Author

Nell Walker

Published

14 November 2024

Estimated Read time

6Mins

There were many inspiring themes on peoples’ lips at DPW Amsterdam 2024, including collaboration. One of the major reasons procurement…

There were many inspiring themes on peoples’ lips at DPW Amsterdam 2024, including collaboration. One of the major reasons procurement professionals flock to DPW is the opportunity to learn from their peers, strategise with them, and make connections in order to partner up and grow. We sat down with Dr Matthias Dohrn and Sudhir Bhojwani, business collaborators of several years who prove the benefits of coming together for growth.

Dohrn is the CPO of BASF, a global chemical company, making him responsible for direct, indirect, and traded goods. Prior to this role he headed up a business unit – and things weren’t going well. It got to the point where the question of how to drive performance became a priority. The business needed to consistently drive value, not just be, in Dohrn’s words, a “one-hit wonder”. 

“I’ve been in a lot of meetings where people come together and say, ‘we should do something’ – but the next month, you have the same meeting and nothing has changed,” Dohrn explains. “Structuring an organisation in a manner that really drives and extracts value, that’s key.”

This eventually led to meeting with ORO Labs and asking how it could help BASF build a solution that enabled the growth it needed. Sudhir Bhojwani, CEO and Co-Founder of ORO Labs, knew Dohrn already from his SAP Ariba days He even credits him with explaining what ‘supplier management’ means. When he co-founded ORO Labs, his team wanted to focus on being a procurement orchestration platform and build smart workflows. 

“When Matthias was running his business unit, as he mentioned, he had this Excel-based process where he was running thousands of measures,” Bhojwani explains. “It was an interesting process. We let him know that our workflow could solve his problems way more efficiently. So we worked with this business unit at that time and saw some positive results. Roughly a year later, Matthias took over as CPO and wanted to bring in the same structure that we’d implemented at the business unit, but on a bigger scale.”

Kicking off the project

Getting this project off the ground meant having a business case, first and foremost. This required actually sitting down with the people who do the ordering, because procurement needed to understand the options it had. “So, with every plant in BASF – all approximately 150 of them – we had to talk to them, and look at the individual spend of each plant,” Dohrn explains. “This included direct procurement of raw materials, energy, logistics, indirect spend for services, and so on. Then we had brainstorming workshops, generating between 30 and 50 improvement measures per workshop.

“Then, because it’s bottom-up, you bring in the performance management tool to prioritise the measures. Then you go through the business case and confirm the value. As these measures go through the implementation levels, it’s very satisfying because you can see how you’re making progress in driving value every day. The people who own the measures set the timeline themselves, and there are incentive schemes behind the best ideas.”

Driving value to motivate people was a priority from the start, and something BASF discussed with ORO Labs early on. People are able to see the status of their measures thanks to ORO Labs, which means they’re able to see the results and also see other peoples’ great ideas. “You create a wave of people who are driving value, much faster,” Dohrn adds. 

Addressing the challenges

From Bhojwani’s perspective, there were multiple challenges when approaching BASF’s requirements. Fundamentally, ORO Labs was building a brand new workflow, as BASF required a very different take on what that means. ORO understanding how that translated to what BASF needed was the first challenge.

“We needed to understand the structure Matthias has, and what the work streams should look like,” Bhojwani explains. “We had to figure out how to model these work streams within our tool in a way that made sense. An indirect work stream is not the same as something in direct material; those things are very different. So here’s where our workflow tool worked quite well. We could customise how direct material work streams should behave, compared to indirect work streams, how country A should behave compared to country B, and so on.

“It was important that we could bring flexibility, and that we could solve workflow problems in innovative ways. Another challenge was the user experience part. We had to make sure that the system worked for everybody, otherwise nobody would participate in the system. We had to keep working on it, keep fixing it, and that took a good 18 months of tweaking. The biggest thing has been understanding how BASF actually generates value, and how a workflow can help. It’s been very interesting.”

Identifying the value

Collaborating with ORO Labs has unlocked an enormous amount of value for BASF. Dohrn has seen the business come together thanks to the work that was put into communicating and collaborating with every site across businesses and functions, and BASF is continuing to conduct workshops for further improvement. There’s also, of course, the EBIT being gained from the business cases, putting BASF on track to generate sustainable savings.

“There’s been a real mindset change,” Dohrn states. “We’re now really focused on value, and we’re using this ORO Labs tool to hold each other accountable. You can see the progress every day. We call it the iceberg because you can see below the implementation levels. Everything starts off below the water line – no value created yet, just potential. Then you see it moving beyond the zero line into the positives, and every day I can see the difference between now and yesterday with just a click. It’s so fulfilling to see what we have created.

“We’re able to see the interaction with the plants, the interaction between people, and interaction with the requisitioners, and we can create something positive together. I think that’s huge. It’s only going to bring more and more value over the next few years. People are used to the tool now, they find it easy. It has created value and everyone’s happy because the cost pressure on the plants has gone down.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

Estimated Read time

6Mins

Tonkean is built differently. Tonkean is a first-of-its-kind intake and orchestration platform. Powered by AI, Tonkean helps enterprise internal service…

Tonkean is built differently.

Tonkean is a first-of-its-kind intake and orchestration platform. Powered by AI, Tonkean helps enterprise internal service teams like procurement and legal create process experiences that transform how businesses operate. The transformation hinges on four key functionalities, intake, AI-powered orchestration, visibility, and business-led configuration (no-code), which internal teams leverage to use existing tools better together, automate complex processes across teams and tools, and empower employees to do better, higher-value work. 

Jennifer O’Gara is the Senior Director of Marketing, Director People and Talent at Tonkean. O’Gara’s route into procurement came when Tonkean became active within the space. “While we initially focused on solving complex process challenges across entire enterprises, we quickly realised how much procurement could benefit from this approach,” she explains. “Procurement processes are inherently complex and collaborative and cross-functional, making them a perfect fit for Tonkean’s orchestration capabilities. We were right. Since we entered the market, we’ve been blown away by how enthusiastically process orchestration has been received. That’s keeping us excited about procurement.”

This year, DPW Amsterdam 2024’s theme was 10X, with a focus on the importance of companies aiming for a moonshot mindset instead of an incremental approach. As far as O’Gara is concerned, achieving 10X improvements in performance is within reach for procurement, but it requires a shift in how the function thinks about growth. “It’s not just about doing more of the same faster—it’s about fundamentally rethinking the processes that drive your business,” reveals O’Gara. “Your processes are like your company’s infrastructure. When you optimise at the process level, you don’t just create incremental gains; you can fundamentally transform the way you operate at scale. You can remove bottlenecks permanently, facilitate easier collaboration org-wide, and drive true, reliable automation across all your teams and systems. The result is exponential performance improvements that can be sustained over time. Aiming for 10X isn’t just a lofty goal—it’s achievable. The key is focusing your improvement efforts at the process level.”

However, the journey to 10X isn’t straightforward. Some organisations believe they can just layer new technology on top of old processes. According to O’Gara, this won’t unlock 10X growth and will still leave your company lagging behind. “Getting to 10X starts, instead, with building better processes—and moving away from the idea that any one technology will do the trick,” she says. “For example, AI. AI is powerful, but it’s just a tool, and it’s only valuable if used strategically. To truly unlock 10X improvements in performance, you need to integrate technologies like AI into your core processes in a way that’s structured, strategic, and scalable. You will only ever be as innovative or adaptive or as effective as your processes are dynamic, dexterous and dependable. How do you build better processes? That’s where process orchestration comes in.”

Process orchestration refers to the strategy — enabled by process orchestration platforms — of coordinating automated business processes across teams and existing, integrated systems. These processes can facilitate all procurement-related activities. Importantly, they can also accommodate employees’ many different working preferences and styles.

Instead of simply adding to an organisation’s existing tech stack, process orchestration allows companies to use their existing mix of people, data, and tech better together. One promise of process orchestration is to finally put internal shared service teams like procurement in charge of the tools they deploy.

This goes a long way towards solving one of the enterprise’s most vexing operational challenges: the inefficiency of over-complexity born of too much new technology. It also allows procurement teams to truly make their technology work for them and the employees they serve. As opposed to making people work for technology. Process orchestration breaks down the silos that typically separate working environments. No longer do stakeholders have to log in to an ERP or P2P platform to submit or approve intake requests, just for example. The technology will meet them wherever they are.

“It helps you create and scale processes that can seamlessly connect with all of your existing systems, databases, and teams, while accommodating the individual needs of your employees and meeting them in the tools they already use,” adds O’Gara. “Orchestration allows you to automate processes across existing systems—like ERP, P2P, and messaging apps—so data flows automatically between them. It allows you to surface technologies like AI when and where they’re most impactful for stakeholders.”

Speaking of AI, it remains one of the biggest buzzwords in procurement. Indeed, anything that offers Chief Procurement Officers cost savings and efficiency will prick their ears, but the question remains: can the industry fully trust it? O’Gara believes it is ‘overhyped.’ “When it first emerged, it wasn’t just seen as a new tool—it was almost treated like magic,” she explains. “The hype still hasn’t died down, and that’s been a problem. It’s created unrealistic expectations and skewed perceptions of what innovation with this sort of technology actually entails; I can’t tell you how many procurement leaders have admitted to us that they’re getting pressure from the C-suite to invest in AI-powered tools just because they have ‘AI’ in the name.”

While clear with her scepticism regarding generative AI’s current place in the market, O’Gara recognises its potential. “Generative AI’s potential is huge—especially if it’s deployed strategically at the process level,” she reveals. “It could truly transform procurement, shifting teams from transactional roles to strategic partners who are involved early in the buying process and appreciated for their unique expertise—and for the unique business value procurement alone can deliver. But AI on its own isn’t going to save procurement. The reality is, many organisations jumped into the AI hype without a real strategy, and that’s why they haven’t seen its full value yet. The key is integrating AI thoughtfully into core processes—that’s when we’ll start seeing its real potential.”

With an eye on the future, O’Gara expects the next year to continue to revolve around AI adoption, but in ways that deliver real value. “I think we’ll see procurement truly stepping into a more strategic role, with businesses recognising procurement as a key partner, not just a back-office function,” she says. “This shift will be driven in part by new technology, especially process orchestration and AI, helping procurement bridge gaps in communication and collaboration across teams. Another big trend will be the rise of personalised, consumer-like experiences in procurement—making buying and approval processes smoother, more intuitive, and better tailored to the needs of individual users. It’s an exciting time, and we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

Estimated Read time

5Mins

Lance Younger, CEO of ProcureTech, discusses the scale of the opportunity presented to leaders amid procurement’s digital drive.

“Behaviours and mindsets are a fundamental thing that needs to be changed, and it starts with the leadership themselves.”

Lance Younger is the CEO of ProcureTech. Speaking to CPOstrategy at DPW Amsterdam 2024, Younger believes that in order for organisations to achieve 10X, transformation needs to be allowed to happen and quickly. However, this doesn’t just come from systems and processes, as Younger explains. “Leaders need to think differently about how they engage with their teams, with their peers, and with suppliers as well,” he tells us. “And then after that, it’s been very focused on execution. What we find is that with many organisations, they’re looking at too many aspects, and rather than doubling down on one or two things, they’re going to make a substantial amount of change to what they do.”

ProcureTech: Closer Look

His organisation ProcureTech catalyses digital procurement transformation through a proprietary platform of digital procurement solutions, intelligence, approaches, and experts. The company shifts procurement performance through the design and implementation of digital procurement blueprints, procuretech stacks, and road maps that incorporate the dynamic, data-driven insights from 1,000s of digital procurement solutions.

In December 2024, ProcureTech is set to release the annual ProcureTech 100 Yearbook, published by CPOstrategy, which showcases 100 pioneering digital procurement technology, data and analytics solutions that are supercharging procurement. The Yearbook provides essential insights into the vital components that will deliver first-class performance for procurement journeys. “Every year we analyse over 5,000 different solutions and have 80 corporate digital procurement judges involved,” explains Younger. “We crunch data, take the qualitative input and create a cohort of 100 pioneering digital solutions. It’s a fantastic resource for organisations to go and look at, and talk about these individual solutions, but also get best practices, insights and white papers which will help shape what you do over the next year.”

10X Drive

Younger believes this year’s DPW Amsterdam theme of 10X was a great fit because of the bold strides needed to make the most of the exponential digital tools available on the market today. “What we’ve seen over the last few years is too much incrementalism, and that’s meant that we’ve not been making the bold strides that we need to make,” he adds. “It’s different this year. We’ve seen that with the advent of generative AI and a number of other technological advancements, we can make that change. Fundamentally, technology will help that, but it won’t happen without people changing it which comes from the leaders that we’ve got here at DPW Amsterdam.”

While Younger believes procurement’s greatest strategies to uncovering the true potential of 10X are closely linked to its biggest barriers. “It comes down to investment and having the money and time to make the change happen,” says Younger. “The first place we tend to work with organisations is on that change, and to make sure it’s an accurate, timely business plan that justifies the ROI and then ultimately justifies the release of resources to be able to support doing the work and investment into technology as well. What we are also seeing is that there’s a gap when it comes to talent that is not going to be addressed in the short term. Yes, you can get the money released, but the time to mobilise talent is going to take too long. You have to invest in digital in tandem with great people.”

DPW Amsterdam

At DPW Amsterdam, the noise surrounding what generative AI can do for procurement was palpable. Over the past two years following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT model, the buzz around large language models has only grown louder. With the benefits of significant cost savings and seismic productivity boosts, it is clear to see why. For Younger, he was impressed with the high-level conversations had at the conference.

“DPW has been fantastic because we’ve been able to see some of the digital solutions talking about generative AI use cases, how they’re applying it and where they’ve reached along the journey so far,” explains Younger. “Some of the solutions presented have been particularly impressive. For example, Certa shared what they are doing and also some research about the productivity you can get from generative AI at about 20%, but if you combine that generative AI with SaaS then you get another 50% as well. In another session with Nestle, they were discussing their five-year plan and are talking about the analytics they are applying today which is supported by deep digital and data architecture and a team that has built that with them.”

GenAI challenge

On the other side of the coin, Younger is well aware that generative AI is not a silver bullet. The technology has often been criticised for providing data quality challenges such as hallucinations, not to mention its governance challenge. “People have got to think about the ethical side and understand the implications of managing and integrating data,” he says. “If you combine that with the fact that there’s a lack of understanding of GenAI, then it becomes quite risky. Exiger extensively shared  how to manage multiple different types of risks in the event of black swan events too.”

Moving forward, Younger is clear about what procurement’s future holds. As technology continues to mature, an ever-increasing number of companies are seeking digital solutions that have the potential to be real game-changers for the space. “There are some critical decisions that leaders need to be making now,” says Younger. “Technology is getting better and better and we’re now at the point where if you want something then it’s there. It’s now about making the decision and committing to technology. Many of the people who are working with generative AI say that now is a fundamental time to place their bets. Now is the time to make those decisions, design a roadmap and start executing against it.”

Find out more about ProcureTech here.

Author

Nell Walker

Published

Estimated Read time

6Mins

It’s impossible not to be inspired by the energy at a DPW event. DPW Amsterdam 2024 was buzzing with that…

It’s impossible not to be inspired by the energy at a DPW event. DPW Amsterdam 2024 was buzzing with that same energy, its attendees soaking in information and inspiration from speakers, peers, other experts. We caught up with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO of Zip, at the event to dive into the procurement landscape and chat about the specific qualities DPW brings to the sector.

Zaparde is the Co-Founder and CEO of Zip. At the beginning of Zip’s journey, Zaparde and his fellow founder, Lu Cheng, based the company around their own experiences as end-users of the procurement process. They took their lived confusion around having multiple intakes for a contract, for the purchase request, and all the different complicated components of the process, and created a solution.

“And so, we started Zip and created the category of intake and procurement orchestration. We’re very grateful to have been named the leader in the category,” says Zaparde, in reference to having just been named a category leader in IDC’s first ever Marketscape for Spend Orchestration.

So, as is often the case, procurement is something Zaparde fell into. In this case, he got involved with procurement specifically to solve pain points. Prior to Zip, he was a Product Manager and Cheng was an Engineering Leader, both at Airbnb; they knew very little about procurement. “We were just end-users,” he explains. The upside of this was that they were able to come into the industry fresh, without the baggage and legacy issues that can come with being in a sector for a long time.

UX first

“At Zip, we really try to take a user experience first approach,” Zaparde continues. “What we found is the highest leverage change you can make in any procurement organisation is to make it easier for your employees to actually adopt and follow whatever the right process is. If you do that, then all of finance, procurement, accounting, and even IT find that they’re suddenly swimming with the current, not against it. And you can’t do any of that unless you solve for user experience.”

Taking away problems, the way Zip does, also takes away a barrier to ambition. The theme of DPW Amsterdam 2024 was 10X, a term on the lips of many across all sectors. Once immediate issues and pain points are addressed, 10X is something businesses can aspire to, with many talks and workshops during DPW Amsterdam focusing on how to approach this.

Getting the mindset right

For Zaparde, 10X thinking is a necessity for growth. “You have to aim for 10X to even end up at something X,” he explains. “That requires ambition. I also think that when you think in terms of 10X, and your mindset is angled towards incremental change, you’re much more open to thinking of solutions that are perhaps a little more risky. It changes your perspective.” 

A mindset shift needs to happen before anything else. This involves considering the needs of procurement and the wider company, having a north star in mind, and then breaking changes down to an incremental level. 

“Then you can start to think about the steps you need to take to get there,” Zaparde explains. “A big component of this is bringing along your peers and stakeholders across every function that’s tangential and critical to the core procurement workflow and path.”

Innovating for good

The work Zip does is indicative of the shift towards continuous improvement and advanced technology that procurement has been going through in recent years. There are things that are possible now that weren’t possible even a year ago, thanks to the vast innovations being made. One of the hot topics right now is generative AI, something that’s opening up a world of possibilities.

“It’s the elephant in the room right now,” says Zaparde. “With the capabilities that gen AI unlocks, you can automate a lot more. That allows you to cut down a lot of the transactional and operational work that procurement and sourcing organisations are doing. Procurement is tired of the status quo. It’s been an underserved function for over 20 years, and I’m glad that’s finally changing. I feel privileged for myself and Zip to be part of the conversation, and that we’re seeing all these amazing changes happening.”

Zaparde believes we’re already seeing the benefits of the major changes that have occurred over the last couple of years in procurement. In fact, he knows this, because Zip has helped its customers save around $4.5bn of spend over the last two years, which is an astonishing statistic.

“One customer of ours, Snowflake, achieved over $300m in savings alone,” Zaparde continues. “We’ve seen tangible benefits already. The way procurement is evolving isn’t a hypothetical thing – it’s really happening.”

