How to Change the Game with Strategic Sourcing Digital Transformation

How to Change the Game with Strategic Sourcing Digital Transformation

• December 18, 2020
• Paul Martyn
• IT & Technology

How do you improve the practice of procurement and deliver better business outcomes using strategic sourcing? Prominent industry thought leader Walter Charles III—former CPO at leading large enterprises including Kellogg’s, Kraft, Biogen, and Allergan—recently joined us for a webinar, Strategic Sourcing: Upgrade from Spreadsheet Analytics to These Transformational Gamechangers, to answer this question. On the webinar, now available on-demand here, Charles shares aspects of his digital procurement transformation playbook that he successfully implemented while CPO at numerous Fortune 100 companies. Below, find five key takeaways from the webinar so you can become a game changer in your organization.

1. While COVID-19 has made our jobs harder, Industry 4.0 tools can make them easier

There is an increasing need today to break past the data processing limitations of spreadsheets to strategically manage spend. To achieve this, one needs to analyze previously unimaginably large datasets, which can be done today using proven, state-of-the-art technology.

On the webinar, Charles addresses the following questions: 

• How can new tools increase the bandwidth of procurement teams?
• What’s the role of AI, robotic process automation, and machine learning?
• How does faster sourcing allow your procurement team to manage more spend?

2. Manual work limits the scope of bid evaluation and is plagued by months-long processes

The problems with manual processes have been apparent for some time, but this tumultuous year has exacerbated the issue. Manual work leads to burnout, and, even then, you still don’t get the information you need to consistently make the smartest procurement decisions.

One of the big benefits of procurement transformation and the adoption of a Business Spend Management (BSM) platform is that it increases your team’s bandwidth by providing new tools that deliver actionable insights faster, better, cheaper, and more impactfully. This enables you to address tail spend with your most highly trained procurement professionals.

3. Faster sourcing allows your procurement team to manage more spend

Focus on efficiency gains available using modern strategic sourcing optimization tools to increase the capacity of your best sourcing professionals, often via a Sourcing Center of Excellence (CoE). With the efficiency gains from new tools, the CoE can source a higher percentage of addressable spend, and when your best people source with the best tools, they find more savings and unlock more value.

4. You can avoid analytics burnout and power up deals by 1,000-fold with the right tools

You can increase the power of your deals by a factor of 1,000 with the power of today’s new tools. Is this an exaggeration? Not at all. The ability to evaluate 100 times the number of suppliers on 100 times the number of cost attributes equates to you having 1,000 times more power on bids. Pretty simple to calculate, not always so simple to implement.

5. Break past the limitations of spreadsheets and manual processes

We live in an era where technology developments outpace some organization’s ability to change. Nimble organizations have a distinct competitive advantage. With the vast quantities of data available, the organizations that can strategically analyze large datasets quickly will differentiate themselves in their markets.

Listen to Strategic Sourcing: Upgrade from Spreadsheet Analytics to These Transformational Gamechangers and learn how to achieve better outcomes on strategically managed spend.

Paul Martyn is Director, Coupa Advanced Sourcing at Coupa Software. He holds degrees in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and currently resides in the greater Chicago area. Paul is a regular commentator on the supply chain industry and has appeared on Fox News, CNBC and MSNBC as an expert panelist and has been quoted on supply management topics in WSJ, Reuters, USA Today, FoxNews, CNN, and others.