Mark Reddy, Global Director of Growth – Finance, Spend, and Governance at OneAdvanced, explores how to boost procurement productivity.

Productivity is a national issue. According to a recent Gallup poll, as much as 90% of the UK workforce is currently disengaged and under-productive. This costs the UK 11% of its GDP each year – equivalent to around £257bn. That’s a massive problem for the country as a whole, but also for every single organisation that seeks to achieve growth, secure market share, and remain competitive as it pursues its business goals.

Increasing productivity is, therefore, the key to unlocking success for individual organisations and the UK at large. There are lots of areas where organisations need to make productivity gains. However, procurement is undoubtedly one of the most important places to start. When an organisation can identify and implement ways to reduce spend and increase efficiency, this can lead to improved return on investment (ROI) and optimises every penny spent. 

More effective procurement processes can therefore achieve more for less. By doing this, procurement frees up budgets. This means the company can spend money in other functions and benefit the overall organisation. These may include attracting and training high-quality talent, upgrading technology, or investing in their R&D for a more innovative, attractive product base. Without money, none of these strategies can be properly initiated.

One of the biggest challenges for organisations seeking to achieve higher productivity in procurement is that they are being held back by existing legacy systems. These stifle any attempts to grow, ensuring the organisation can’t adapt to rapidly-changing environments and will struggle to remain competitive.

Identifying legacy technology

The basic definition of legacy is outdated technology that still serves an important role for the business. That doesn’t necessarily relate to age as some older IT is still very much fit for purpose while certain newer solutions may already be obsolete. To identify legacy technology, look for technology that the vendor no longer supports or which is no longer available to purchase. This means any issues that arise will not be easy to fix, potentially disabling procurement processes and costing the organisation dearly.

Also, legacy technology may be incompatible with other, more recently acquired solutions, negating the value of investing in them. Identifying whether it’s time to upgrade comes down to assessing efficiency. And if competitors are using more efficient procurement tools, they will be forging ahead with increased productivity.

Choose suitable upgrades


If increasing productivity is the objective, then in an ideal world, organisations would be managing all their functions, including procurement, using the latest, most powerful digital solutions.

But many businesses are not in position to implement a wholesale upgrade of all their technology architecture. Instead, many choose to explore ways to evolve and transition from their legacy systems by phasing in next-generation solutions. This may help with budget, as well as reducing downtime and disruption, although best in class providers can enable the transition with little or no interruption to business as usual. These vendors will work with their legacy technology, integrating updated IT with a staged approach that best meets budget and other requirements.

One approach involves organisations identifying the most crucial processes in the procurement function first – whether that be sourcing, contract management, or supplier management, and successively implementing the solutions and seeing the greatest benefits most quickly.

Managing the deployment of new technology

Having found a procurement solutions provider that understands the specific needs and requirements of your organisation, its experts should work with your procurement team, ensuring that everything is in best order before beginning the transition.

It is absolutely crucial that this includes getting organisational data into a good state. Data is arguably an organisation’s most important asset, next to or on a par with talent and it must work effectively for the organisation. If not managed correctly, poor quality data will slow everything down.

The processes include checking accuracy, identifying missing data, establishing ways to sort, categorise, standardise, and validate the data while ensuring compliance with data protection law. 

Supporting the fight for talent

The procurement talent shortage is well documented and the battle to secure the best people is an ongoing one. Technology empowers already overstretched teams. However, it’s also a powerful tool for attracting new talent into your organisation. 

Many businesses are waking up to the importance of the employee value proposition and the need to offer a full package comprising more than just financial remuneration. The chance to work within a tech-first team and advance personal knowledge and skills in data, automation and AI is far more appealing for candidates than a paper-based procurement system.

The cost of inaction

It’s not necessarily a technology’s age that defines it as being “legacy.” It’s likely that legacy technology will be primarily on-premises, implemented prior to widespread cloud adoption. Of course, some on-premise technology is highly effective and appropriate to the organisation, but in many cases it is out of date and holding organisations back from achieving their productivity goals. On-premise technology can be very expensive to run and maintain, and often hampers attempts to scale, strangling any growth ambitions. 

Increasingly, organisations are seeing the real value in taking subscription-based cloud technology, that is scalable, secure, and accessible. Cloud-based procurement solutions help professionals do their jobs more easily, with greater flexibility and enhanced security standards which are crucial for protecting valuable data. Their inherent scalability provides for more future-proof strategies, and helps maintain connectivity with other forward-thinking supplier and customer businesses.

Procurement is a business-critical function, where failure to effectively manage and control spend can make or break an organisation’s financial health. Effective procurement has other impacts too, including helping to elevate (or not) reputation, driving sustainability by using more local and ethical suppliers. Powerful procurement solutions enable organisations to pivot quickly when disruptions happen in the supply chain, so they can continue to serve their customers reliably, thus they can potentially transform the customer experience, driving greater satisfaction, leading to increased sales.

From legacy to the next generation 

When embarking on the transition from legacy to next-generation solutions, it is crucial that organisations put in the hard yards with their data to create a powerful dataset. This can provide procurement professionals with important, actionable insights, and accurate data analytics that drive decisions around trends, forecasting and more. 

These will reduce spend, save resources (including valuable employee time), and drive increased productivity. Budgets may be tight, and while some productivity gains often come in a series of small changes, effective digital transformation in procurement can very quickly bring big wins, powering the organisation forward towards success.

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