Fragmentation on fragmentation

The key, again, is overcoming base level issues for the sake of evolution. This is precisely what Zip provides, after all. But sometimes, the issue is at a data level. Unclean data is something that technology leaders are talking about a great deal right now, with some feeling that it holds them back from implementing new technology. Zaparde believes that businesses should be questioning why their data isn’t clean from the start, rather than worrying about trying to cleanse existing data.

“You don’t just clean your data – the real question is why is your data not clean in the first place?” he muses. “You have to have a clean entry point for it. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a Fortune 500 CPO that said they had clean data. I think it’s because of the upstream processes in intake and orchestration. If all the cross-functional teams – the IT review, the legal review, the finance – are being manually shepherded by the procurement operations organisation, then how can you possibly end up with clean data?

“People are keying the same information into multiple systems, which might mean they answer in similar – but different – ways. So you end up with fragmentation on fragmentation. But if you have one single door to that data, you’ll be able to drive only clean data, because it’s a funnel. If you let everyone have different swim lanes that never intersect, you won’t have clean data.”

As 2025 approaches, Zip has multiple product capabilities and features coming up that Zaparde and his team are very excited about. This includes leveraging gen AI, something we’re seeing incredible utilisation of across the sector.

For Zaparde, attending events like DPW Amsterdam to talk about what Zip does and interact with peers and clients alike is a joyous part of his job. “DPW is really accelerating the rate of change in the procurement industry. That’s very much needed, and it’s energising to see so many incredible people from the procurement world in one place. I love spending time with these forward-thinking procurement leaders at this event.”

Author

Nell Walker

Published

Estimated Read time

5Mins

Whether we’re talking about gen AI, 10X, or any other kind of advanced tech solution, data is at the core…

Whether we’re talking about gen AI, 10X, or any other kind of advanced tech solution, data is at the core of the discussion. And when data isn’t clean or ready for the implementation of something being built on top of it, businesses can end up significantly held back. Mithra-Ai is an organisation that helps its customers to build trust in their data, which is a core issue for many. 

“That sets us apart,” says Christophe Frère, Co-Founder of Mithra-AI. “We help procurement leaders and category managers create, execute, and realise their strategies. This is backed by reliable, comprehensive data, both internal and external, tailored specifically for their categories.

“Maintaining high-quality data is crucial as it influences the accuracy and reliability of AI-driven insights and recommendations. That’s where Mitha-AI comes in. Our cleansing, enrichment, and auto-classification engines ensure that procurement stakeholders, including data scientists, begin with a reliable data foundation.”

Cleaning and classifying data

Mithra-Ai is an AI-native SaaS solution, which starts off by proposing a meaningful spend hierarchy for every category. What’s key is that this is paired with an automated cleansing and classification engine. This is so important because the only way to achieve truly clean data is to make sure it enters the system clean in the first place. 

“Clear visibility into categorised spending eliminates uncategorised expenses and wrong assumptions,” says Frère. “When supplemented by relevant external data intelligence, category managers are empowered to negotiate with confidence, achieve greater savings, and monitor initiatives effectively.”

A world beyond cost savings

When launching Mithra-Ai in 2021, the company’s founders rightly foresaw that the role of procurement would evolve beyond focusing merely on cost savings, and become the central hub of every organisation. Because of that, they knew that accurate, reliable information was needed – hence the necessity for Mithra-Ai.

As procurement has shifted, the status quo is no longer good enough. It’s an exciting time for the sector, but also one of high demand in the race to adopt increasingly advanced technology. But it’s necessary for efficiency and growth.

“Tesla and Nvidia exemplify the power of embracing change over maintaining that status quo,” says Frère. “Procurement is facing intense pressure to evolve with organisational needs. Those organisations can opt for incremental changes, which will likely slow them down, or pursue a 10X leap to maintain competitive advantage. The latter requires bold and decisive leadership from heads of procurement.”

The road to 10X thinking

The way to drive 10X thinking, Frère believes, is through having a clear vision of your goals. Sometimes businesses, especially ones which are going through major change or those navigating outdated legacy systems, are at risk of losing sight of their goals. But having that vision is a foundational necessity, regardless of what stage you’re at.

“Set aspirations high, and question existing norms,” says Frère. “Procurement leaders can draw inspiration from startups by fostering a culture of innovation through small-scale initiatives that can rapidly expand. Reevaluate the skills and team structure necessary for future success.”

Another important aspect to bear in mind when considering these things is the level of risk you’re willing to undertake when setting goals and aspirations. “That’s often overlooked,” Frère continues. “Determining the acceptable level of risk is crucial. It significantly influences partner selection and the outcome of RFPs.”

Thinking big, starting small

While ambition is vital to 10X thinking and beyond, businesses must also make sure they don’t bite off more than they can chew. Launching into adopting huge volumes of advanced technology can lead to overwhelm and can make a business stall rather than evolving. A more careful approach is required.

“Think big, start small,” says Frère. “Prioritise high-impact, low-effort initiatives over those requiring significant effort. Many transformation projects fail to deliver the expected benefits and incur high costs during the program.” This is another reason to decide on the appropriate risk level early on, in order to guide prioritisation decisions and transformation pace. 

It’s an incredibly exciting time for procurement, and that includes Mithra-Ai. In a very short time, it’s developed several foundational modules for its data-driven category management solution. This includes the Collaborative Initiative Tracker that was launched during DPW Amsterdam 2024 – just one of Mithra-Ai’s inspiring undertakings as we approach 2025.

“The tracker means that procurement teams can now involve multiple stakeholders in collaboratively tracking and enhancing the impact of key initiatives, such as cost-saving measures,” says Frère. “Exciting times lie ahead.”

DPW Amsterdam is the perfect stage for launching a solution like this. It’s an event that inspires a culture of innovation, bringing procurement professionals together to teach, learn, and shout about their latest additions to the procurement landscape.

“DPW stands out as the premier procurement tech event of the year,” says Frère. “Practitioners can explore and engage with procuretech suppliers, showcasing valuable use cases and personal stories across multiple stages. DPW is a catalyst for ideation, creating trust and confidence in the benefits of applying cutting-edge technologies to improve business outcomes. This year’s event felt even more international than previous years. I look forward to seeing it continue to grow.”

Frère’s main takeaway from DPW Amsterdam this year is that a solid data foundation is essential – something he was well aware of as part of Mithra-Ai. “Without it, transformation projects and new technologies will struggle to succeed,” he concludes. “In the past two years, there has been increased focus on sustainability and risk intelligence, driven by numerous new solution providers. However, during the DPW Amsterdam 2024 conference, we observed new trends coming up and, again, more focus on data quality, which works to our advantage.”

Author

Nell Walker

Published

Estimated Read time

6Mins

When we’re talking about technology in procurement, the importance of partnership is a major component for success. No business is…

When we’re talking about technology in procurement, the importance of partnership is a major component for success. No business is an island, and joining forces with experts is, increasingly, the direction many move in for the sake of growth. 

At DPW Amsterdam 2024, we met many businesses who were looking around at the procurement sector in search of either what direction to move in next, or who they can help. The event is one that brings people together to learn, to teach, to discover the cutting edge of procurement, and be inspired by it. So when we sat down with the CEO of Fairmarkit, Kevin Frechette, it wasn’t surprising that he brought Nick Wright, who leads bp’s Procurement Digital Garage, into the conversation.

For Frechette, one of the best things about working in the advanced procurement technology sphere is joining forces with other businesses to help them keep improving, and vice versa. “Having the chance to work with people like Nick, who are pushing the envelope when it comes to autonomous sourcing, is amazing,” he explains. “We’re fired up to be at DPW, absorbing this atmosphere.”

While it’s something of a running joke in the procurement world that most professionals in the sector don’t deliberately choose it, Wright actually did. “I went to university and thought ‘wow, I fancy a career in procurement or vendor management’. I know a lot of people don’t have that story, but I’ve been doing something I’m passionate about from the beginning. I love making deals, whether I’m buying a car, a house, or something for BP.” The Procurement Digital Garage he leads exists to look at problems being faced across procurement, and figuring out possible solutions. 

For Frechette, the intention wasn’t to start a company in the procurement space, but his team quickly saw the opportunities within it. “We had this ‘aha’ moment,” he says. “It was a tough pivot. There was a lot of debate, a lot of late nights. I’m super glad we made it because we got to be in a space where people can be forgotten about, and we’re able to give them centre stage.”

The realistic approach to 10X

DPW itself exists to put procurement under the limelight. Each event is themed in a way that gets conversations flowing around the next big thing in procurement. For Amsterdam 2024, this theme was 10X – something Frechette believes isn’t achievable right off the bat.

“It’s something to strive towards,” he says. “It’s something where you work on getting a little better every single month, every quarter. You keep getting those small wins, and you build credibility. There’s no silver bullet. You just have to start the journey and learn as you go.”

For Wright, it’s about not getting caught up in the hype, but figuring out what’s realistic. “There’s a lot of hype out there, and the beauty of something like my team at the Procurement Digital Garage is to weed out that hype, because what’s right for us might not be right for someone else. Having a team that’s out there in the market, testing and figuring out what’s real, will put you in good stead.”

“There’s a leap of faith element that can be challenging to achieve, before you can really strive for 10X,” Frechette adds. “It’s like Amara’s Law: humans typically overestimate the value of technology in the short term, but underestimate it in the long term. So the hype is needed. We have to help people on that journey and sometimes, a leap of faith is needed. For the people that risk it, it’s exciting, and they’re then well positioned for the future.”

However, again, managing expectations is important. “People might be on the sidelines expecting a 10X solution,” says Wright. “But the reality is, you’re going to get 5% here, 10% – smaller pockets of improvement.”

The benefits of advanced technology are absolutely being seen at this stage, but being realistic about the future outcomes is important. “The benefits are there – not at the scale of 10X – but if you just make a start, you’ll achieve wins,” says Frechette. “You broadcast those wins across the organisation. That generates excitement, and then you can work on the next thing because you have ground swell.”

How ‘the future’ has changed

What’s interesting is that this 10X focus, this drive towards incremental wins, has reframed the way businesses plan for the road ahead. ‘The future’ used to mean having a three or five-year plan. Now, the future is only 12 months away.

“The thought process right now is ‘what can we do that’s super optimistic in just 12 months’?” says Frechette. “Then you can put in realistic time frames and set off on a sprint to get there. You have to be able to move fast. We have launches every two weeks now, and we have to be flexible with our roadmap along the way. But we always know where we’re going – we have a north star.”

“To me, that’s the only way to do it,” Wright adds. “I don’t have a crystal ball. Nobody knows what’s going to happen in two or three years. So what’s the point of creating a plan that’s going to get you to a certain point in those two or three years? You have to work on small iterations, make adjustments, change direction as necessary.”

It’s part of what makes Fairmarkit and BP an active partnership – the ability to be flexible and open up discussions at every point. It’s all about real-time feedback and trust-building, to the extent that both parties feel like they’re on the same team. 

The right people in the right places

Because ultimately, it’s the human element that makes transformation happen. Having the right people in place is one of the elements that’s key to making sure implementing advanced tech for the sake of business strategy works at all. “It’s about access to talent and making sure you’ve got a capable user group that can make the most of that technology,” says Wright. “You don’t need to be a data scientist, but you do need to have the right mindset to take advantage of the tools you’ve got.”

“I agree – you have to get the right people on the bus,” adds Frechette. “You all have to be committed to going on the journey together. Prioritise where you start and where you’re going to have the most value with the lowest risk, and have people on your side who can give suggestions and ideas.”

While the much-discussed talent shortage can create challenges there, DPW as an entity proves that not only does procurement keep becoming more appealing and exciting, but where there are gaps, there are digital tools. “I’ve noticed a lot of folks under 30 who are here at DPW Amsterdam, and they’re genuinely interested in procurement,” says Wright. “We’re at a tipping point that makes me really excited about the profession I’m in.”

Author

Nell Walker

Published

Estimated Read time

6Mins

‘Digitalisation is just the beginning’ according to Crowdfox, a business which aims to improve procurement by bettering the ordering process…

‘Digitalisation is just the beginning’ according to Crowdfox, a business which aims to improve procurement by bettering the ordering process while lowering costs. That tagline speaks to Crowdfox’s dedication to advancing procurement using the exciting tools the sector now has at its disposal, and this push to innovate is being driven, in part, by Martin Rademacher, Crowdfox’s CSO. We sat down with Rademacher at DPW Amsterdam 2024, the exciting vibe of the event spreading far and wide around us. 

Rademacher is responsible for everything to do with Crowdfox’s customers. From sales, to marketing, to customer onboarding and success, and everything in between – that’s Rademacher’s wheelhouse. His background is in management consulting, with a focus on procurement and supply chain. So, while he started out in sales, he soon decided that procurement was the direction to move in.

“During my time as a consultant, I found procurement very interesting because it’s so versatile,” explains Rademacher. “Of course, it’s about the transactional phase with suppliers – but also you’re so connected with R&D, production, logistics, and so on. You have so many fields of application.”

10X thinking

At DPW Amsterdam, the overall theme of the two-day event was 10X. The concept of the 10X rule is around taking a goal you’ve set for yourself and multiplying it by 10. It’s an aspirational tool, coaxing all of us to aim higher. In procurement, that means innovating.

“In the last two years we’ve seen tools like ChatGPT trigger some big adaptations in the procurement world,” says Rademacher. “I think there is the opportunity now to achieve 10X in terms of efficiency gains. Especially when it comes to making better decisions, more quickly, in order to analyse data. We’re now finding out what AI can really do, and focusing on how that can help with strategy.”

For Rademacher, he believes people have the right tools to achieve 10X – it’s now about implementing those tools properly, and having the right culture.

“In the last couple of years, implementing tools has become much easier than it was a decade ago,” Rademacher continues. “They’re so well designed that they fit into large procurement systems, and can connect with other best-of-breed tools. I’d say implementation should be the focus, but it’s not that complicated anymore. AI tools especially are really intuitive. As a result, you don’t need much in the way of change management. People just intuitively cooperate with AI.”

The question of security

The big challenge, Rademacher believes, is data protection. When it comes to barriers preventing a 10X approach, concerns around data privacy are among the biggest issues. As a result, organisations have to take the necessary precautions before plunging into making major technological changes, or risk falling at the first hurdle.

“In the EU, it’s all about data protection,” says Rademacher. These concerns led to the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) coming into force in the EU in August 2024. It was created in response to the rise in generative AI systems, and ensures that there’s a common regulatory framework for AI within the European Union. “Companies are very concerned about their data, but I wouldn’t call this an obstacle – more like a challenge.

“The key is making sure you have a protected environment. Start with a pilot in a limited space, for instance, and then make sure you can find a solution you can control in a safe environment that suits your operations.”

Shooting for the stars

With these measures in mind, it’s never been easier to implement new technologies and aim for that ambitious 10X goal. Certainly, advanced tools have never been more accessible, or more straightforward for businesses to educate themselves about. Even as recently as two years ago, integrating multiple elements of advanced tech – like genAI – wasn’t really possible.

“It definitely wasn’t easy to combine sources the way we can now,” says Rademacher. “Now, you can provide a much better user experience experience not only for procurement professionals, but for anyone who takes advantage of what procurement introduces to the company. Finding the supply to fulfil your demand is so much easier now. You no longer have to have difficult conversations starting with an email to your procurement professional to identify whether you’re allowed to purchase from a certain vendor, and whether they’re vetted or not. Streamlining processes like that makes that information quick and easy to identify.”

Additionally, we’re at a point with advanced technology where the tools we have access to are capable of handling more and more volumes of data at an extremely fast pace. “In consulting, for example, every project started with an analysis of the status quo of a firm,” says Rademacher. “We’d figure out who the vendors are, the categories, and the spend. Depending on the workforce, this could take one or two weeks. Now, with the tools we have access to, you can gather this information in 24 hours.”

The evolution continues

While we’re seeing many of the benefits that come with genAI and other advanced technologies already, it’s only the beginning of what we can achieve using these tools. GenAI is at a peak right now, but according to Rademacher, it might take another five years to achieve its full productivity level. “There’s also this ambitious idea going around of fully autonomous procurement, and it’ll likely take a good 10 years to reach that level of productivity,” he adds. “On the other hand, nobody is talking about robotic process automation anymore because we’re almost there with that already.”

Another challenge is data quality. The cleanliness of an organisation’s data can make or break its use of advanced technology, which is where making the right connections with service providers comes in. “It’s a good example of when to find the right partner,” says Rademacher. “Find someone from the innovative tech space who you think you can rely on. Don’t try to do it all on your own – that’ll just hold you back more and more. Be bold; find the right partner to make the most of your data and that helps you constantly improve. There’s a lot of talent out there, a lot of solutions that are really helpful for organisations of all sizes. You’ll improve step by step.”

There’s no doubt that it’s an exciting time for procurement. The atmosphere at DPW Amsterdam 2024 was electric for that exact reason. The event, in Rademacher’s words, has “a really strong influence on the sector and enables attendees to learn about how the landscape is developing in real time”.

“The AI-driven future is already a reality for us,” he states. “We’re beyond the pilot phase with our AI tool, ChatCFX, and now we really want to drive market share. 2024 going into 2025 sees us in a good position with high user visibility, and now we’re adding ChatCFX to the game, pushing it into the European market. We’re at DPW Amsterdam to meet the players who are looking for a solution exactly like ours, making it an invaluable place to be.”

Author

Nell Walker

Published

Estimated Read time

6Mins

Certain procurement pain points can prove debilitating for a business, freezing it in its tracks when it’s trying to grow…

Certain procurement pain points can prove debilitating for a business, freezing it in its tracks when it’s trying to grow and improve. This is where companies like Candex are able to step in and turn a headache into something so simple, it requires no further thought. 

Danielle McQuiston is the Chief Customer Officer at Candex. She’s been with the fintech startup for five years, spending two decades prior to that working in procurement at Sanofi. Candex is a technology-based master vendor that allows customers to engage with and pay one-off or small suppliers without setting them up in their system. This means that the system doesn’t get clogged up with suppliers that are rarely or never going to be used again. 

“We’re primarily used for what companies consider tail spend, and we typically deliver it as a punchout catalogue for a really simple user experience,” McQuiston explains. That ability to support lots of customers was what drew her to the role. “Coming to Candex, I was very excited about what they were doing and wanted to help as many companies as possible.”

Addressing tail spend

That ability to address tail spend in a unique way is the main thing that differentiates Candex. It’s an enormous problem for procurement professionals. The way Candex delivers it is through a digital plug-and-play solution, removing the need to be dependent on human intervention. “It’s a horizontal solution for any good or service, and it’s available in over 45 countries now,” says McQuiston. “It becomes part of the customer’s ecosystems and leverages the P2P process. It’s super compliant, and allows a lot of control.”

