking what they had bought.
Procurement was a time-consuming,
frustrating process – especially
for businesses that needed goods
immediately to keep the line going
and meet customer needs.
It was a decentralised function
executed in silos. In large companies,
procurement was typically managed
by regional offices, with no
communication or collaboration. The
person responsible for purchasing
in California had his or her own
suppliers, so did the guy in Chicago
and the woman in London and staff
at all of the global facilities, and so
on. What’s the best price? Who’s
providing the best service? Whose
product is high quality, or poor? There
was no way to really know and no
cross-country or global coordination.
At this stage, procurement was a
task, not a strategy. And it certainly
wasn’t awesome – not just yet.
Digital switchover
Digital technologies arrived,
making it simple and efficient to
both connect and collaborate with
suppliers. And slowly, but surely,
procurement embraced it.
Aided by innovations such as
business networks, cloud-based
applications and big data, procurement
has begun to understand the business
better, collaborate with customers and
suppliers more efficiently, build trust
with stakeholders, and communicate
the value that it can bring to the
wider organisation beyond savings
and efficiencies.
The next quantum leap
As the pace of innovation continues
to accelerate and things such as the
Internet of Things (IoT), machine
learning, virtual and augmented
reality, and blockchain are real,
setting the stage for procurement to
make another quantum leap.
Don’t be surprised to see bots
controlled by artificial intelligence
mining historical transaction data
and automatically ordering items
before supply gets low without
anyone in procurement needing to
lift a single finger in the not-too-
distant future. Or machines scouring
intelligence from thousands of
sources to detect the risk of forced
labour in global supply chains
and recommending actions to
stamp it out. Or procurement
professionals using the IoT to
compile data and analyse it to avoid
business interruptions.
Procurement organisations
that embrace these trends will
continue to move beyond simply
lowering costs and driving process
efficiencies and add broad value to
their organisations. They will reap
the benefits of true, networked
collaboration among employees,
customers, and suppliers. And they
will deliver innovations that drive
real business advantage.
Innovation alone does not make
procurement awesome
SAP Ariba salutes this year’s World
Procurement Award nominees for
the vision to see what technology
can do and, in turn, driving
technology to be more innovative.
They are all visionaries, blazing
the way for the next generation of
procurement leaders and working to
#MakeProcurementAwesome.
Visionary finalists are making procurement awesome
Procurement has begun to communicate the
value it can bring to the wider organisation
‘‘
Alicia Tillman is Chief Marketing
Officer for SAP Ariba. Follow her on
or on LinkedIn
