Focal Point’s Anders Lillevik and Alice Gumo discuss procurement in the digital age, and how their end-to-end solution enables the function to modernise, optimise, and drive value…
How do you run a successful procurement department on Excel and email, or on legacy infrastructure? The short answer, as Anders Lillevik and Alice Gumo can unsurprisingly attest to, is you can’t. At all. And that’s truer today than ever, with procurement professionals facing increased pressure and complexity. There is a need to add value beyond savings. To have greater visibility and transparency across an increasingly broad remit of activities. Think ESG, diversity and inclusion, and risk mitigation.
Technology, of course, is essential in navigating such a landscape, but only if it gives the necessary flexibility and user experience. It must centralise procurement processes and brings high levels of automation to workflows. It must connect functions and stakeholders across the business and brings large and disparate volumes of data into one central location. Which is where Focal Point, developed in 2020 by Lillevik in response to his own experiences as a senior procurement professional, comes in.
The company provides a single, end-to-end management solution for procurement decision intelligence, data analytics, and automation. Focal Point connects seamlessly to legacy procurement infrastructure. It also helps streamline workflows and mitigate process inefficiencies. Focal Point brings in typically-siloed data from across the organisation and making it easily available in real time. This eliminates the need to log into multiple systems to find information, thus reducing complexity and inefficiencies. It also enables procurement to track and monitor activity across the business and demonstrate greater value…
Modernising procurement
Focal Point takes a people-first approach to procurement to empower those in the function to realise their full potential – hardly surprising considering it’s the product of Lillevik and team’s 95 collective years’ procurement experience. Both Lillevik and Gumo have been in the profession for more than 20 years, with Lillevik’s own tenures as a CPO inspiring him to start the tech firm. Which brings us back to those Excel spreadsheets and emails…