With this tool in place, Candex’s customers are able to gain much better control over their smaller purchases, defining what is allowed to be purchased. For many, this tool allows them to put tighter restrictions on purchases than their e-procurement systems are able to do. Additionally, Candex runs suppliers through screenings every day, which generally doesn’t happen for small, rarely-used suppliers.

“We run really detailed compliance and sanction screening against all those vendors, taking away a really daunting task from customers,” McQuiston states. “Customers probably check those suppliers once when they’re being set up, but then they never look at them again. Every day, we’re checking them, and keeping an eye on them when our customers can’t.”

Candex’s reporting is extremely detailed, and provides customers with the kind of real-time visibility they wouldn’t normally get – even in their own systems. Reports are generated weekly or monthly, including the diversity status of suppliers. This is data that a lot of clients then feed directly into their Power BI tools and data lakes, meaning they’re able to integrate it seamlessly into their other data.

Cleaning up the data

The whole purpose and aim of Candex’s tool is to make life easier for its customers, streamline its processes, and improve efficiencies. To that end, standardisation is key when it comes to business improvements, and that includes preparing data prior to implementing new technologies and processes. When it comes to ensuring a business’s data is healthy –  before launching into major tech changes – accepting the necessity of making foundational change is key. 

“Data cleansing processes are ugly, cumbersome, and long – and everyone has to do them,” McQuiston comments. “But you have to accept that you’re going to have to do something, if you want to get a handle on your spend. First and foremost, you need to standardise the way you name things, the way you put data in the system, and you need a really strict discipline around that. All of those things will make backend processes a lot easier.”

It’s just one of many considerations CPOs need to bear in mind when seeking out technology solutions and implementation. Modern procurement departments have a seat at the wider business table now, and what they do impacts the entire business. So when it comes to utilising solutions for the sake of the business at large, there are many factors to think about.

“As with any data or technology, it’s all about garbage in and garbage out,” says McQuiston. “Any advanced technology should be used with caution and viewed with a critical eye. You have to start with knowing what you want out of it. 

“A lot of times, people put technology in place because it looks interesting, but you need to start with the problem and work backwards. If the issue is user experience, you need to make sure that whatever you’re implementing focuses on a positive UX. If the problem is unclean data, you need to make sure you’re putting in place all the foundational elements you need to make that better. Always start from the perspective of implementing a technology based on a problem, rather than the other way around.”

Improving UX in 2025

It’s a seriously dynamic time to be involved in procurement right now, as evidenced by the intense buzz around us at DPW Amsterdam as we sit with McQuiston. As we look ahead, she envisions that procurement will have an increasingly powerful impact on user experience. This is particularly important at a time when tasks are becoming increasingly automated, with less and less direct human interaction.

“We’re also seeing a pretty big leap forward in terms of best practice sharing amongst our clients,” says McQuiston, something that events like DPW also encourage. “For Candex, a big theme of 2024 has been getting our clients together to share best practices and information, helping them to develop further expertise in the field. 2025 will have more of the same, but there’s now a higher level of maturity out there in the way customers are considering tail spend. As people continue to onboard solutions, it will be interesting to see how that impacts the UX in relation to Candex. We’re always looking for ways to make our tool more user-friendly and add better functionality.”

All of this is why Candex’s customers love the company. On a base level, Candex takes a complex pain point and makes it simple. In a broader sense, the reason Candex is becoming so popular is the way it works with people. “The most common feedback we get from customers and suppliers is that we’re great to work with because we’re so flexible,” says McQuiston. “We hired a team of procurement experts, so our team is made up of people who really understand the pain of our clients, and can anticipate their fears, their needs, and cater to those.”

Author

Nell Walker

Published

Estimated Read time

6Mins

The buzz of DPW Amsterdam draws in the most innovative minds across the industry. They’re there to have riveting conversations…

The buzz of DPW Amsterdam draws in the most innovative minds across the industry. They’re there to have riveting conversations with their peers, to inspire, to teach and learn in kind. And they’re there to keep an eye on an industry that doesn’t stop changing for the better.

This is a big part of the appeal for Fraser Woodhouse. Woodhouse leads the digital procurement team within Deloitte in the UK. His team historically focused on large-scale transformations, providing a backbone for suite implementation. Increasingly, however, it’s turning its attention to helping clients navigate a plethora of technology solutions. The goal is to help them build and scale, and take advantage of some of the more niche functionalities available. These are things that can be highly daunting for many customers, which is why Deloitte is there for support.

“We’re helping clients ask the big questions,” Woodhouse explains as he sits down with us at DPW Amsterdam 2024. “How do you connect the technology in a way that allows data to flow from one system to another? How do you deal with processes that are connected to solutions which all have their own release cycles? How do you approach change management? That underpins so much of where the value is going to be achieved, and a lot of the providers will be focusing on it. They just might not have the same capability that Deloitte can provide.”

For Woodhouse, getting involved with procurement was a total accident. He even left the sector at one point, but his strong foundational knowledge – and the exciting landscape procurement is enjoying right now – lured him back in. “It changes faster than I can get bored with it, that’s for sure,” he explains. “Procurement is fascinating.”

Aspiring to greatness

Especially now, with constant conversations around genAI, 10X, and beyond. Procurement is only becoming more interesting, more enticing, drawing young professionals in to fill gaps in the talent pool. 10X was actually the theme of DPW Amsterdam this year, a notion that’s on everyone’s lips. And for Woodhouse, it’s absolutely something to aspire to.

“Aiming for 10X is sensible. You just have to consider your timescale. I’d caution against running before you can walk, but a culture of experimentation is important. Running small-scale pilots can help you hone in on where you really want to see value, or where value is likely to be generated. Starting with requirements is a fundamental thing at the moment, but you shouldn’t underestimate how long that will take. And it’s a continuous consideration, because requirements change. Just keep trying to refine your solution in order to take advantage of everything that’s out there right now.”

Fotograaf: MichielTon.com

Having the wrong mindset is one of the major barriers to adopting 10X thinking. It all starts with the company’s culture, and whether that’s one of growth or not. “I imagine most of the people here at DPW Amsterdam have already made that mental shift,” says Woodhouse. “Last year, people were still trying to understand how they, as big companies, could utilise startups. That’s changed now, and it’s amazing to see companies that were startups three years ago working with all these big enterprise customers. 

“They have scaled and grown in partnership with those customers. Mindset is so important, and having the wrong one will only create barriers and missed opportunities.”

Always improving, never slowing down

When it comes to the advantages that technology has brought to procurement in the last few years, the list is endless. Procurement has gone from an overlooked segment of any given organisation, to having a seat at the table and helping make major business decisions. 10X thinking – whether it goes by that name or not – has been spreading across the segment and fuelling businesses to aim higher.

“The layers of automation have really improved,” says Woodhouse. “A year or so back, there were a handful of use cases that you could truly automate, but now you can do it at a much larger scale. Another big change is around security concerns. There are more tried and tested case studies to draw upon now, and solutions are more readily available. You don’t necessarily have to be a pioneer, because someone else has already taken that first step.”

The question of data

Something else that holds businesses back, despite the innovation at their disposal, is an element that can be harder to change: poor quality data. When trying to implement advanced technology solutions, bad data can make or break their success.

“It’s always useful to focus on that and have a dedicated work stream,” Woodhouse advises. “You need someone who really understands data. I think there’s a tendency to try to boil the ocean before you even get going in your transformation, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Cleaning up your data before you start, and having a fresh foundation will help you make decisions on what to implement on top of that good data. 

“Doing all of that is obviously hugely beneficial, but it’s going to slow you down, in many cases. There are ways around that, like embedding the cleanup of data within the new processes. Data is important – we shouldn’t underestimate that – but there are different approaches to solving the issue of poor quality data, like buying it or using genAI to restructure your data into something more powerful. Either way, you need a strategy.”

Novel thinking 101

Some businesses fall into the trap of thinking that they can’t achieve specific things because their data isn’t in the right position, but novel thinking around data can allow them to still drive forward. “You’ve just got to focus on it. You can’t assume the data’s going to fix itself,” Woodhouse adds. 

Novel thinking is certainly something that can be seen at DPW events, and DPW Amsterdam 2024 was no exception. People congregated there to learn, to share stories, to inspire. For Woodhouse, the magic of the digital procurement sector right now is that everybody recognises that their journey has no end. While that may be daunting, it’s a positive thing and keeps procurement professionals striving for more.

“It’s a continuous improvement journey, and I think the best-performing organisations will recognise that, and invest in the business capability to continue that journey,” Woodhouse concludes. “That’s how you get proper value. I love hearing about how people frame problems differently, and how they approach the solutions.”

Author

Nell Walker

Published

Estimated Read time

6Mins

Making procurement slicker, more streamlined, is the name of the game right now – and this is precisely why Globality…

Making procurement slicker, more streamlined, is the name of the game right now – and this is precisely why Globality exists. It’s an organisation which leverages advanced, native-built AI to make sourcing more autonomous for Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies, meaning it has a finger on a pulse of the technology tools procurement now has access to as the industry shifts and evolves.

Keith Hausmann is the Chief Customer Officer at Globality. He has been working in procurement since the early 90s, both in industry as a service provider, and now, at a technology company. He came to Globality from Accenture, where he ran the operations business. During his first real job after college, Hausmann was also part of a training program at a major Fortune 500 company, working closely with a COO. At some point they got into a conversation about salespeople seemingly having an advantage over procurement people due to their access to information, knowledge, and training. The COO suggested that they launch a company to help support procurement. For Hausmann, it was a serendipitous entry to the industry.

“I came to Globality because I saw the business was struggling with how to scale, automate, and deliver a differentiated user experience. Ultimately, I found it really compelling, and joined about five years ago.”

Achieving 10X thinking

Hausmann admits that the concept of what procurement is has only been defined relatively recently, and he’s been in the industry long enough to have seen the shift happen and suddenly accelerate over the last few years. Now, procurement professionals are in a position where they’re able to think big, and they have the tools to support that way of thinking. One of the most-discussed topics right now is 10X, whereby businesses are setting targets for themselves that are 10 times greater than what they can realistically achieve.

“There continues to be, and always has been, so many mind-numbing manual activities that go on in procurement spaces,” says Hausmann. “We’ve built small armies of teams to handle those things. I think 10X has prompted us to take a step back and ask if there’s now technology that can uplift the role of people in the function and take on some of those automatable tasks. Whether that’s writing RFPs, discovering suppliers, or analysing proposals – these are all things that can be automated in today’s technological world. With 10X thinking, you can imagine the many, many, many things that can be automated and just go after them. 

“There are barriers, of course. The biggest one is not being able to convey a compelling vision of what we want people to do in the new world. It’s not necessarily about making them go away – it’s about making their daily jobs, lives, and work more valuable. There are so many things around category thinking and strategy that don’t get done because people are spending so much time on tasks that could be automated. So I think the barrier is creating that vision and that plan to shift the operating models, roles, and the skill sets to something new and different.”

People power

Hausmann believes that if roles are reshaped and honed in response to automation, it’s less likely that there will be resistance to change because employees will know exactly what they’re doing, rather than being concerned about their future. “They have to know what they’re doing before they jump on board. It just requires a mindset change and good change management.”

Hausmann believes it’s down to the CPO to drive that change management by conveying the activities, impacts, roles, and operating model they envision. If they can paint a picture of how humans can impact things in a new way, alongside the new technology rather than against it, suddenly it’s an exciting prospect and people are keen to make a bigger impact. 

CFOs and CPOs joining forces

While CPOs now have a long-deserved seat at the table to help push change business-wide, CFOs’ roles are also expanding and having an increased impact on procurement. “I think they’ve always influenced what’s going on in procurement,” says Hausmann. “CFOs are the champions of many things, but certainly improving the bottom line of the company. They’re also champions of using technology to make the organisation more resilient, more scalable, and more efficient. There was a time when people thought that the CTO or CIO would be doing that, but more often than not, the CFO is the ultimate owner of improving business impacts. More and more, we’re seeing our customers leaning on the CFO to help them make decisions about investments that have a big impact through technology and AI. 

“These days, the relationship between the CFO and CPO is wildly different to what it once was, and CFOs are showing more interest in procurement as a function than ever, making a difference to the bottom line. It makes sense because, in theory, procurement controls one of the biggest cost line items in a company, besides raw headcount.”

Matching the pace of technology

The fact that we still need to focus on change management and relationships confirms that the way procurement is changing isn’t just about the technology. Far from it. However, technology is moving at an incredible pace and needs to be taken seriously. There are things that are possible now which couldn’t be done even one or two years ago.

“A few years ago, technology couldn’t write an RFX document for you,” Hausmann says. “Technology could not instantaneously bring to light the most relevant suppliers from within a customer’s supply base, or in the broader market. It couldn’t write a contract, or an SOW, or a work order. It can now. Those are things that are near and dear to my heart that were impossible 3-5 years ago.”

With these tools in mind, procurement professionals are able to think about the future in short-term stints. Five-year plans are no longer good enough when it comes to the way procurement is shifting – a year is now the maximum for putting plans in place. 

“I’ve always thought that procurement, from the perspective of technological advancement and investment perspective, should sit under a broader business umbrella,” says Hausmann. “I’d guess that probably 50% of companies in the world right now have some kind of program in place to save money or improve agility by investing in technology. And speed to market is more important than ever, so sourcing can’t be a bottleneck.”

Looking ahead, Hausmann expects to see many of the unique, differentiated technology providers becoming interoperable together, because big enterprises want services that operate and scale well in combination with others. 

“We’re seeing that a lot, and working with our customers on how we improve interoperability and integration,” he says. “Tools will become more seamless, more easy-to-use, more scalable. Another big thing is, and will continue to be, analytics. It’s a hot topic in procurement, and I think there are profound opportunities to be deployed. For Globality, we’ll continue to endlessly innovate on user experience, ease of use, and beyond.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

Estimated Read time

7Mins

CPOstrategy speaks with Brandon Daniels, CEO at Exiger, to explore how it helps customers achieve greater visibility into their supply chains amidst ever-changing global challenges

Exiger is on a mission to make the world a safer and more transparent place to succeed. 

The company aims to do this by revolutionising how corporations, government agencies and banks navigate risk and compliance in their third parties, supply chains and customers through software and tech-enabled solutions.

Brandon Daniels serves as Exiger’s CEO. A regulatory expert and technology practitioner, Daniels brings decades in senior management across the financial services, technology, life sciences and energy markets. Over the last 20 years, Daniels has managed some of the largest crises, compliance and risk management matters in the private and public sectors.

Given the unpredictable nature of geopolitical challenges and global disasters and the subsequent knock-on effect these events have on supply chains, Daniels stresses it is imperative to keep your finger on the pulse in order to stay ahead and mitigate problems. 

“Even if you look at the past month alone, in the United States there’s been Hurricane Helene, the Longshoreman strike and Hurricane Milton,” says Daniels. “It is one hit after another. Since the pandemic, we’ve really pulled back the veil on how fragile our supply chains really are. With climate change set to disrupt over 25 trillion dollars of assets over the next 20 years, I think the likes of natural disasters, man-made disasters and geopolitical tensions will continue to disrupt our supply chains, so we’ve got to get ahead of it. We’ve got to regain control and procurement professionals are at the front line.”

This is where Exiger comes in. 

Supply chain visibility

Exiger is a supply chain visibility, orchestration and risk management solution that helps customers to increase the resilience of their operations, reduce risk, and help drive cost efficiency throughout their organisation. Exiger helps customers with their most complex and critical issues from ESG to managing supplier financial health. The company empowers them to regain control of their supply chains when facing global challenges. According to Daniels, every challenge brings opportunity. But the real winners out of disruption are those who can achieve greater resilience. 

“Having visibility where you think you’re purchasing from seven vendors, but you’re actually purchasing from one and that vendor is in a high-risk zone that could be disrupted is key,” explains Daniels. “Firstly, you could contract directly with that vendor and use your volume to your advantage. That’s a pricing and cost management opportunity. And two, knowing that you only have one vendor and maybe diversifying away, that’s also a risk management opportunity. Companies are missing major opportunities by not gaining visibility into their supply chain.”

But with procurement and the wider world seemingly transitioning from one ‘black swan’ event to the next over the past few years, Daniels recognises the workforce is ‘exhausted.’ “People are overwhelmed,” he admits.

“Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have all gone into this hyperdrive. Even though we’re working at home and people are remote, employees are still working all day. It’s a constant battle and a constant crisis. So the idea of saying ‘Well, if I have 1,000 vendors at my tier one that I’m managing today, and that’s already hard, how can I manage the 800,000 vendors at tier five?’ You just stare at this morass of data, this volume of suppliers and amount of risk. And you might say, ‘I just don’t want to know.’ And that’s where also AI can help us with ruthless prioritisation of what actually matters. That’s why we get up every day to help our customers to prioritise these issues and opportunities.”

DPW Amsterdam

DPW Amsterdam’s theme for 2024 was 10X and how a moonshot mindset can take companies from incremental to exponential impact. 10X amplifies the necessity for organisations to think and act 10 times bigger than their current capacity. For Daniels, he believes companies could be aiming even higher due to the potential value that can be tapped into.

“I think you should shoot for a 100X and land at 10X. But I think there are so many opportunities as we gain visibility into our broader supplier ecosystem that we’re missing today,” he says.

“Just because I have visibility or transparency into my supplier ecosystem, or because I can manage on a multi-tier basis, it doesn’t mean I need to. For the most critical things, it means that I need to prioritise those areas where I’m going to deliver the most cost savings, the most resilience or the most significant reduction in our risk. What we’re encouraging procurement and supply chain people to do is to drive reward out of this risk and focus on those opportunities where you can have your cake and eat it too. This means I can contract with suppliers that sit deep in my supply chain that are supporting all of the metals and microelectronics buying that I’m doing, and establish a relationship that’s going to reduce cost. 

“But here’s the important point. With that visibility, I can also demand more ethical supply chains. So now that I have visibility into those suppliers that are manufacturing the critical noble gases that I need in order to etch these semiconductors, I can also demand an ethical wage. I can demand a carbon-neutral supply chain, and I can give some of that savings back. If I’ve made 15% percent savings, I can say there’s a 3% premium because we want to source ethically. When I say we can 10X, it’s the compound value of both reducing risk and increasing cost efficiency.”

AI-powered Platform

Exiger delivers AI-powered supply chain visibility, orchestration and due diligence through the 1Exiger Platform and the AI engine, DDIQ. The world’s first purpose-built supplier risk technology has been developed to navigate the biggest risk and compliance challenges in 2024 and beyond. 1Exiger accelerates growth to organised fact-finding which allows for important decisions to be made quicker. 

