A digital supply chain’s benefits: cost-savings and ESG reports
By Costas Xyloyiannis, CEO of HICX
By helping procurement teams digitally transform their operations, businesses gain a single source of truth in supplier data. This transformation leads to cost-saving metrics and helps generate accurate ESG reports, writes Costas Xyloyiannis, CEO of supply chain technology firm HICX.
In recent years, ESG (environmental, social, governance) was hoisted to the top of the board agenda. To manage it, business leaders had to ensure that compliance and readiness across multiple areas were captured, analyzed and reported.
This job needed an owner. When it came time to delegate, leaders assessed whether a single department with a clear responsibility across all suppliers for all these areas existed. Unluckily, in most cases it did not. So, management turned to the next best option: procurement.
The function’s leaders, chief procurement officers (CPOs), now had new mandates to meet and quickly sought to apply technology. “Point” solutions, software dedicated to tackling individual use cases, were implemented. Often these tools were standalones. Integrating them with established P2P (purchase-to-pay) and S2P (source-to-pay) software suites, used to manage sourcing and supplier relationships, emerged as a challenge.
Today, swapping between these old and new tools is a slow and painful experience for procurement teams — and all their suppliers. The impact of this digital struggle extends even further, to the greater business. So, how does this stack up, and what can business leaders do about it?
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