Are you Ready for the Procurement Revolution?

In this guest post we welcome Dr Howard Price, a PhD in strategic procurement, from the consultancy firm Supply Chain Impact Partners. In this short article Dr Price explores how the procurement profession will evolve over the next five years and how procurement teams can find and deliver new sources of value for their organisations.

Over the next few years, we're going to see dramatic changes in the challenges facing procurement professionals and CPOs. There’s already been huge turbulence in global supply chains in this decade. We’ve experienced a global pandemic, geopolitical turmoil, supply shortages, rampant inflation, and increasingly extreme weather causing death and disruption.

All this will likely continue; scientists say another global pandemic is statistically certain and, whilst currently stalling in some regions, tackling global warming is a major priority for human survival.

But there’s now an additional major disruption joining the mix: the acceleration of digital technologies, particularly AI, which will generate a sustained burst of new products and services, eliminating existing jobs and creating new ones. How will procurement respond? AI will force us to change, as it rapidly takes on the majority of work involved in issuing and evaluating RFPs, even high value, complex ones. Many procurement teams currently spend 80% of their time doing this – so what will they do instead?

Procurement teams will need to focus instead on the strategic management of complex supply ecosystems. That all sounds a bit fancy, so let’s break it down a bit. What are these ecosystems? The world needs to move away from linear production, which still remains the reality today; products are manufactured, used by the customer, and then go to landfill. This production approach is highly wasteful, inefficient, and generates huge amounts of greenhouse gas. We need to move to a circular economy, where products are designed with longer lifecycles and can be re-used many times.  This is a very different kind of supply chain, requiring multiple companies collaborating closely together.

These complex supply ecosystems are the key to creating more efficient, sustainable and resilient national and international economies, and helping to tackle the threats that will continue to challenge us all through the rest of the decade.

The great news is that procurement teams are best placed to take the lead in embracing this new challenge, supported by increasing sophisticated AI tools, working closely with sales and design, building new circular networks of suppliers. It’s going to be an exciting time to be in procurement!

If you are interested in learning more about Supply Chain Impact Partners or procurement and supply chain consulting, let’s talk.

You can contact Dr Price directly via:

E:  info@SCIPartners.net