“We actually started with just an AI tool that built business profiles on companies,” explains Daniels. “But it’s more focused on the data that we give the system as opposed to training on the broader landscape of open source data that can cause some hallucinations. We wanted to get to high fidelity business profiles. What generative AI is doing that is so unique is it’s making that multi-tier visibility and supplier assessment possible. It wouldn’t be possible for us to come here three years ago saying you can 10X in the same way today. It’s really been the fact that people’s eyes are open to the idea you can create net new data with generative AI. If I’m trying to find something out about 1,000 companies, I used to have to go out and research that.”

GenAI drive

Now, with the capabilities of GenAI, time-consuming and cumbersome fact-finding missions can be completed within minutes. Daniels is well aware of how GenAI has changed the game in generating data while also bridging a skills gap. However, Daniels insists that while procurement professionals are incredibly intelligent in what they do, they can’t do everything.

“Procurement and supply chain people are geniuses at cost, schedule, performance, vendor value creation, supplier negotiation, and market research focused on value-based sourcing. They’re geniuses, but they’re not trained risk managers or compliance people,” he explains.

“The second thing generative AI can do is it can help to bridge that skills gap. If you’ve had risk experts in your organisation feed it on how to handle situations, then those procurement people can rely on those decisions to say, is this within risk tolerance? Is this a vendor that we can accept? Is this a supplier risk that we should either mitigate or we should make a change to? And then finally, it can support that decision-making. I need to be able to document my decisions. I need to be able to create a history of why I did that. Generative AI can help us to automate those unnecessary tasks. Generative AI has a sweeping impact on procurement, supply chain, and in the business world overall.”

Find out more about Exiger here and follow Exiger on LinkedIn

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

Estimated Read time

7Mins

Leaders at SpendHQ, Coupa and Deloitte explore the importance of collaboration to achieving 10X in today’s procurement landscape.

The future of procurement is here and it isn’t hanging about.

In a world with so much complexity, traditional operating models are quickly becoming displaced due to a lack of flexibility to cope with the demands of the modern world.

As procurement functions grapple with an ever-increasing list of issues such as the likes of cost pressures, market volatility and supply chain disruptions, businesses are desperate for ways to achieve sustainable, profitable growth in the market.

Understanding the urgency of the situation is dynamic trio Pierre Laprée, Chief Product Officer at SpendHQ, Kathryn Thompson, EMEA Sourcing and Procurement Market Offering Lead at Deloitte, and Michael van Keulen, Chief Procurement Officer at Coupa. In a joint conversation at DPW Amsterdam 2024, they reveal the power of working together to unleash 10X thinking quicker.

“Practitioners should start embracing this ecosystem mindset because alone, you cannot succeed,” reveals Laprée. “It’s important to be aware that you can’t know everything. It’s about learning how to surround yourself with the right voices, don’t stay on your own or you will never achieve 10X. Find the people who can help you move the needle. No one will do everything on their own, but when we come together we have a better chance of succeeding.”

The notion of 10X was apt as that was this year’s theme at DPW Amsterdam. The meaning of 10X is how AI and a moonshot mindset can transform a company from incremental to exponential impact. 10X showcases the necessity for organisations to think and act 10 times bigger than their current capacity.

SpendHQ is a leading best-in-class provider of enterprise spend intelligence and procurement performance management solutions. SpendHQ’s Strategic Procurement Platform empower procurement to generate and demonstrate better financial and non-financial outcomes. Laprée references the battle between integrated suites and best-of-breed solutions and stresses the importance of collaboration to reach the promised land. “You need proper foundational data, but then you also require more agile solutions that can help you overcome the problem of the day,” he says. “It is the power of all of us that makes the difference.”

Procurement transformation

As someone who is no stranger to driving procurement transformations, van Keulen is well aware of the ingredients needed to succeed in the digital-driven procurement world of today. Van Keulen’s company helps other organisations better manage direct and indirect spend, mitigate third-party risks and address supply chain volatility and resiliency. Through the compounding effect of AI, Coupa has combined its total spend management platform with its community-generated AI to introduce The Margin Multiplier effect. This is real-world AI informed by $6 trillion worth of spend, created over 15 years and across a community of 10 million suppliers.

“What that really means is how can you go from where you’re operating today to where you could and should be operating through the power of people, process and technology,” explains van Keulen.

“What is extremely critical is that you have the right data foundation, but it’s also important that we understand how AI is going to influence your end-to-end process. How is AI trained and what underlying data is used to train your AI? In our case, it’s based on real data, real companies, real suppliers who are all doing real business with each other. And that’s where the AI comes in. When you think about 10X, I think technology is a key enabler. I truly believe that you need to have reliable data to train AI and then it’s the power of all of us together, which we’ve always called the community element, to get the 10X multiplication or the margin multiplier that we can be in procurement.”

10X Vision

In order to make achieving 10X a reality, Laprée stresses in no uncertain terms that people are at the heart of that journey. According to Laprée, SpendHQ helps its clients build their data infrastructure to support acceleration and velocity. “Businesses move fast, the world moves fast and data moves even faster,” explains Laprée. “We help our client make sense of all of that. How does your spend evolve? How do your suppliers evolve? What are the areas of risk that you should be looking at? And that’s a constant monitoring process. Having a strong data foundation is an absolute prerequisite to achieving 10X speed because otherwise you will crumble under your own weight. That’s the key.”

Thompson, who has worked at consultancy giant Deloitte since 2012, believes that one of the biggest barriers in the way of achieving 10X is getting bogged down in the mechanics of reporting instead of value delivery. “Finance directors want you to put numbers to whatever you’ve done but you shouldn’t get too drawn into those conversations,” she says. “I think keeping a focus on value delivery rather than value reporting and measurements is where the magic happens. It can get a bit distracting so you need tools to help.”

According to van Keulen, the importance of trying new things and being proactive is essential. He draws comparisons to his own career and explains that part of the journey is to be comfortable with the uncomfortable.

“I fundamentally believe that if you want to drive transformation, then you have to be bold,” he reveals. “You will potentially make some mistakes along the way, but you have to get started. I’ve been fortunate enough in my career that I’ve had the ability to do procurement transformation a couple of times and support our customers in that journey. The ones that do it at a high level are the ones that are getting out there and talking to people out there in the community and want to share, be vulnerable and are okay with all of that. Those are the ones that are in our community, but also those are the ones that are the highest performers. But you have to get out there and you have to be bold to start with.”

GenAI Drive

Looking at the potential of GenAI in procurement, Thompson admits while the future is exciting the function still has some catching up to do as other sectors are further ahead in terms of GenAI adoption. As part of her role with Deloitte where Thompson also leads life science practice in the firm’s UK operations, her organisation leverages GenAI to accelerate clinical trials and research product development. 

“That speed to market and the difference it makes for timing on product launch is more than tenfold value return – it’s huge,” she explains. “Now the difference in procurement, a lot of the case studies we saw early on were like, summarise a contract or an RFP, but while you can save some time, it isn’t touching the sides. Of course, the CEO might say, ‘Show me all your GenAI use cases and this speed to market on R&D or product launches is more interesting than some of what we have done so far’. Now, we are beginning to see some exciting stuff like negotiations and the way that we can triangulate data for spend reporting. Indeed, there are insights we can get that we couldn’t get before. But ultimately, I think procurement is still relatively early on the journey.”

Digital future

Laprée adds that it is important users think carefully about the problem they wish to solve rather than shoehorning a GenAI solution into it. According to Laprée, SpendHQ has spent the past year evaluating what AI means to its clients and how it can help get to the desired outcomes quicker. “What we found is that our clients want faster refreshes where we can make our AI into a touchless entity that is essentially real time,” explains Laprée. “It’s about how we collect risk, financial and past sourcing information to generate insights that actually make sense. It’s about bringing this depth into the insights and stop forcing your user to look at pie charts and dashboards to get an answer. We have to make procurement more conversational and intentional.”

“But GenAI is just one tool in the toolbox. It’s one flavour of AI whereas natural language processing and machine learning have been here for longer than we can remember. Not all tools can solve your problems. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That’s pretty much the GenAI situation today. Understand that GenAI is not the be all and end all of artificial intelligence. Intentionality is key. What are you trying to do and what do you want to do? Define and think in terms of outcomes, not technology.”

Find out more about SpendHQ here.

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

Estimated Read time

6Mins

Christel Constant, Executive Board Member at Unite, tells us how her organisation is evolving its approach to indirect procurement amid a significant procurement transformation.

“There is so much that can be done in this space.”

That is why Christel Constant, Executive Board Member at Unite, is so excited.

Having originally transitioned to procurement from a career in financial technology, Constant explains that what inspired her to shift her focus to procurement was the potential of delivering real change, particularly with an eye on sustainability. 

“Procurement decisions can shape supply chains in ways that reduce environmental impact, support fair labour practices, and encourage responsible business behaviour,” she says. “Even when it comes to indirect procurement of catalogue-based products, the potential is still significant. By choosing suppliers with sustainable practices, we can reduce waste, improve energy efficiency, and contribute to the broader sustainability goals of the company. It’s about recognising that every procurement decision, no matter how small, can be a step toward creating a more responsible and resilient supply chain.”

Transformation

Constant is passionate about leadership and has become a transformation enabler within organisations by exploring new market opportunities, presenting pioneering concepts, spearheading change, coaching teams and enabling significant growth. The company she works for is Unite, a buyer-first platform for catalogue-based demands across Europe, offering a single contractual partner, single contact and creditor. With over two decades of experience, its compliant e-procurement solution combines framework agreements and catalogues with a pre-integrated assortment from vetted suppliers for effortless sourcing and purchasing for private and public sector organisations. The company was founded as Mercateo in 2000 and is headquartered in Leipzig, Germany. It now operates in 12 European countries, with over 700 employees and revenue of €440.8 million.

Over the last 20+ years, Unite has acquired a solid foundation of fair competition and trustworthy partnerships. The platform’s scalable infrastructure supports connections, business stability and a robust supply chain. In 2022, Unite became the first platform business accredited with the Fair Tax Mark, representing the global standard for responsible tax practices. Earlier this year, Unite was awarded the EcoVadis Gold rating for the first time, recognising its significant sustainability efforts. This achievement places Unite among the top 5% of companies assessed during the period and within the top 3% in its industry. 

How Unite is evolving indirect procurement

“Unite is transforming indirect procurement by integrating catalogue-based demand—encompassing ad-hoc (tail-end) needs and recurring (core) demand, which has traditionally been managed through framework agreements—into a single platform under one creditor. Currently, we handle contract management and order fulfilment, ensuring that buyers can easily track orders and manage returns. Financial processes, such as billing and payment, are simplified through a centralised system, enabling seamless transactions and mitigating financial risks.

“The next phase in this transformation is a shift to a service-led model, providing dynamic procurement solutions that address the full spectrum of catalogue-based requirements. Our PraaS (Procurement-as-a-Service) model will span the entire procurement lifecycle,” she explains. “From supplier and manufacturer qualification, ensuring compliance with industry and buyer standards, to generative demand analysis that enables automated, adaptive sourcing for repeat purchases. This approach unlocks significant, previously untapped cost savings for our buyers.”

Procurement’s shift

In October, Constant spoke and hosted a panel discussion at DPW Amsterdam 2024. The session focused on market-led strategies within indirect procurement. At Unite, the company views market-led strategies as creating an ecosystem where demand and supply meet seamlessly, providing full transparency for buyers and neutrality for suppliers. Unite centres its focus on three main aspects: providing access to a broad and diverse offering, delivering a user-centric experience, and enhancing supplier management efficiency. “We also touched on the growing pressure within procurement departments. As the number of professional buyers decreases, decentralised, requester-led purchasing has become more common,” explains Constant. “This shift demands more integrated compliance and ease of use, leading to a reduction in the administrative burden by managing fewer suppliers and centralising access through single creditor solutions.

“In implementing these strategies, the discussion highlighted the importance of finding the right partner to integrate with existing IT systems, provide clear change management policies, and ensure user onboarding and training to maximise adoption. At Unite, we designed our platform to enhance transparency and optimise indirect procurement. Until now, our focus has largely been on functional requirements. But we’ve already started incorporating non-functional requirements—such as sustainability measures like CO2 reporting, compliance, and broader ESG criteria—into catalogue-based procurement, with further enhancements planned to make these criteria transparent at the point of purchase. Ultimately, combining these elements can unlock efficiencies and create a more sustainable procurement ecosystem. This will drive long-term value for businesses and suppliers alike.”

DPW Amsterdam

This year’s theme at DPW Amsterdam was 10X and how organisations should think 10 times bigger than their current capacity. Paul Polman, the former Unilever CEO, spoke about how 10X is about a mindset shift. “Paul Polman explained the need to have very ambitious goals to build partnerships to create this systemic change,” explains Constant.

“At Unite, we’ve been at the centre of an ecosystem that includes buyers, suppliers, other e-procurement platforms, and IT partners that we integrate into our system. Here, we feel we can be at the centre of this change because we connect with the different stakeholders. For us, what is very important is that aiming for 10X is not just about growth. It’s about being purpose-driven. At Unite, our purpose is to connect the economy for sustainable business, which drives us. We need to achieve 10X  our growth and impact because only then will we bring our purpose to life.”

Future proof

It is clear Unite has no plans to stand still. Next year, the organisation aims to launch a foundational service step. This will enable companies to reduce the complexity of their indirect procurement processes. “With our end-to-end support, businesses can focus on core operations while their indirect procurement is being handled efficiently,” she explains. “This approach not only improves operational efficiency but also ensures compliance and flexibility in managing supplier relationships.”

And with GenAI set to continue to shake the procurement space, Constant expects an ever-increasing adoption rate as time progresses. “In 2025 and beyond, I believe we are going to see lots of new offerings and changes,” says Constant. “Of course, GenAI and large language models will impact many industries. We are already working with these technologies to accelerate our impact on society and to power our statement and purpose. Next year will be a real amplification into getting some new technologies to support a more sustainable way to procure.”

Read more about what Unite has to offer here.

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

Estimated Read time

7Mins

Caitlyn Lewis, Founder and CEO at Supplier Day, and Alexandra Tarmo, Vice President of Procurement at Kenvue, explore how good communication with suppliers plays a crucial role in achieving long-term success in procurement and supply chain.

“How you communicate determines whether or not you achieve your goals.”

It is fair to say that Caitlyn Lewis, Founder and CEO at Supplier Day, believes in the power of honest conversations. 

Since 2020, her company has partnered with some of the world’s leading brands to help them elevate their supplier relationships through high-impact in-person, virtual and hybrid events. Supplier Day’s mission is to create experiences that drive powerful relationships between procurement teams and their suppliers. In order to achieve this, Supplier Day’s team combines deep expertise in event design, procurement strategy and innovative thinking to offer a full suite of services that empower customers to succeed.

The idea to create the organisation came just after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when supply chains were under pressure more than ever before. Due to the sudden shift from in-person to virtual events, Lewis realised the procurement space needed a partner who had the necessary tools to support the journey. This led to the birth of Supplier Day to help create strategic events and communications while delivering spectacular supplier events that drive real impact. Four years on, Supplier Day has grown into a trusted partner for procurement teams and worked with industry giants such as Siemens, Bayer and PepsiCo.

“Good communication is something that we aim to bring to every single event that we design for our clients,” explains Lewis. “But it’s also something that we hold really close within our team because essentially everything that we do and the value that we deliver for our clients is helping them to achieve their goals through building better relationships with suppliers. And that all starts with communication.”

A positive supplier experience can lead to resilient long-term supplier relationships, increased collaboration and improved supply chain performance. In the modern world, it is vital for companies to prioritise supplier experience as part of their procurement strategy in order to harness sustainable, mutually beneficial relationships with suppliers. Through Supplier Day, organisations can work with the company’s team to deliver impactful experiences that drive engagement, collaboration and measurable success. 

One of Supplier Day’s alliances is with Alexandra Tarmo, Vice President of Procurement at Kenvue. Speaking to CPOstrategy alongside Lewis at DPW Amsterdam 2024, Tarmo credits Supplier Day with bringing the outside in to drive transformation.

“Coming from a company that was newly formed, you need to find a new identity and work out how and when to engage with suppliers,” explains Tarmo. “The fact that Supplier Day brings us the outside in and reveals that your peers and competition are on the journey too is so important. Ultimately, if you don’t do it, you’re missing the boat and that has been a very big advantage in convincing leadership teams to go for it. The fact that Supplier Day knows how to drive this programme with our peers and competitors is hugely advantageous too. I’m a person of simplicity so if it has already been done and it works, let me just copy and paste it and use the same processes. It has helped us to convince management to feel confident it will work.”

With procurement and supply chain in the midst of its most exciting, dynamic era yet, Lewis believes the real challenge procurement faces is how companies differentiate themselves from competitors in a bid to win business. “I think what is really exciting is that it now comes down to the quality of that relationship and how you can pull real value out of a strong relationship,” reveals Lewis. “We’ve heard so much at DPW Amsterdam about technology and how that really helps to drive productivity and efficiency and I think that the big game changer will be for the companies and for the procurement teams that can then use that extra time to drive capabilities around relationship building so that they can extract more innovation.”

Looking ahead, Lewis is full of optimism for the future, particularly after going through a recent rebrand. “I’m just so proud as I think that it is a true reflection of the differentiation that we bring for our customers,” she explains.

“We talk about being unmissable and a large part of that is bringing that outside in. This is done for multiple companies across a range of industries for many different purposes across various cultures. We have a vast understanding of what different communication needs to look like. It means that we have that good foundation and then we are focusing on making it 10X better. What does being unmissable mean for this client? How is that going to look? Which again is that differentiation for every single client. It is that unmissable element and that’s what excites me. It’s what I get really enthusiastic about every time we’re sitting down with a client because I’m thinking ‘What’s that unmissable quality going to be for them?’

This year’s theme at DPW Amsterdam explored the mindset of aiming for 10X growth instead of an incremental approach. According to Tarmo, prioritisation is key in order to achieve goals for the coming year and beyond.

“The concept of 10X is non-negotiable,” she explains. “If we want to continue to be relevant and drive value, it’s the way to go. What I get is that we talk a lot about digital, data and systems. There are a lot of solutions and there is a lot of technology available for us as a function. The decision we need to make is where do I put my efforts? What do I prioritise? It is important to keep in mind that this is a space where the full value comes only when you bring everybody inside. What is the first priority I follow where I know I will get adoption and I will get all my team and my supplier on board to get the full value?”

Given the hype around new digital innovations such as GenAI tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot, Lewis recognises how exciting the landscape is for procurement. However, she is quick to point out that despite the transformational advantages to leveraging new technology, they can’t be at the cost of replacing humans. “Having listened to Marcelo Stefani, CPO of PepsiCo, and Marc Engel, CEO of Unilab, on the main stage earlier, there is still this idea that AI can’t fix my toilet or do the laundry,” explains Lewis. “As great as this excitement about what AI can do and how this technology can make our lives so much easier, the human element remains so important. I think that the companies that are really going to differentiate themselves, both with their customers and with their suppliers are the ones that understand that. That’s my main takeaway from DPW Amsterdam this year.”

