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5 Key Procurement Technology Trends

Ongoing advances in technology has enabled organizations to drive significant transformation to their digital procurement processes. Marketing procurement can take advantage of this transformation to improve supplier relationships, lower costs and adapt to fast-evolving customer expectations.

To stay relevant, competitive, and efficient, organizations must keep pace with new technologies and marketing procurement is no exception.

Here’s a list of a few trends that are expected this year and beyond.

1.    Risk Management

Risk management is critical in any business, but it’s amplified even more when it comes to marketing procurement and the COVID environment is adding further to this issue.

Marketing procurement is further complicated because risk is most associated with preferred supplier status which is often skewed to long term suppliers who deliver on time and meet quality standards, they are often never tested and simply relied on year over year.

Today’s innovative organizations are taking advantage of technologies that deliver true transparency into the supply chain by being the repository of all supplier information, contracts, quote requests, bids, job requisitions, communications and shared documents between buyer and supplier.

Risk is mitigated through greater transparency and standardized approach to managing supplier relationships ensuring no single points of dependency are introduced.

2.    Simplification and affordability

Marketing buyers are busy and work within a very dynamic and fast-moving procurement category. They seek a greater level of convenience from technology and are adopting a self-service approach offered by solutions that simplify the procurement process through automation, pre-built quote templates, instant pricing and other features that reduce effort and minimize human errors.

SaaS based platforms have introduced a new level of affordability by lowering upfront costs, reducing ongoing overhead by allowing organizations to take advantage of subscription-based models. Many solutions providers are entering the market with flexible and scalable solutions that can be incorporated into existing processes cost-efficiently.

3.    Collaboration and Communication Tools

Organizations can improve productivity and increase cost savings by deploying technology that streamlines and centralizes communication between suppliers and stakeholders into a single platform, no more email and spreadsheets.

Effective collaboration tools should enable real-time information sharing between suppliers and buyers ensuring information is retained by the organization and accessible by all stakeholders.

4.    Integration

Integration between applications using APIs has been around for long time, but organizations are now demanding an omnichannel approach to their technology needs and this is enabled via APIs.

The trend to make APIs more accessible has enabled organizations to unlock themselves from a one platform strategy, allowing them to build innovative, targeted and more effective technology solutions.

By allowing developers to access APIs it enables a digital first strategy to be adopted, leading to increased functionality around suppliers, payments, billing, messaging in a low-cost, effective manner.

5.    Data & Analytics

Organizations globally have been clear in their adoption and use of data and analytics to drive cost optimizations, process improvement and more detailed management reporting.

The key to leveraging an analytically driven approach will come from technologies that have reporting and analytics embedding into the application that can be accessed and used by buyers to improve the decision making process.

Summary

Organizations today have a wide range of technology choices available to them. More and more organizations are moving towards a hub and spoke type model for technology solutions based on the understanding that one platform cannot deliver for every category. Marketing procurement teams are transforming themselves as they embrace new technology applications to improve procurement processes allowing them to thrive in an ever changing and demanding new environment

For more information on sourceit’s procurement platform, book a meeting today to arrange a time to discuss how sourceit can meet your procurement requirements.