What are Large Organisations Looking to Prioritise in Procurement?
When you have spent years of your life doing the same thing, you can find it hard to take a step back and gain true perspective. After all, you are the expert, quite literally so. You’ve seen everything, you’ve learnt from your mistakes and you have perfected the processes that you run through.
That being said, being an expert doesn’t necessarily equate to knowing the right answer it also doesn’t necessarily allow you to see the big picture. At times it can go so far as being a hindrance.
It’s one of the reasons consultants (for better or worse) are often paid considerable amounts of money.
Now, I am not a consultant but I am knowledgeable when it comes to the world of ERP and since making the decision to join HICX I’ve learnt a fair amount about the world of procurement.
As such, I thought it would be useful to share one particular point of interest. A trend, that I personally, see as very positive.
I’ll get straight to it. The vast majority of those that come to our website are reading about master data governance.
This makes sense to me. It may not be the key buying factor for everyone, but, it is exactly the white paper I’d read if I was looking around. (It often does end up being the primary focus of any internal budget pitches.)
I like to view technology as extremely basic, all it does is allows someone to get from Position A to Position B more quickly and more cost effectively than the manual option. Not only that but it also allows visibility of all data throughout its lifecycle.
The second point is the one that sticks out to me. Surely if you are running a large organisation you need all the information available possible?
To me it just makes sense. If you can analyse accurate data, you can find trends, you can spot discrepancies and with that kind of information you can drive your company forward.
To clarify.
I’m not advocating significant investment in analytical tools (yet), I’m advocating a focus on high quality data at the point of entry and a consistent effort put into maintaining said data.
From there, anything is possible. If you were building a house, you’d start with the foundations and build from there.
In what is a positive turn of events, a lot of organisations now seem to be making their foundations a priority. Presumably, as a result of the changing face of procurement and thanks to the new SaaS opportunities. That is a whole other blog though.