Moving towards 2025, Tarmo reveals that being transparent about what kind of relationship you wish to have with suppliers and where they fit into the journey is vital. “There is a necessity to be very open and transparent on what we want and what type of relationship we want to have with our suppliers,” she says. “It’s important to ensure that whatever we build as new technology, you always remember that you also need to engage your suppliers on that journey. You should question how to onboard them and make their experience easier.”

Lewis aligns herself with Tarmo’s view of honest communication with suppliers in order to grow in a mutually beneficial way. “We talk so much about user experience when we are designing products or services for consumers and essentially it’s that same value, but doing it for suppliers,” explains Lewis. “We have an approach at Supplier Day that is “Starts with Suppliers” and as Alexandra said, once you’re super clear on what it is that you are trying to achieve, you then want to put yourself in the shoes of your suppliers and work out how you can communicate with them in a way that relates to them and allows them to see where the value is in having a relationship with you as their customer.”

Read more about Supplier Day here.

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

Estimated Read time

7Mins

Spencer Penn, Co-Founder and CEO at LightSource, reveals the rise of his company amid a transformative time in procurement and supply chain.

Being successful in today’s supply chain requires work. It doesn’t just happen by mistake, especially in the fast-paced tech-driven business world of today.

Spencer Penn, Co-Founder and CEO at LightSource, knows this well and recognises the importance of full use of the digital tools at his disposal. 

Indeed, his company is on a mission to ‘illuminate the global supply chain’ through building software that helps procurement professionals collaborate with their suppliers and create a win-win in the process. LightSource is an online platform for strategic sourcing designed for both buyers and suppliers and includes sides of the app with tools for everyone in the supply chain ecosystem.

The birth of LightSource

Penn’s journey to founding LightSource is certainly an interesting one. Penn spent a portion of his early career at Tesla under the leadership of Elon Musk where he helped push the company’s Model 3 programme which was Tesla’s first mass-market electric car. Upon starting with the carmaker, Tesla was making approximately 1,000 cars every week which Penn explains later scaled to 10 million vehicles throughout the lifetime of the Model 3 programme. 

“One of the big challenges that we faced was that we were sourcing 30 billion of direct materials on Excel spreadsheets and emails,” he recalls. “So naturally I went out to the market to find a direct material sourcing solution because I assumed something like LightSource existed. I got demos from every vendor under the sun and I was shocked to discover that there were only really two options that I knew nobody would use. And so at a certain moment, years after leaving Tesla, I thought what would it look like if we went out on our own and built something that’s by procurement for procurement which is easy to use and fast to deploy. And here we are.”

But what sets LightSource apart is its ability to solve the direct materials use case. According to Penn, he believes his firm’s competitive advantage lies in being a source to contract that works for direct materials and large strategic indirect spend. “What we don’t focus on is the tail spend or on this requisition intake to procure process,” he explains. “We are focused on the source to contract which is everything from the bill of materials through the PLM, to sourcing and supplier relationship management which is all focused on direct.”

DPW Amsterdam

At DPW Amsterdam, this year’s theme was 10X which is the idea that organisations need to accelerate thinking that is 10 times their current capacities. As far as Penn and LightSource is concerned, he believes aiming for exponential advances holds the key to long-term success in 2025 and beyond.

“Incremental improvements don’t stick,” he reveals. “If you’re going to go to an organisation and say, ‘Hey, we’d like to improve your procurement process by 5%, 10%, 20%, it’s not that interesting.’ The inertia of what people know and are used to no matter how much they love or don’t love it, they’re not willing to change for a small incremental improvement. That’s what I see a lot of companies angling for is only a slight improvement. But when I think about the theme of 10X and the fact it is also very closely paired with generative AI, this will enable the next generation of software that’s not just an incremental improvement, but a complete revolution.

Transformative space

“I think in two years the way the software landscape’s going to look is totally different. If you present someone with a 10% improvement, there’s not really a lot of interest or adoption, but if you can actually think about what’s a paradigm shift, a 10X improvement, then the conversation switches from why should we use this to how can I make sure I’m not left behind by not adopting this? That’s the key.”   

But in order for procurement to reach its digital potential, executive buy-in is required. According to Penn, it is both the biggest driver and obstacle in equal measure that stands in the way of progress. “If we encounter a Chief Procurement Officer and they’re very forward thinking and have a really clear and defined vision, those end up being really revolutionary deployments,” says Penn. “When there’s a leader that is very comfortable with what they already know, they’re living in their comfort zone and they don’t really want to reinvent the wheel or just think about what’s possible, then it’s always rolling a rock up a hill. I always get a little bit of PTSD when I think about really engaging them more directly.”

GenAI drive

But Penn is empathetic to ripping up the carpet and starting from scratch, particularly when strategies or processes have worked successfully in the past. However, if an organisation isn’t proactive in their approach to digitalisation and embracing 10X thinking, they risk being caught out by competitors. “There’s this great Bob Dylan that I love which is ‘If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying’. And I love it because being born is uncomfortable. It’s like being a beginner again, it’s new. And if you’re not busy being born, then you’re busy dying. And I think the same can be said for procurement leadership.”

GenAI is one of the hottest topics in procurement right now. Its potential is exciting and is discussed at length in meetings and conferences the world over. However, there are still risks attached such as data quality challenges like hallucinations along with security concerns.

“You have to think about where these models live and are stored,” explains Penn. “Are they using your data in training? How do you make sure you’re creating safeguards around IP leakage? I think that’s extremely important so we handle that in a very sophisticated way. The second thing is you have to think about access control for the models. One of the techniques that’s been popular over the last year is something called retrieval augmented generation. The model is not just creating a response from its own training set, but rather being instructed to query the company’s known data. If it can query the known data, whoever’s accessing that model, you need to make sure that they have permission to access things like payroll data or HR data if that’s the kind of question that’s going and seeking through databases.”

Managing the AI challenge

However, AI is not a silver bullet and should not be used for technology’s sake. Penn is well aware of the temptation of leveraging AI, and in particular GenAI, because it is shiny and new. But doing so could be a costly mistake.

“You should ask yourself ‘What are the problems that you face that are real pain points?’ And then work backwards and be flexible about the solution,” he explains. “You should then ask ‘Can AI actually solve it?’ There’s a very common product management question I like to ask customers during discovery interviews which is ‘If you had a magic wand, what problem would you solve?’

“That basically asks the participant to forget about the possible and just assume anything’s possible. This is simply to get to the heart of what are the biggest challenges that you would solve. That magic wand thinking is a good approach to scoping out the problem sets that you want to address with AI, especially as the space is moving so fast. My final recommendation is just to know it’s moving quickly. If you’re going to make a big investment in AI, assume that it is very possible that within six to 12 months there is a different company that obsoletes whatever you’re looking at today.”

Find out more about LightSource here.

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

Estimated Read time

6Mins

Jag Lamba, CEO at Certa, on how procurement can unleash the full value from GenAI.

Certa was born with a founding mission – simplify the way businesses work with third parties.

For CEO Jag Lamba, that mission hasn’t shifted since the company was created in 2015. Lamba came up with the idea for Certa after witnessing the many inefficiencies and complexities of the third party lifecycle at large organisations. He discovered that managing third party risk and compliance was always more challenging than it should be, so he was determined to do something about it.

CEO Jag Lamba from Certa at DPW Amsterdam.

Certa’s goal is to improve the way businesses manage third party relationships by simplifying workflows, automating processes, and delivering full visibility. Now, more than 100,000 users do business via Certa.

“What differentiates Certa is that it is a full spectrum of risk compliance and sustainability as it relates to third parties,” explains Lamba. “It’s comprehensive, but it can be deployed in a modular manner. Secondly, it’s very agile, so it’s easy to make changes with all the different regulations which is really important because companies need a very agile solution in today’s world. Lastly, it is intelligent. What I mean by that is beyond rules-based decision-making, we have generative AI embedded into the platform, and that makes lots of tasks much, much easier.”

A common joke in procurement is that the majority of practitioners fall into the space by accident. Not for Lamba. His journey into the industry was more of a conscious decision. “Previously, I was a consultant with McKinsey and I was working across clients. I noticed that one of their biggest pain points was that working across third parties was really challenging,” says Lamba. “As soon as I realised this, I understood that what’s challenging is all the risks and the compliance requirements that you need to cover when you work with third parties because you can’t work with just anyone. That’s what got me interested in this space as I wanted to solve this challenge.”

Lamba speaks to CPOstrategy at DPW Amsterdam 2024. This year’s conference focuses on the theme of 10X, the notion that companies should aim for a moonshot mindset instead of an incremental approach. “This is the first time that I actually see the 10X vision possible,” explains Lamba. “The main reason for this is because of the improvements in generative AI. For the first time, we can see this tectonic platform shift into what we’ve been calling the new productivity revolution. Companies in the procurement space and otherwise can now deploy AI Copilots and agents. Copilots can improve productivity by up to 50%. But AI agents can actually improve productivity 10X because AI agents are like coworkers. You can actually give them tasks and manage outcomes. That is your path to 10X.”

However, one of the biggest barriers to achieving 10X is getting buy-in. Change management is about delivering new ways of working in a considered and strategic manner while showcasing the benefits of giving up legacy systems and processes. “Change management is a difficult hurdle,” he says. “How do you sell that internally? How do you get adoption and how do you change your company based on all the new capability and automation that’s available to you? It’s the biggest problem procurement faces.”

Generative AI is changing the game in procurement. Through Certa AI, users can use natural language to create workflows, directly engage with data for sharp insights and supercharge supplier onboarding with automatic form-filling. For instance, instead of asking suppliers to answer hundreds of questions manually, businesses can use Certa AI to synthesise past responses and live data from the web to auto-complete questionnaires. Certa’s Risk AI also analyses and reasons via documents, extracting key information to enhance decision-making and streamline risk management.

“We were quite early adopters of generative AI,” explains Lamba. “We have generative AI live with 10 large enterprise clients which is rare. Now we are seeing incredible productivity benefits. Overall, generative AI is a tectonic-like technology platform shift that is ushering in this productivity revolution. Over five years, it’ll be as impactful as the communication revolution behind it, even potentially the industrial revolution before it. This is going to be massive. Generative AI will go through disillusionment phases, but can you imagine your life without the internet now? That’s how transformational this technology is and we’re only at the beginning.”

CEO Jag Lamba from Certa at DPW Amsterdam.

However, Lamba is well aware that generative AI adoption is not a straightforward and smooth process. According to him, there are four key considerations that should be thought about before leveraging generative AI into operations. “The reason why evaluating generative AI is tricky is because it’s relatively easy for software providers to create a sexy demo,” explains Lamba.

“You can actually do that in as little as six weeks, but to create a production-level system requires a lot more than a sexy demo. Now to get a product to completion, you need efficacy and reliability, ideally in the real world. As an evaluator, you want to ensure that the solution provider is giving you hard metrics on how efficacious and reliable the technology is.

“Secondly, you need a detailed audit trail because generative acts on your behalf so you want to understand all the steps that it did. Thirdly, you want some guardrails because the technology is still new and you need to follow company policies. And lastly, which most providers aren’t doing yet, is ongoing monitoring because the underlying models change and evolve over time. Traditional software has a defined set of inputs and outputs. With generative AI, the reverse is true, and you have an unlimited number of inputs and outputs. It’s a lot more challenging.”

With so much digital transformation and innovation at procurement’s fingertips today, Lamba is keen to stress how excited he is for the future ahead. “Working across companies, which is what procurement and supply chain does, is mainly an unstructured data problem because there’s no centralised database across companies,” he discusses. “Finally, we have a technology, generative AI, that is designed to work with unstructured data. As far as I am concerned, in the last 20 years this is the most exciting time to be in procurement. This function will be at the forefront of this revolution.”

Find out more about Certa here.

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

8 May 2024

Estimated Read time

8Mins

Anthony Payne, Chief Marketing Officer of HICX, tells us how working collaboratively with suppliers on sustainable procurement practices could act as an organisation’s competitive advantage.

Sustainability isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ anymore – businesses don’t have much of a choice in the world of 2024.

With ESG regulations now locked in place, organisations must comply or risk significant penalties. In order to achieve sustainability objectives more effectively and efficiently, collaborating with suppliers represents a real opportunity to get there faster.

When businesses work with suppliers to reach sustainability goals, they need access to the most accurate supplier data possible. However, obtaining this data isn’t necessarily straightforward. Ultimately, suppliers own it and need to provide it.

This means it is in a business’s interest to form and maintain a great working relationship with suppliers.

Anthony Payne, Chief Marketing Officer of HICX, the supplier experience platform, discusses the benefits of being supplier-centric and how giving brands a better experience adds value to organisations.

Anthony Payne: “There is a direct link. A good supplier experience makes it easier to communicate with suppliers because it allows for collaboration, whereas the opposite can harm communication efforts. For example, when businesses need ESG information, many will survey a broad group of suppliers even though the questions don’t apply to everyone. This is easier for the business. But it means every supplier who receives the survey must investigate whether it applies to them. The experience is more likely to frustrate suppliers than to help them offer the best information.

“Rather, we can help suppliers to help us by communicating better. The way forward is to segment suppliers into groups and send them only relevant requests. This creates a more positive experience in which suppliers are better able to provide helpful information.”

What about their motivation to help sustainability efforts – does this also rely on supplier experience?

Anthony Payne: “Yes, because if the culture of the business-supplier relationship is one in which each party looks out for themselves, then suppliers won’t be terribly motivated to offer the most helpful ESG information. It’s just human nature. Whereas if a business creates an environment in which suppliers can collaborate with them, then they’re more likely to become a customer-of-choice. This is a status worth having. A recent HICX survey showed that while 49% of suppliers would go the extra mile for their biggest customer, as many as 73% would make the effort if this was a customer-of-choice.

“Ultimately, if businesses give their suppliers a good experience, then more suppliers should be willing to provide helpful ESG information – even if it means spending a bit more effort.”

Anthony Payne, Chief Marketing Officer of HICX

What are some of your most effective strategies and best practices to building a future-proof ESG framework?

Anthony Payne: “Businesses can futureproof their ESG frameworks by viewing suppliers as value-adding partners. This principle suggests three ways to engage suppliers…

“First, have a corporate mindset in which every employee views every supplier as a valued partner. If COVID-19 taught us anything it’s how much we rely on suppliers. When the pandemic hit, non-strategic suppliers such as providers of IT equipment and protective personal equipment suddenly became as central to operations as those who supplied the main ingredients. If we take the view that ‘all suppliers matter’, then it becomes easier to treat them all as partners in the same eco-system and we can work together towards common goals.

“Then, through this lens, we can market to suppliers. In customer marketing, a business would require a certain action from customers – such as getting them to buy a product, read a newsletter or attend an event – and so would motivate this behaviour. Similarly, in procurement, we can appeal to suppliers in a way that encourages them to participate in ESG activities, for instance, by providing helpful carbon emission information. 

“One way to encourage the desired behaviour with suppliers is to segment them into the appropriate categories and send them only necessary messages. This is what a marketer would do with customers. By viewing suppliers as partners and introducing supplier marketing and segmentation, you can improve suppliers’ experience and get the most from them.”

What are the biggest barriers that organisations face to delivering more sustainable practices within their organisations?

Anthony Payne: “Once supplier data has been captured, however, the challenge continues because it must be maintained as a golden source of truth. Not having accurate supplier data is a major barrier to delivering sustainable practices because it means that businesses cannot see who all their suppliers are and what they’re doing. 

“Thankfully, with robust onboarding and data management in place, businesses can keep their supplier data up-to-date and accurate so that it can inform good sustainability decisions.”

What is the best way for procurement teams to assess and prioritise the suppliers they work with? How do you juggle environmental impact vs value to company?

Anthony Payne: “The best way to assess and prioritise suppliers is to have visibility. Businesses need to know who all their suppliers are and what they’re doing, at any given time. Only once leaders are informed, can they make the best environmental decisions.

“It’s imperative to manage environmental impact with suppliers, regardless of how much value they bring a company. Apart from the moral obligation to protect the environment, businesses also have their reputations to consider. An environmental infringement that gets exposed – no matter how deep in the supply chain it might occur – is very likely to cause reputational damage, which can have a knock-on effect on sales and share price. 

“In addition to brand reputation, businesses can also face expensive fines, if their suppliers are found to fall short of environmental regulations.”

Anthony Payne, Chief Marketing Officer of HICX

What are the challenges and opportunities when it comes to supplier diversity?

Anthony Payne: “The challenge is to source the right suppliers in the first instance and then be able to report on their activity. We know that finding diverse suppliers in the UK can be difficult. While the US market is more mature, supplier diversity is growing here. Considering this, many suppliers that could qualify as “diverse” are not yet certified. Additionally, when diverse suppliers are indeed certified, there is no guarantee that their skillsets will match your needs. 

“Thankfully there are ways in which businesses can proactively grow their networks of diverse suppliers. For starters, leaders can equip people within the organisation who work with suppliers, to find diverse suppliers by educating them and putting policies in place. Further, there are practical steps one can follow – such as defining the criteria for what qualifies a supplier as diverse in various territories and then finding the right businesses by searching online directories, desktop research and asking for recommendations.

“Once suppliers that are considered to be diverse are indeed found, they bring much value. Apart from being able to make a positive sustainability impact, the expectations of regulators, shareholders and consumers can be met. The by-product of this is a positive reputation which has economic benefits. 

“The opposite logic also applies, and failing to capture supplier diversity value becomes a missed opportunity. For instance, when third-party expectations to support supplier diversity are missed, this can damage brand reputation which hurts sales figures and share price. Also, the unique offerings that diverse suppliers can offer will be missed, and with it the chance to make an impact. Therefore, it’s sensible to make the most of the diverse suppliers that you worked so hard to find.”

Do you have any tips for readers who want to make the most of the diverse suppliers they have sourced?

Anthony Payne: “Yes, you can start by knowing that it’s possible to make the most of the diverse suppliers you find. You can do this by following a stepped approach. 

“Start by onboarding new suppliers who are considered ‘diverse’ with processes that reliably capture their information. This way, your diversity programmes can be well-informed. It’s hugely valuable to be able to tell, at the touch of a button, where a particular supplier might be based. Also, what qualifies them as ‘diverse’? And while they might hold diversity status today, how can we be sure it still applies tomorrow? 

“With all the right information collected at the start of each relationship, then it’s a good idea to instill processes that drive everyone who works with suppliers to spend more with those who are considered as diverse. As more diverse suppliers join the organisation, then you need to keep their data accurate. Do this by digitally transforming the procurement landscape to make master data a priority. With robust processes, it’s possible to maximise your relationships with all suppliers.”

