Procurement in the Spotlight: A New Agenda for a New Era

Now is the time for procurement to seize the stage. Learn how to position procurement as a strategic business partner while setting your team up for success against future uncertainty.

Request E-book

Break Down Silos to Deliver on Today’s New Procurement Agenda

Read this e-book to:

  • Learn the five components of today's new procurement agenda
  • Address the challenges of siloed approaches and discover how Business Spend Management can help
  • Understand why now is the time to capitalize on procurement's proven value
Download the eBook Now

Procurement leaders gained significant political capital within their organizations thanks to their extraordinary efforts managing recent disruptions.

CPOs now stand at an important crossroads with a significant opportunity to implement today’s new procurement agenda. By breaking down silos, procurement teams can drive innovation, increase agility, and deliver on board-level initiatives—such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues.

CPOs have a real opportunity this year to make step-change improvements across the procurement agenda by breaking down silos with an end-to-end Business Spend Management (BSM) strategy, setting up their teams for success in an uncertain future and positioning procurement to be more strategic in the long term.
Procurement’s New Agenda E-book

FAQ

What are the five items in the new procurement agenda?

Procurement’s new agenda includes three long-standing priorities, delivering margin impact, increasing agility, and reducing risk, along with two new priorities, delivering on ESG imperatives and driving innovation. Each of these agenda items are crucial for procurement teams to position themselves for future success and stability.

What are process and technology silos, and why are they so harmful to an organization?

Siloed processes and systems keep cross-functional teams from collaborating effectively when faced with new challenges. For example, during recent economic changes, many companies wanted to accelerate payments to small or at-risk suppliers while stretching payments to others to the limits of agreed terms, in order to preserve cash. Even though they may have made investments to identify small suppliers as part of their ESG initiatives, obtained financial risk data on their suppliers, and digitized transactional P2P, companies still struggled to put the pieces together. The financial risk data wasn’t available to the AP team when they were ready to prioritize invoices for payment. The AP team often wasn’t prioritizing at all and were just paying invoices on approval. Breaking down these siloed functions is an essential first step to achieving a modern, efficient, and sustainable procurement process.

What are the top procurement challenges for most organizations, and how does Business Spend Management address these challenges?

The first most familiar challenge that procurement teams face is digital readiness, which became especially apparent as team members started to work remotely. In addition, maverick spend with unapproved suppliers has elevated risk. The third challenge is value leakage from off-contract spend, inefficient manual processes, and limited visibility and control over spend and liquidity. The fourth most common challenge is a lack of agility in times when plans must change. Business Spend Management addresses these challenges by providing visibility and control over all spend, effectively managing suppliers and risk, maximizing the financial impact of spend, and increase the organization’s agility in the face of constant changes and disruptions.