Following the Road to a Stronger Business with Procurement
By Costas Xyloyiannis, HICX CEO
With both interpersonal and operational barriers removed, the business can partner with all its suppliers. In this scenario suppliers are happier, and Procurement can deliver its mandates, the benefits of which extend well into the business.
When ESG rose to the top of the board agenda, leader needed to see how compliant and ready their businesses were across multiple areas. To gain this clarity, they sought a department that could capture, analyze and report on supplier information. Ideally, they wanted a single team that had worked with 100% of suppliers across the business – which didn’t exist.
What did exist was Procurement, a function that did worked with all suppliers, albeit in one area: transactions. So, management ended the search and tasked Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) with this added job. To do it, CPOs quickly applied ‘point’ solutions, software that can deal with given use cases. Procurement soon learnt however that plugging these tools into established software (P2P and S2P suites) doesn’t work. The new and old tools simply don’t play well together and today, swapping between them is slow and painful.
The problem is that the whole supplier network also has a bad user experience (UX), which ultimately compromises the data they give. Leaders peering into the supply chain can’t see what’s happening through all this bad data – and their choices suffer for it.
How then, can management create a clear supply chain view and keep it that way? By making it easier for suppliers to work with their businesses.
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