How optimistic are you about the future of ESG within procurement?

Anthony Payne: “I am very optimistic about the future of ESG within procurement, because, we’re seeing the supplier experience movement grow in the UK and the US. For instance, we’re seeing new job roles come out in this area as the principle is popularised. And we know that having good Supplier Experience Management programmes in place sets up business to procure in the most ESG-friendly way possible. 

“And so, with Supplier Experience Management becoming increasingly popular, we believe that the future for sustainability is bright.”

Read the latest CPOstrategy here!

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

14 March 2024

Estimated Read time

5Mins

In this innovative partnership, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts as the two companies focus on taming tail-spend with an on-demand platform with embedded change management.

Businesses have been leaving money on the table for years. For most organisations, (indirect) tail spend flies under the radar because of the large number of lower-value transactions, a fragmented supply base, and a poor user experience. This results in process inefficiencies and lost savings opportunities that can be eight to 13 percent higher than with more competitive sourcing.

Simfoni and Kearney set out to solve this problem, joining forces on solutioning tail spend management. The partnership pairs Kearney’s rich heritage and expertise in procurement transformation and change management with Simfoni’s composable analytics and spend automation technology. The result is a comprehensive global delivery model that significantly improves tail spend management, which until now has been a major problem for large and smaller organisations alike.

“We started our journey over three years ago,” says Stefan Dent, co-founder of Simfoni. “It takes some time to form a bond. You get to know one another working together on client engagements and then you realise that the relationship is really working, so you double down on the commitment.”

Simfoni helps businesses “see spend differently” leveraging data analytics to gain a deep understanding of user needs across everyday ‘tail spend’. Founded in 2015, Simfoni is a leading provider of tail spend, spend analytics, and e-sourcing solutions for large and midsize businesses around the globe. Simfoni’s platform uses machine learning and AI to accelerate and automate tail spend management, saving time and money. Its solution quickly ingests and organises complex data to uncover opportunities to optimise tail to higher value spend. Simfoni emphasises rapid value delivery through on-demand spend automation solutions that are operational in weeks rather than months.

Remko de Bruijn, senior partner at Kearney

The Kearney–Simfoni partnership delivers a unique and powerful proposition, combining Simfoni’s digital tail spend solution with Kearney’s know-how and ability to launch a transformation and unlock the promised value, says Remko de Bruijn, a senior partner at Kearney. “There are many digital procurement solutions around, but frankly, many of them aren’t delivering the promised value, typically because of challenges with user adoption and change,” he says. “Kearney continuously assesses solutions in the market, with one of our other partners, ProcureTech, and together, we concluded that Simfoni is leading in tail spend. This is how we found each other.”

Kearney is a leading global strategy consulting firm founded in 1926, with more than 5,700 people working in more than 40 countries. The company works with more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500 as well as with the most influential governmental and nonprofit organisations. Kearney is a partner-owned firm with a distinctive, collegial culture that transcends organizational and geographic boundaries—and it shows. Regardless of location or rank, the firm’s consultants are down-to-earth and approachable, with a shared passion for doing innovative client work that realises tangible benefits for their clients, in both the short and long term.

“We see Simfoni as a powerful solution to realise savings in indirect tail spend. It’s about not only data and spend automation, but also the customer experience,” De Bruijn says. “This is crucial when dealing with everyday spend as most users are non-procurement professionals.”

Kearney aids businesses in implementing Simfoni’s solution quickly, mitigating risks associated with unmanaged spend and vendors. “The attractive thing about Simfoni is that the solution manages tail spend—optimising both spend and vendors—with the savings funding the digitisation. It’s a tail spend solution that delivers a comprehensive service,” De Bruijn says. “Simfoni will even pay the tail suppliers with Simfoni becoming the ‘One Vendor’ for the tail, which creates additional benefits in accounts payables and working capital.”

Simfoni and Kearney both operate globally, which is important since their customers often operate in multiple regions around the world. “It’s a very interesting and powerful proposition,” De Bruijn says.

Stefan Dent, co-founder of Simfoni

Simfoni designed its tail spend platform from the ground up. The company founders came from the procurement domain, having worked in a variety of procurement leadership roles and at other procurement technology providers. “Let’s face it, existing solutions never solved tail spend, which accounts for around 80 percent of your vendors and transactions and around 20 percent of spend value,” Dent says. “Until now, the only options were BPOs, where you effectively outsource your tail to be managed by humans in a lower-cost country, or you use self-service bidding platforms. These solutions deliver some value, but it’s like putting a plaster on a wound.  You never properly cure the problem.” 

Simfoni’s platform is unique in that it is first and foremost a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution with integrated buying services and digital procurement content components that connect with a client’s existing systems, or Simfoni can operate autonomously. Dent says that’s not even the best part. “The user experience is the most important element because, as Remko pointed out, most tail spend users are not procurement professionals,” he says. “Our users are in R&D, IT, plant operations, or marketing. They want an intuitive, easy-to-use solution to source and buy goods and services to support the everyday needs of their business. This is where traditional eProcurement systems fail.”

Dent says Kearney is an ideal partner being a trusted advisor to many of the world’s largest organisations. Kearney’s expert knowledge of procurement and transformation are a vital part of the offering. “Kearney’s input and expertise is crucial as Kearney helps our clients scope their tail spend program and update their procurement operating model while Simfoni frees up resources, allowing the client to focus on higher-value activities,” he explains. “At the end of the day, technology alone doesn’t solve tail spend. It’s about change. Kearney helps our clients make that digital shift. That’s why our partnership is so powerful because together we provide a comprehensive change and a digital solution as a package. The opportunity for our clients to finally control and optimise tail-spend is huge.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

13 December 2023

Estimated Read time

4Mins

At DPW Amsterdam, Kathryn Thompson and Fraser Woodhouse, Partner and Director at Deloitte, discuss the rise of generative AI and the impact on procurement.

Procurement is changing.

That’s something that isn’t lost on Kathryn Thompson, a Partner at Deloitte.

As part of her role, she leads the Sourcing and Procurement Market Offering within Deloitte’s Consulting division in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Originally from Australia, Thompson has worked in procurement since 1996 and has observed quite the evolution over the past two and a half decades.

Procurement’s transition

Over the years, procurement has shifted from a traditional back-office function to an entity operating at the fore of a company’s strategy. Having been involved in the industry for more than 25 years, Thompson has had a front-row seat to procurement’s digital transformation. While she affirms that AI has changed procurement, she isn’t convinced that generative AI is changing the space – yet.

Kathryn Thompson speaking at DPW Amsterdam 2023

“We see lots of AI tools pulling from different data sources to apply intelligence to different decisions,” she explains. “But the generative part, beyond contract summaries or pulling together draft RFPs, remains to be seen at scale.  One of my more sophisticated clients has run 300+ Proof of Concepts in AI across their business, including and beyond procurement, and admits they are yet to scale or drive meaningful ROI from any POC. At the moment, the generative AI side for us, isn’t getting past proof of concept or the pilot stage yet.”

Fraser Woodhouse is a Director at Deloitte and has been with the firm since February 2019. He believes that procurement and sales teams will use gen AI for RFPs over the next six months. “I think they’ll do it without telling anyone,” he explains. “It will eventually get to a point where I think that sort of crutch will become a necessity. When it’s built into the enterprise platforms, people will forget how to write contracts because the AI does it automatically. People will even use it to write their emails.”

The AI dilemma

AI on its own is pointless – it simply doesn’t operate the way you need it to. That’s why the importance of making tech work in a way that creates efficiency has never been more important. For Woodhouse, he insists it’s about putting a human at the right place in the process. “One of the solutions I saw was a gen AI assistant helping write an RFP built in, but then the supplier has a gen AI assistant helping do the response to the RFP as well,” he tells us. “Very quickly you’ve got two AIs negotiating with each other, and that doesn’t work unless a human is curating stuff at that point in the middle.”

Given the ease of AI usage, there is a discussion as to whether tech implementation could go too far the other way. Could humans lose the ability to perform simple tasks they previously wouldn’t have thought twice about? But Woodhouse is quick to dispel that myth and believes that despite the growing reliance on technology, people won’t be rendered useless. “People didn’t forget how to communicate when spellcheck came around, they could communicate better,” he explains. “If you are a supplier and are responding to an RFP and you’re pressing their generative AI button to build the response and five of the other suppliers are doing the same thing, who’s going to stand out? The ones who wrote it themselves or at least edited it and had meaningful input.”

“You can use AI for the transactional, easy stuff but there must be a value underpinning it,” adds Thompson. “The winners are going to be the ones that are human about things.”

Fraser Woodhouse and Kathryn Thompson speaking to CPOstrategy at DPW Amsterdam 2023

Procurement’s place

With such significant innovation happening, it is seen as a transformative time to be in procurement. As automation speeds up, the necessity to upskill new graduates coming into the workforce and encourage them to learn higher-value work earlier in their career journeys is becoming increasingly important.

“Covid and the following work from home attitude has a lot to answer for,” explains Thompson. “Pre-Covid, you would rarely work from home. Consultants, suppliers, delivery partners always went to the client’s site. That’s where innovation, creativity, results that are more than the sum of their parts happen. That’s not replicable by generative AI. We need to get everyone back out there and doing things. Rather than replacing jobs, we’re replacing tasks. The tasks that we’re replacing are the likes of data analysis, synthesising, and summarising. Hopefully, it means we’re doing real-life negotiations, brainstorming and innovation instead which are the things that people love to do. Fingers crossed, it just means the bar goes up.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

6 December 2023

Estimated Read time

4Mins

Conrad Smith, Founder and CEO at Graphite Systems, discusses the similarities between Formula One and procurement amid significant digital transformation.

“Our business, like the F1 driver, knows to go fast.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking that procurement and Formula One are worlds apart at first glance. However, to Conrad Smith, Founder and CEO at Graphite Systems, they are actually a lot closer than initially meets the eye. A petrolhead by his own admission, Smith shared the stage with Haas Team Principal Guenther Steiner at DPW Amsterdam 2023. As a purchaser with almost 30 years of experience, Smith has overseen quite a transformation during his procurement career. He says that with everything going digital, you would assume that purchasing would accelerate. But it is, in fact, the opposite.

The pace of purchasing

“Over these 30 years, you would think purchasing would be getting faster,” he tells us. “Business is speeding up, but purchasing is slowing down – that’s stunning. When you think about it, where else in the world is slowing down when everything’s going faster and faster? Even though we’re investing in Coupa and Ariba and all of these expensive purchasing tools, it’s still slowing down. Our business stakeolders know business is speeding up, and so their tolerance is going away. In the nineties, when you onboarded a supplier, you just needed commercial data, name, address, tax, and banking.”

Conrad Smith (left) with DPW founders Matthias Gutzmann and Herman Knevel

Having been founded in February 2019, Graphite Systems is the premier supplier life cycle and risk management solution. The emergence of risk and due diligence has become a primary function within procurement. Vendor due diligence during the procurement process ensures users can identify and mitigate the risks present with a vendor they want to do business with during the contracting process. For Smith, he believes that this transformation has been 15 years in the making.

“I think that it was typical that a purchasing leader would point to other stakeholders and say it’s legal that’s holding this up, privacy or security. They’re the ones stopping the process from happening,” he explains. “And quite frankly, I’ll admit, those were my early thoughts. This is like a hot potato – I don’t want to be owning it. I look stupid because of the slowness I described. Think how stupid the business thinks we are when they come and say, I’m working on a project, I need this consultant here on Monday. And our best response is that it’ll take weeks or months to onboard the supplier”           

“Weeks matter, and we need to go through all this risk and due diligence. It’s really important to do the risk and due diligence, but we can’t do that at the expense of the speed of business. While business is quicker, in every measure that you look at, purchasing is going slower. It’s dumb, and the business knows that, and it means we lose credibility. It needs to happen, but we need to be very intelligent about it and not just do things the same ways we’ve always done them.”

Conrad Smith with Haas Team Principal Guenther Steiner at DPW

Procurement’s changing

Smith explains that one of the reasons he can relate to the F1 analogy is that while cars are going faster than ever, the drivers are far safer today. “Every year, we see massive accidents take place,” he tells us. “I think last year, a car that was flipping head over heels tumbling and hit the fence before slamming into the ground but the driver was okay,” he explains. “There’s this principle that is very important in almost any situation where somebody says, you can have this or you can have that. It’s a false choice.

“You have to pick speed, or you have to pick safety. If you go in with a requirement that says it has to be fast and it has to be safe, that’s the F1 example. You have to go into purchasing and say it’s a non-negotiable. It has to be fast and safe. How can we rethink the design so it can go fast and be safe? That’s really my passion, and it’s possible. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it’s possible. Frankly, in the case of this purchasing problem, it’s way easier than it should be. But we’re still stuck on passing paper back and forth instead of just saying, there’s my profile. Everything you need is in my Graphite profile – just like everything you need to know about me [as a professional] is in my LinkedIn.”    

The future of creation, management, and sharing of data and documents between buyers and suppliers absolutely needs to evolve from emails, spreadsheets, and PDFs into a modern social network architecture. This transformation of information sharing has already proved its speed and efficiency in most other aspects of our lives. It’s time to quit wasting time and money on supplier onboarding and embrace modern technology in this critical procurement process.

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

30 November 2023

Estimated Read time

6Mins

Maarten van der Borden, Customer Transformation Director at Celonis, discusses the influence digital tools such as generative AI is having on procurement’s workforce.

“When something new arrives on the scene, people have a tendency to immediately think of the worst-case scenario.”

Maarten van der Borden is a Customer Transformation Director at Celonis. As AI gets increasingly complex and advanced, there are concerns from some sections of the workforce that robots will take human jobs in procurement. Indeed, one of the biggest draws of automation is the cost savings and efficiency it brings, with AI able to complete some tasks almost instantly. But van der Borden challenges that notion and believes technology should be used as an enabler.

AI’s impact on jobs

“AI will, in my opinion, not replace anyone anytime soon,” he reveals. “What it will do is make life easier and change the way we operate. In the late 90’s, we couldn’t envision what having a mobile phone would be like. When those were first introduced, we thought how annoying it would be that you would always be reachable. Now we can’t imagine living without a phone.

“I don’t envision the elimination of procurement positions due to AI. Rather, a significant shift may occur in the transactional aspects of process analytics. Currently, individuals proficient in creating complex Excel macros or adept at extracting and transforming data into actionable insights are highly valued. These roles are likely to undergo changes, but this should be seen as an opportunity for enhancement, not a threat. It’s crucial to recognise this. My belief is that AI won’t be replacing jobs, particularly in procurement where human involvement is key. The role of technology should be to empower and improve processes in procurement, not to replace the human element.”

Maarten van der Borden, Customer Transformation Director at Celonis

The journey

Over the years, Van der Borden has distinguished himself through a series of impactful transformations and strategic developments, primarily at the nexus of IT, business operations, and finance. His journey has been marked by the successful management of large-scale programs, where his ability to engage cross-functional teams and collaborate with stakeholders at all organisational levels has consistently led to the achievement of key goals. Notably, he has a history of taking on complex and challenging projects, steering them from concept to completion under stringent conditions. This track record has established him as an influential change agent, known for transforming underperforming organizations into models of high performance and efficiency.

Having began his career in the Dutch Military, he experienced a similar journey to many procurement practitioners. Van der Borden fell into the space by a “happy accident” and never left.

He shares, “I didn’t know much about procurement initially, but I quickly grew to love it.” His journey led him to DS Smith, a major packaging organisation, where he successfully spearheaded a comprehensive global procurement transformation. Subsequently, he transitioned to head the finance transformation within the same company. In this role, he sought a tool that could effectively navigate the unique challenges of procurement compared to finance.

“I needed something that would show me how our financial processes really ran. It meant finding the most impactful inefficiencies and developing an action plan to deal with them.”

Celonis today

This search brought him to Celonis’ process mining capability, a product that resonated with him so profoundly that he decided to join the company. “Right now, I am a Customer Transformation Director at Celonis, which means I help our customers organise themselves around this solution because I firmly believe implementing a tech solution by itself doesn’t do anything. We will always need the human element to make the change and create value, based on the insights tech provides. I’m very happy to be here.”

Today, Celonis is the global leader in process mining, providing companies with a modern way to run their business processes entirely on data and intelligence. The firm pioneered the process mining category more than a decade ago when it first developed the ability to automatically X-ray processes, find inefficiencies and implement immediate, targeted, and automated action to resolve them.

Gen AI drive

Procurement is in a transformative moment. At DPW Amsterdam, generative AI was the buzzword on attendees’ lips everywhere you looked. For van der Borden he acknowledges how rapidly the space is changing as a result of an increased influence of digital tools.

“To me, the first big thing to realise when we talk about gen AI is the democratisation of data and process analytics,” explains van der Borden. “I think what’s really important is that procurement realm to me is a prime example of where gen AI can have a huge impact. I think what gen AI will do is open up the capabilities of analytics to a much wider audience than today. People who may previously have trusted some Excel sheets or PowerPoint slides presented to them to make decisions can now freely explore, or even converse with their own data and make informed decisions themselves. You start to build a community of data analysts rather than just having consumption of data analytics. That to me is the big game changer that gen AI is actually providing procurement with.”

Procurement’s perception

CPOstrategy sits down with Maarten van der Borden, Customer Transformation Director at Celonis, at DPW Amsterdam 2023

By its own common admission, procurement used to be boring. A function hidden out of sight and kept far away from the c-suite. Now, it’s front and centre, firing on all cylinders. Indeed, the Covid pandemic helped drive it towards the top of the agenda, in addition to other enablers such as transformation and ESG. For van der Borden, he believes procurement is beginning to shake off that old skin and be seen as more of a strategic function.

“We’ve received a bad reputation in the past because the impact has not always been clear,” he tells us. “Some analysis that people do on procurement as a strategic function is to ask what’s the real impact? Yeah, you manage the supply and demand but as long as I have my blue ball point where and when I need it, you’re doing a good job. If things start to fall over then procurement used to get the blame. What I’m really happy to see is that more and more CEOs are seeing procurement as a strategic function, not only driving value in the financial domain but also more and more as the primary contributors to a more sustainable future and the guardians of our corporate brands.

An evolution

“There’s been a noticeable evolution in procurement, particularly in the merging of processes like source-to-pay, procure-to-pay, and purchase-to-pay. Our definitions in these areas haven’t always been crystal clear. However, when you delve into purchase-to-pay, it’s apparent that this is where the transactional activities occur. Due its very transactional nature, this phase is measurable and reveals the outcomes of our upstream actions in sourcing. I’ve observed that these areas, despite often being managed by separate divisions or functions, are intrinsically linked. The transactional aspects are commonly seen in shared services, while the sourcing aspects represent traditional procurement.

“Bridging these two areas, in my view, is a significant shift. This is where technology truly demonstrates its value. By integrating and examining the transactional processes to understand their shortcomings, we can trace back to the root causes, often found in sourcing. This integration is fascinating to me. It allows us to assess the real impact of our efforts.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

28 November 2023

Estimated Read time

3Mins

At DPW Amsterdam 2023, Sigbjørn Nome, CEO and Co-Founder at Ignite, discusses the importance of a people-first mindset in procurement.

“It’s super important to get the right people in procurement.”

Sigbjørn Nome, CEO and Co-Founder at Ignite, is passionate about talent. The company is now armed with 60 employees and has become an organisation of choice for many graduates in Norway. According to Nome, building a positive environment that empowers staff holds the key to long-term success and growth in procurement.

“We’ve managed to get a good reputation in Norway and recruit top talent,” he tells us. “In the beginning, we used the best students and offered internships to help us build the first version of the product. Then we built a good relationship with the universities in Norway and we’ve also recruited lots of senior hires too. There’s a great combination of talent within Ignite.”

Sigbjørn Nome, CEO and Co-Founder at Ignite

Procurement transformation

Ignite is an advanced yet simple spend management solution that gives customers the power of correct and holistic data, transparency, and actionable analytics to empower data-driven decision-making. This way, customers not only save money and avoid risk but also make smarter choices and drive value across their organisation. Ignite provides a one-stop shop to consolidate, clean, and enrich data, get advanced procurement analytics, conduct supplier assessments, as well as holistically managing suppliers and contracts and quickly and automatically estimating their Scope 3 CO2 footprint.                             

With a background in consulting, Nome worked on a variety of procurement transformation projects and has witnessed significant potential in the space. Having decided to form Ignite in 2016, the organisation began as a consulting firm but it was later decided to be delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. “As a consulting business, you are cashflow positive and you earn money from the get-go. While for a SaaS business, you need to invest a lot in product and productive development,” he tells us. “It is quite a challenging change. As a business owner, you also need to sell and be more out there to get customers. There’s been a lot of challenges and one of those has been building the team which I’m really proud of.”

Procurement’s evolving function

Procurement is changing. Traditional procurement revolved around delivery, cost and quality. Now, given the nature of environmental challenges as well as the necessity of data analytics, people with diverse skill sets are needed more than ever before. Nome believes it’s about changing the mindset of procurement. “You’ve got to shift that mentality because the function is so different today,” he explains. “In the future, it’s going to be a more collaborative function because procurement teams cannot win alone.”

With that future in mind, Nome recognises the space is a different beast today than it was a decade ago. Change dominates the industry and the players that embrace transformation will be the ones who win. “You need to use procurement as a lever to get change done,” he tells us. “It’s not enough anymore to look at your business only, your responsibility also extends to your suppliers. It’s about where you spend your money and your negotiation power because customers will look at that. I would say the regulation demands will offer a broader perspective, not only looking at your business but also how you spend your money.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

27 November 2023

Estimated Read time

6Mins

At DPW Amsterdam 2023, Alan Holland, CEO of Keelvar, tells us about the acceleration of digital transformation in procurement and what it means for the next generation of the workforce.

Keelvar’s mission is simple – to help procurement teams globally to scale sourcing excellence.

Keelvar is powered by unique artificial intelligence, designed by category experts, to deliver significant savings and operational improvements for global enterprises such as the likes of Siemens, Coca-Cola, Samsung, Novartis and more. The company was founded in Europe’s largest AI research lab by a team of computer scientists and engineers specialising in AI, optimisation and game theory applied to strategic sourcing. Keelvar has raised $42 million to date in funding to accelerate product development and global growth.

The company is led by Alan Holland who has served as CEO since the company’s foundation in September 2012. Indeed, in his first year, he led the organisation to win the Cork Company of the Year in the small company category, and the firm has more recently been awarded a Gartner Cool vendor.

Having previously served as a lecturer in artificial intelligence in University College Cork’s Computer Science Department, Holland specialised in Optimisation, Game Theory and Algorithmic Mechanism Design. Such experience has helped give Keelvar an edge in terms of innovating with offerings that exceed competitors’ technical capabilities. This enables Keelvar to define an entirely new category of the solution, putting Keelvar in an ideal position to lead this new category that Keelvar has called autonomous sourcing.

CPOstrategy sitting down with Alan Holland, CEO at Keelvar, at DPW Amsterdam 2023

Evolution at scale

Procurement is in a state of flux. The industry is experiencing unprecedented amounts of innovation and change in a way which has ripped up the playbook of what went before it. However, Holland believes it is only in the past half decade or so where transformation has really started to take place. “If we look at the last 10 years, the first five of those procurement was very slow to change,” he discusses. “What we saw were technology landscapes dominated by a small number of large suites vendors who had acquired many companies, but most enterprises were satisfied in buying all the modules they would need to run their procurement function from one vendor. Rarely was it the case that the various modules did what their customers needed. Some of them might have worked in some ways, but others just didn’t serve the need at all.

“In the second five years of our being, things started to change. We did start to notice an increasing acceptance that best-of-breed was the way forward and that enterprises needed to accept that if they were to get the buy-in from their stakeholders, then they needed to work with a combination of best-of-breed vendors and piece together their specific technologies landscape rather than just buying it in bulk from one. I would say it was gradual at first and then suddenly, but it’s only been suddenly in the last couple of years. The pandemic likely accelerated some of that change.”

Trust first

Holland explains that in recent years, large multinationals are placing an increasingly important level of trust in smaller, best-of-breed vendors such as Keelvar to allow them to run their sourcing events and meet niche demands. He believes that in the past it simply wouldn’t have happened and strives to prove that faith right. “I suppose that’s a process where enterprises are gradually increasing their trust in what are smaller vendors, but these smaller vendors are becoming bigger because we’re serving hundreds of large enterprises,” he explains. “We’re gaining in strength and momentum and the barriers to adopting best-of-breed at scale are lowering and the market willingness to jump those barriers is increasing. That momentum is just gathering more and more force.”

Alan Holland, CEO at Keelvar

Using tech as an enabler for talent

Procurement’s talent shortage and the ways to bridge has been a hot topic for years. Whoever you speak to within the industry, everyone will have a different viewpoint. Some say procurement needs a rebrand, others say it’s a lack of education while others think technology could hold the key. For Holland, he believes it’s about making tech work and freeing up people in procurement’s time to focus on more value-add work that will help solve strategic goals.

“What is attracting graduates to procurement now is working with intelligent systems that are powered by AI and that allow them to be strategic and not working on routine or tactical tasks because machines are taking over the data-intensive areas of processing these workflows,” he tells us. “Our second product, which we launched about three years ago is autonomous sourcing. These are sourcing bots that are intelligent software agents that you can now design, build, and operate your own sourcing bots. If you’re somebody who understands best practices in sourcing, you can now build automated workflows so that instead of having to run sourcing events one by one and get through 15 or 20 a year, now you could design bots that are running hundreds of these events per annum.”

Procurement’s bright future

While not only opening up people’s day, using technology as an enabler to make life easier also acts as a way of encouraging the next generation into the industry. “What you’re doing is freeing up many other people’s time to spend on relationship management or innovation discovery and talking to the market, finding out what new suppliers you should be dealing with, visiting suppliers to check things are in order,” he says. “And that is the type of work that people enjoy doing. Machines are taking more of the data-intensive work off their tables, and machines are not good at work related to establishing trust. Machines have no empathy, but people do. The soft skills in procurement are becoming ever more important because the machines are taking over the harder skills. That is leading to a transformation in the type of work that procurement is doing.

“It’s also leading to a transformation in the interest levels that graduates emerging from universities have for this sphere. When it used to be that they were first introduced to a legacy system and told that this is what they needed to use to do their job. Young workers are coming with higher expectations about software and rightfully so, and enterprises are reacting to the need to satisfy the technology requirements of younger recruits now, which is a very good thing. It’s accelerating that digital transformation that we are seeing.”

The next step

Looking ahead, Holland is full of positivity for the future and believes decision-making in procurement is easier than it’s ever been. He believes tomorrow is “very bright” as procurement enters an era with intelligent software agents which can automate workflows and make the human workday more efficient. “There’s a whole new range of possibilities where creative and thoughtful planning will provide a competitive advantage for organisations and procurement can be far more influential in how successful their companies can be. It’s a game-changer.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

24 November 2023

Estimated Read time

5Mins

At DPW Amsterdam 2023, Brandon Card, Co-Founder and CEO at Terzo, discusses the rise of his organisation amid the COVID-19 pandemic and how it used the disruption to its advantage.

Terzo means third in Italian.

With the two founders having Italian heritage, they chose to describe what they set out to build – a platform that brings third parties together.

Terzo uses powerful AI technology to extract, analyse, and visualise its customer’s contract data. Terzo’s AI data extraction capabilities also reach beyond contracts and can solve an organisation’s document problems, from invoices to POs and more. Its platform was designed on the foundation of contract intelligence, providing business teams the necessary data to improve productivity, optimise spend, reduce costs, and manage risk and governance across their entire supplier ecosystem. Terzo is the first solution to provide critical data and terms to both legal and business teams to make decisions together.

Terzo’s journey

Brandon Card is the Co-Founder and CEO at Terzo. His company’s journey’s start was an interesting one, having been founded days before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that then ensued. But, reflecting on the disruptive nature of the situation, Card believes it actually helped get Terzo up and running quicker. “It just accelerated our timeline because we wanted to build fast,” he reveals. “When we put the team together, we had this concept that we wanted to get the product out as fast as possible. We knew that with Covid happening there was going to be a huge shift in how people were working. People were going to need to buy new solutions faster and it’s going to be harder to control spending. We knew procurement was going to have a host of challenges across the supply chain with this interruption with Covid. Our team on the engineering side believed we need to build faster.”

This led to Terzo’s team on the engineering side of the house to work diligently throughout the rest of 2020 and into 2021 on building code and new releases with the vision of getting the Terzo product into the industry quicker. “We thought we might be able to help procurement given the challenges they have now with all of these new needs that the business is going to bring,” he says. “We probably built the product about 50% faster just because there were no distractions so there’s pros and cons when everything happens in life. Our team really worked well together and they buckled down and they took that time to focus on Terzo. It’s something I’m very proud of this team for doing that.”

Brandon Card speaks with CPOstrategy at DPW Amsterdam 2023

Developing relationships

A big part of what Terzo does revolves around strengthening relationships by uniting teams to unlock insights so organisations can make smarter decisions and maximise value from suppliers, customers and partners. Card believes this mantra holds the key to long-term success in procurement.

“It’s critical for us because when we think about whether we’re doing spend analytics or contract intelligence, it’s all about understanding the relationship with these different entities you’re working with,” discusses Card. “We’re not there yet but my big vision in the future is to build an enterprise relationship intelligence platform to understand every single business that you’re working with, whether it’s a customer, a supplier or a partner. The truth with these big organisations, a lot of their suppliers are also partners or customers. These relationships are very complex and they’re very critical to innovation.

“If you’re doing anything in the cloud right now, if you’re doing anything with AI or even autonomous driving, you need partners to get this done. You can’t build it in-house. And years ago, people would build in-house. When we were young growing up in the nineties, everyone had to build their own data centres and build their own software. We’re in a world now where you can go and turn things on online in a few minutes, and that’s where we want to be so you can push product out faster, competitive advantage, and I think these relationships are critical to procurement having a competitive advantage and driving value for the whole business.”

Procurement’s place

In today’s world, procurement is in the driving seat. The function isn’t siloed anymore, stuck in a back-office room and out of the way of everyone else. Despite such significant innovation, there is sometimes a perception that procurement is still boring. For Card, he believes one of procurement’s biggest challenges is changing that age-hold mentality of procurement within a c-suite.

“It’s about educating the CEO or the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of large organisations just how critical procurement is. A lot of them just don’t understand,” he tells us. “That’s the challenge we have, and that’s something we want to change. In the future, the CFO is going to treat the head of sales the same they treat the CPO. Right now, the chief revenue officer gets special treatment in every organisation. If you run sales, you’re treated differently because you bring in revenue. If you’re procurement, you’re lucky if you’re at the table. But I do see that changing.”

While Card believes this shift is already beginning to happen with younger CFOs, change such as this doesn’t happen overnight. “By doing this, you’re going to have a really balanced organisation and reduce risk while optimising their costs,” he discusses. “Ultimately, they’re going to be more efficient, and the teams are going to be working a lot better together. There’s going to be a better culture when leadership buys in because then procurement feels valued. They work harder, and that vibe carries throughout the organisation. That’s something that we want to help push for procurement but we know it’s going to take time.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

22 November 2023

Estimated Read time

5Mins

At DPW Amsterdam 2023, Daniel Barnes, Community Manager at Gatekeeper, discusses the evolution of the procurement function and the influence tools such as generative AI are having in the space.

“It might sound harsh, but people just won’t have a job if they don’t change.”

For Daniel Barnes, Community Manager at Gatekeeper, his thoughts are clear. Technology is here and it’ll only get more advanced.

Barnes has been the Community Manager at Gatekeeper since June 2022. The company he works for is a next-generation Vendor & Contract Lifecycle Management (VCLM) platform that was born in the cloud and works on any device. Gatekeeper has a strong focus on collaboration, clear actionable data, obligation and compliance tracking, email alerts and most of all ease of use. The firm has a ‘zero training’ mantra driving a fanatical focus on usability that results in an application internal stakeholders and suppliers can use effortlessly.

The Gatekeeper Platform provides a suite of vendor management, contract management, kanban workflow, collaboration and reporting features. Customers can extend the functionality of Gatekeeper with additional modules to meet their required use cases, as well as integrating with over 220 third-party solutions.

Technology potential

Since joining the company, a key consideration for both Barnes and Gatekeeper has been the influence of generative AI. However, Barnes explains that while the potential of the technology is exciting, they are being strategic about how to leverage AI.

“We’re probably taking it a little bit more of a slower approach,” he tells us. “We have a contract summary function at the moment which means for any contract we summarise it so that anyone in the business can get a really quick understanding of that contract. We’re also exploring whether we’re going to bring in a Gatekeeper bot that allows us to get insights analysis in a very conversational manner. One thing we really believe is that contract and vendors aren’t just for procurement or legal. Everyone in the business has to contribute to make these successful. A lot of the issues, data and information behind these are legally complex. Procurement language is difficult when you’re talking about RFPs or you’re talking about risk. Someone in the business doesn’t care about that, they just want to get whatever they have brought, they want the service, they want it performed, they want it on time and they want a good relationship. We’re trying to figure out how to use AI like that.”

CPOstrategy speaking with Daniel Barnes at DPW Amsterdam 2023

The rise of Gen AI

Generative AI isn’t exactly new. In fact, it actually dates back to the 1960s. Among the first functioning examples was the ELIZA chatbot which was created in 1961 by British scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. It was the first talking computer program that could communicate with a human through natural language. But, given the introduction of a far more advanced model – ChatGPT – gen AI is the name on not only procurement’s lips but the wider world too. Barnes questions what you need to make AI successful at implementation.

“You get data and most procurement and legal teams have an issue with data because they don’t have it in one place,” he explains. “We fundamentally believe in this three-pillar approach. It’s to restore visibility and to have all your vendors and their contracts in one place. From there, you take control of that by digitalising all of your processes. Once they’re digital, you can track and automate them from various data points that you have in your vendor and contract records. That allows you to safeguard compliance, whether that’s regulatory, legislative or by contractual obligations. They’re all different forms of compliance that you need to track. Most teams are really struggling just with those. When we talk about gen AI, the reality is most teams are still so far away from even being able to realise those benefits. Today, gen AI looks powerful once you have the pillars in place and I’m really excited about its future.”

Procurement’s evolution

Indeed, procurement stands at a unique moment. With some in the space used to operating a certain way through legacy systems and others embracing a digital transformation and the technological innovation that brings with it, Barnes recognises that people who are reluctant to change could be left behind. “I think there has to be a willingness to change,” he tells us. “I’ve been talking about change in procurement since 2019, and I would say 80% of people who are engaged are hesitant and don’t want to change. That’s a really big concern. But my biggest worry is they don’t want to know in the first place. One of my fears is you’ve got so many solutions that genuinely can eliminate work in procurement teams. I’m worried for those people who don’t want to change because what are they doing when their work’s automated?”

The future

Barnes, who also hosts the World of Procurement podcast and YouTube channel, believes there is a current cultural divide in procurement and the industry is at a make-or-break moment. He affirms procurement will go “one of two ways”.

“You’ve got people who are stuck in the past that are archaic with what they’re doing. Then there’s those who are really pushing the profession forward,” he explains. “I see it as a moment in time where procurement kind of goes one in two ways. It’s extinct in terms of how it used to be. There’s solutions that I’ve seen which have automated workflows and are doing the work that traditional procurement people used to do. We can pull people along, but there has to be an initial willingness to change too or it’s not going to happen. That’s why I think it’s great to see people that are showing that willingness. They may not have the answers, but they want to learn.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

8 November 2023

Estimated Read time

7Mins

At DPW Amsterdam, Gregor Stühler, CEO and Co-founder of Scoutbee, and Karin Hagen-Gierer, CPO and Strategic Advisor at Scoutbee, discusses the rise of chatbots and their influence in procurement.

Scoutbee was created with the idea of improving supply chain resilience through AI and big data to transform the way organisations use supplier data to discover and connect with suppliers.

The company, which was founded in 2015, offers an AI-powered Scoutbee Intelligence Platform (SIP) which uses graph technology and predictive and prescriptive analytics to deliver holistic supplier visibility that helps procurement make confident supplier decisions, drive cross-functional efficiency and optimise existing technology investments.      

Scoutbee’s AI-driven data foundation connects teams to any data point, internal, external, third-party and more, as well as any data combination necessary to orchestrate a resilient, competitive and sustainable supply base.

Gregor Stühler is the CEO and Co-founder at Scoutbee. He believes that waiting to invest in AI tools and underlying data training will be companies’ greatest sustainable disadvantage of the next decade. “AI is not an off-the-shelf product, so you can’t buy AI unless it’s a pre-trained AI on a specific use case but then it’s not a competitive edge,” he tells us.

“A competitive edge only emerges when you have a clear use case and training on top of that. The companies that start using those AI solutions sooner with their data have much better training in place. As a result, they’ll always be ahead of the game quite significantly. Companies that use off-the-shelf AI products will do well, but the ones that actually take it meaningfully and start trading on their own use case and their own data will be the ones that will be accelerating.”

Gregor Stühler, CEO and Co-founder and Karin Hagen-Gierer, CPO and Strategic Advisor, at Scoutbee

AI – Changing the game?

Karin Hagen-Gierer is CPO and Strategic Advisor at Scoutbee. She explains that there are a multitude of ways in which tools such as generative AI are having an impact on procurement to change the game.      

“AI is great to help with mundane and boring tasks,” she discusses. “It can help us with vendor requests that come in and can be appropriately channelled. It can help your colleagues to navigate procurement. When they have questions, they can interact with a chat solution and be guided in a much better way to find what they want much quicker. I think if we look at how it can enhance our teams’ effectiveness, it is really in market analytics, supplier searches, supplier evaluations, and ChatGPT that could help us broaden the spectrum. If you then look to more tailored solutions like Scoutbee then it’s a very different ball game that procurement professionals have at their fingertips. I’m noticing a drive on both efficiency and effectiveness in this space.”

Despite AI’s draws, Stühler is well aware of the challenges and hesitations around digital technology. As far as he is concerned, there are two waves of generative AI to be aware of.  “Wave one is about having a prompt and how tools such as ChatGPT can help with that,” he says. “For example, what are 10 RFI questions for aluminium cans?

“Wave two is where I merge and synthesise all of my data into our large language model and it has reasoning to drive decision-making and scenario planning. You do have to be careful though because you have to give the system all your critical data but you don’t want to input this into an open model. This means the use case has to be that you deploy a large language model in your own infrastructure, and own your own graphic card that will never actually leave your organisation.

Gregor Stühler, CEO and Co-founder at Scoutbee

“This is the biggest concern that we’re seeing because ChatGPT has brought a lot of progress but also a lot of questions. Now, when people hear that we want them to merge their data into a large language model that’s completely private, we’re met with some resistance when we explain to them that their large language model is running on their very own graphics card that we don’t have access to. That tends to give them more comfort to put their data into it,” he continues.

Stühler adds that he believes there are some misconceptions around ChatGPT and the nature of how accurate the data it provides actually is. As is the case with any new technology, these things take time. “It’s always the same. It happened with electric cars, nobody thought that would solve the battery issue,” he discusses. “I think we are right at the peak of the hype cycle when it comes to those things and people have figured out what they can use it for. With wave one of generative AI, it is fine to have hallucinations of the model and if something is spat out that is not supported by the input.

“But by the second use case, hallucinations are not okay anymore because it’s working with accurate data and should not come up with some imaginary creative answers. It should be always supported by the data that is put in. This is very important that people understand that if you train the model and if you have the right setting, those hallucinations will go away and you can actually have a setting where the output of the model is 100% accurate,” he further emphasises.

Procurement’s potential

According to Karin Hagen-Gierer, there is an incredible opportunity to create value in procurement today. Following unprecedented global challenges over the past few years, CPOs have never been in the boardroom so often – something she’s keen to stress.      

“The value of procurement through crisis has been proven,” she says. “We tend to say, it’s not a core business, but very often if things don’t go right, it becomes core very quickly and you are in the CEO’s office more than you might like. It’s the breadth of the role that allows to drive value: You impact the P/L impact, topline, and the ESG agenda to name a few. But then there is a need to future-proof your team’s skill set around how you can drive more impact from being more effective in the respective tool sets you’re using, the questions you’re able to solve solutions for. Additionally, you have to work on improving your efficiencies. Teams are not getting bigger, so you need to be enabled in a very different way to really drive all this value.”

Karin Hagen-Gierer, CPO and Strategic Advisor at Scoutbee

Stühler reflects on the past and admires the transformation procurement has undergone in the past decade since he joined the industry. “I came to procurement in 2012 and even then I remember this function being solely responsible for paying invoices and calling trucks to arrive sooner – at first glance,” he says. “Combined with the crises that now happened over the last couple of years, post-Covid has proven procurement’s value – and the impact organisations such as Scoutbee can make.    

“I think two key things will happen in the future. Firstly, the tech landscape is exploding so quickly that there must be a consolidation that will happen. Secondly, when it comes to generative AI I think those pragmatic use cases will become the new normal. ChatGPT will be like Google today to get insights. Generative AI and large language models will get increasingly powerful over time and will help if you feed it the right data and connect it to different data streams that you have internally. It can become this true copilot and help you with complex scenario planning and make you aware of weak spots in your supply base while helping you to strategically take the right steps. The future is exciting,” he concludes.

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

7 November 2023

Estimated Read time

6Mins

Stefan Dent, co-founder at Simfoni, and Richard Martin, CEO at Thinking Machine, discuss the power of data in procurement and the future of AI.

“See spend differently”.

Simfoni is revolutionising how businesses spend their money – via data. In today’s ever-changing world, everything is underpinned by data at Simfoni.

Founded in 2015, Simfoni is a leading provider of spend analytics, Tail Spend and eSourcing solutions to global businesses. Simfoni’s platform utilises machine learning and AI to accelerate and automate key parts of the procurement process which saves time and money while creating a pathway for supply chain sustainability. Its solution quickly distils and organises complex spend data to help discover opportunities and savings. It also gets up and running in days with an on-demand spend automation solution.

Indeed, Simfoni aims to take the hassle out of procurement through its automated, fluid platform that offers a unique pay-as-you-save pricing model which reduces barriers to technology adoption. Through fused revolutionary technology with AI-enabled content and deep expertise to automate, streamline and simplify procurement. Simfoni’s composable platform provides a selection of advanced automation modules that help customers sky-rocket savings and achieve sustainability objectives.

Stefan Dent, co-founder, Simfoni

Stefan Dent co-founded Simfoni and now serves as Chief Strategy Officer. He tells us his organisation was created ‘with a purpose to be different’. “A lot of customers have been working on full suite solutions for some time, which was seen as a sort of panacea for all ills that would solve everything,” says Dent. “It solved some areas such as direct spend, but these are large, mega expensive solutions that aren’t particularly agile. Ultimately, we came up with our own solution which is purposely different. We launched as a composable, agile solution that works with existing systems to boos ROI on tech spend. We apply next-gen technology to procurement that democratizes access to digital procurement tools – opening-up digital solutions to organizations of any size and across any sector. It means we can open our solution up to the masses and not just for large organisations.”

Relationship with Thinking Machine

Simfoni is powered by analytics. Its analytics solution informs spend, as well as watching how change is measured and performance is tracked over time. Now eight years old, Simfoni has fostered alliances with several younger companies offering specialist tools which have been embedded within the Simfoni platform. One such company is Thinking Machine, led by CEO and Founder Richard Martin.

Thinking Machine was founded in 2019 by Martin after he discovered the industry needed to find a better use of data to address ‘complex spend’ such as in Telecoms where you have multiple vendors, manual and frequent billing, changing tariffs and users. Martin explains that he witnessed all types of companies going through the same problems instead of only large companies. “Thinking Machine was developed as a way to give customers a single source of revenue across all services, pricing and demand but in a way that can be done at the very lowest level,” says Martin. “We would take all that complexity and be able to roll it up into actionable evidence that could be reconciled against their top-level financial numbers. It gives procurement directors the tools they need to actually be in the driver’s seat when it comes to their procurement operations.”

Developing key, strategic relationships with partners that can be depended on is an essential component to the success of any long-term business relationship. Simfoni relies on Thinking Machine to help manage its load and enable customers to go deep with Thinking Machine to extract even more value from their data. “We offer our clients the opportunity to go deep within certain domains,” discusses Dent. “We can then bring in Thinking Machine to help extract even more value from the data on complex spend.

Stefan Dent and Richard Martin speaking to CPOstrategy at DPW Amsterdam

“Thinking Machine’s application will ingest a large quantum of complex data. Their tools work like magic and allows data to be put into a readable format so they can make sense of the actual spend and quickly identify optimisation opportunities. This is part of our philosophy to work with niche technology partners because we shouldn’t do everything, so we need to put our resources where it counts. Resources like Thinking Machine work well by plugging into us, which means we offer incremental value to our clients without them going to market separately.

“It can also be very hard for a young company to work with large corporates because they’re untried or untrusted. This means for a company like Thinking Machine to connect with Simfoni is a win-win for everyone.”

Procurement’s bright future

Given the space procurement finds itself in today, the future is set to continue to be transformative. For Martin, he believes the introduction and influence of generative AI tools will help meet challenges in procurement head-on. “For the first time you see how it’s actually possible to be a unicorn with a 10-person team,” he explains. “The scales of efficiency are just out of this world. In terms of the procuretech industry, I think we’ve had a problem for a while now because there’s been all these best-of-breed solutions that are doing bits and pieces but is very difficult to stitch together into one cohesive platform that customers can make use of without having to know how to use 50 different tools.

“I think Gen AI offers a path to helping to smooth over some of those challenges and figuring out how to bring these things together. I think enterprises are going to start finding a lot more value in having all these best-of-breed solutions, such as Thinking Machine and Simfoni, while being able to use AI as a way to put this together into more of a single common layer that they can access. It is a very exciting time.”

For much of the past decade, Dent explains that he has believed that machines will take over mundane and outdated ways of working. Now, with the influence of tools such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, that digital future has only been accelerated and change the workforce of tomorrow. “Most CPOs of today are saying they need more headcount but I think they will soon be thinking very differently,” he discusses. “We predicted some time ago that Procurement departments will get smaller in headcount, maybe by even up to 50%. The procurement function of the future will be a lot smaller, leaner, and meaner.  Procurement teams will be more intelligent and strategic, in terms of both the people employed, and the digital tools used to manage spend.”

While Dent believes AI and machines won’t replace every human in procurement, it will mean forward-thinking teams need to embrace new technology with humans taking on higher-value roles. “The shape and structure of the modern procurement function will change quite dramatically, and people will need to upskill,” he discusses. “A lot of the work will be taken over by the machine eventually either 20%, 50%, and then a hundred percent. But the human needs to have that in mind and then plan for that next three to five years. The procurement function of the future will be smaller, and they should purposely be doing that, to then look at solutions to find a way to enable it to happen naturally.

“This is arguably the best time for people to join procurement, as you’ve got this great opportunity to embrace digital and make it happen. Young people can question ‘Well, why can’t it be done by a machine?’ They’re coming in with that mindset, as opposed to fighting being replaced by a machine. I think for graduates coming into procurement, they’ve got the opportunity to play with digital and change the status quo which is a wonderful thing.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

1 November 2023

Estimated Read time

5Mins

At DPW Amsterdam, Ashwin Kumar, vice president at GEP, discusses procurement transformation and what tomorrow’s challenge could look like.

Transformation. Procurement has witnessed quite a bit in recent years.

Given the widespread adoption and acceleration of AI and data-driven processes over the past decade, change has been a necessity rather than a nice to have.

Evolution of AI transformation

Ashwin Kumar is not unfamiliar with change. Having worked at GEP since May 2008, he has had a front-row seat to the transformation and change procurement has overseen. Now Vice President, he tells us about the evolution of the procurement function and how the landscape is shifting to meet future market demands.

“I think the way we see the industry evolve over time is because we started with web 1.0, simple ERPs that were fragmented with no easy way to connect systems,” he tells us. “Data was all behind firewalls and it was very expensive to manage or mine data. Then we had a big technology breakthrough in cloud systems where the people who were managing the storage said they had a solution. You can just simply push data out of the cloud and what we saw was a lot of that control that the CIOs had on data architecture and the software systems and solutions was being given to different functions.

“A lot of that enrichment of data happened because of the cloud platform that enabled it. Back in 2010, we made the decision to move away from a SaaS platform because even then we believed the future was cloud and that’s where data is going to be which could mean a gold mine. Our CEO made a very conscious decision to basically stop a really good product that was working and move to the cloud platform.”

Ashwin Kumar, Vice President, GEP

The GEP difference

Today, a global leader in AI-driven procurement and supply chain transformation, GEP helps enterprises take the lead and, using the power of data and digital technology, to stay ahead in the connected global economy. More than 1,000 engineers have spent the last 7 months to design and launch GEP’s new AI-native, low-code platform for sustainable procurement and supply chains, GEP QUANTUM. This new platform, launched last week, powers GEP SMART, the industry’s leading source-to-pay procurement application, GEP NEXXE, its next gen supply chain solution, and GEP GREEN, enabling companies to track, measure and achieve their ESG goals.

With the transformative power of AI, GEP enables businesses to operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness, gain competitive advantage, boost profitability and maximise both business and shareholder value. GEP helps global enterprises across industries and verticals build high-performing, resilient and sustainable supply chains.

Investing in dedicated spend analytics and solutions has become an essential part of the procurement process. Data is king and ultimately the more companies know and can predict, the better off they’ll be. However, some companies are still lagging behind when it comes to adopting digital tools created for better visibility and transparency. Kumar questions the reason for this and points to the possibility that there could be a perception that digital tools were hype or a fad – but affirms spend visibility is the real deal.

“If you look at spend data, if I’m the business stakeholder, you’re coming and showing me things that happened six months before,” he tells us. “One of the things we actively tell customers is to understand that there is a difference between spend and cost. Spend is basically the last AP data that you get, which means it’s not even current.”

Procurement’s greatest time?

Given the disruptive nature of the past few years, procurement has had to stand up and be counted. For Kumar, he reflects on global challenges such as Covid, a war in Ukraine and inflation and its knock-on effect on procurement and the supply chain. He maintains that it’s a “difficult time” to be in the industry at the moment given the hurdles procurement and the wider world has faced head-on recently.

“We started off with Covid where we went and told suppliers, sorry, I don’t have money to spend so I’m going to stop spending,” he tells us. “Two months later, you tell them there’s a supply shock and since I’m your preferred customer, can you do something for me? Make sure my products are getting to me on time. Then six months later, there was a war in Ukraine where you were testing suppliers to see which side they were on and questioning whether or not to do business with them. After that, there were inflation concerns so things are constantly changing and you’re pivoting from one problem to another.

“It now means you need to have a platform ecosystem with multiple solution options so that there isn’t a single point of failure and avoid the need for a “transformation” every two years. Given the pace at which things are changing in the macro environment, those single points of failure are quickly going from lack of supply to resilience to risk to people to visibility. It could be something else tomorrow, it could be ESG tomorrow, we simply don’t know. I could have a really good risk assessment tool, but that might not be my focus six months from now – it could be something else. So resilience in the form of digital ecosystem housing different point solutions is paramount.”

Author

Sean Galea-Pace

Published

30 October 2023

Estimated Read time

5Mins

Koray Köse, Chief Industry Officer at Everstream Analytics, speaks to us exclusively at DPW Amsterdam and discusses the importance of leading from the front in the supply chain

Everstream Analytics sets the global supply chain standard.

Through the application of AI and predictive analytics to its vast proprietary dataset, Everstream delivers the predictive insights and risk analytics businesses need for a smarter, more autonomous and sustainable supply chain. Everstream’s proven solution integrates with procurement, logistics and business continuity platforms generating the complete information, sharper analysis, and accurate predictions required to turn the supply chain into a business asset.

Koray Köse is a supply chain expert, futurist and multi-lingual thought leader, CPO, researcher, and published author. He specialises in working with CSCOs, CPOs, CIOs and other c-level executives while possessing more than 20 years of success in developing global supply chain and sourcing strategies, re-engineering and transforming business processes, and maximising financial resources. Köse is experienced in designing new business frameworks, risk and governance processes and deploying full-scale ERP and procure-to-pay systems to drive efficiencies through digital transformation. He is an expert in industries such as automotive, pharma, life sciences, IT, electronics and FMCG and has served as Chief Industry Officer at Everstream Analytics since June 2023.

Koray Köse, Chief Industry Officer, Everstream Analytics

World’s first Slave-Free Alliance

Recently, Everstream became the world’s first Slave-Free Alliance (SFA) validated modern slavery and forced labour technology provider. Everstream’s collaboration combines the firm’s multi-tier supplier discovery and AI-powered risk monitoring and analytics with SFA’s proprietary forced labour intelligence to expose unknown risks and protect global supply chains from modern slavery and exploitation.

“We’ve had issues in supply chain before, like conflict minerals for instance was a big topic,” Köse tells us. “Legislation came that was rather weak, where companies can say we can’t confirm nor deny that we have conflict minerals in our products. Modern slavery takes it to a whole different level. In essence, you may get import issues the moment that you might be suspicious, or the government import controls may say, ‘this comes from a specific region that has general exposure’. You basically have a disruption in your supply chain.

“If you forget about the business side, your business is actually promoting ethics that your own company in its statement and the way you live don’t align with and you didn’t know about it. So unknowingly you have actually incremented the issue that you are tackling on your own and within your environment. For us it was important to live up to the promise and look for an NGO that is impactful, has a mindset that is all about partnership and not blaming or shaming, it’s about changing the environment.”

Breaking down barriers

Around 50 million people worldwide are living in modern slavery. It remains a serious problem in nearly every region, with over 40% occurring in upper-middle to high-income countries. Due to the opacity and complexity of today’s global supply networks, companies are increasingly vulnerable to the risk of forced labour. According to a study cited by Slave-Free Alliance, 77% of companies expect to find modern slavery somewhere in their supply chain. Through this alliance, Everstream will actively contribute to enhancing capabilities and eradicating modern slavery and forced labour from global supply chains.

“We started that partnership to transfer our knowledge and also get insights from their end and understand what the upcoming issues were in the arenas of modern-day slavery that we should keep an eye on and how to help our clients to be informed and avoid getting exposed,” says Köse. “That’s where I started to talk with Hope for Justice and have collaborated with them during my time at Gartner as well. Then legislation is pushing the matter to the forefront of supply chain issues.

“Now, there is also financial impact and disruption and there’s the ability to do good and live up to the promise of your own vision and the way you want to conduct your business. Then I wanted to put our product to test and make sure that it lives up to the promise and if it doesn’t then we fix it. We went through a validation process and we got 90% plus accuracy in the feedback, which is important as it’s another confidence boost that we’re doing the right thing and we should continue on that path. We are the first world’s first validated modern-day slavery solution to tackle the issue – we’re very proud of that.”

The value of due diligence

In today’s fast-paced world, due diligence has become more important than ever. Companies must ensure they are generating the best value for money and that the product that they’re purchasing actually meets their needs. Köse believes companies almost have no choice in 2023.

“It’s an element that is not only preserving value, but it also creates it too,” he explains. “In the past it was more like a checkbox exercise that you conducted because everyone thought it was the right thing to do. Meanwhile, you had spillovers that you didn’t know about. It’s almost like what I don’t know, I don’t care. Since transparency requirements have been augmented significantly and the realisation of transparency as a value driver has dropped through Covid almost instantaneously in the c-level boardroom, compliance has become a value driver.

“It’s not just a checkbox exercise where you say that you are compliant. It is an affirmation of your product quality, brand and innovation that speaks to the customers and the choice they make. If you are concatenating beliefs and values to your product in that moment, you just have created a customer and that customer will be retained throughout the lifetime that you actually care about what they care about.”