Evolving technology trends in Procurement - Part 1
Procurement practitioners have been front runners in adopting changing technology for past few years. Tactical savings in time and hence the cost of acquisition was definitely a leading intent behind this adoption. In the process, practitioners have realized that adapting to newer technology does provide huge information visibility and free up a lot of their operational time to think on much critical issues like source selection, supplier rationalization, low cost country sourcing etc. In the upcoming posts I will focus on some of these evolving technological changes and their impact.
Today let’s confer around evolving trends in Sourcing.
Leading technology packages in procurement domain like SAP SRM, Ariba, Oracle iProc, Maximo etc. have been able to bring about a major change in business processes.
Supplier Registration and enablement – Supplier’s can now access any customer and register on their website to show their interest in becoming a supplier. This not only enhances the speed of the registration process but also opens up huge opportunity for customers to tap much wider supplier network without any incremental costs. The technology solutions now come equipped with segregation facilities to sort suppliers based on product categories and initiating automated approval workflows for enabling these suppliers. Of course the cost of supplier evaluation will have to be born as that is more of a technical process applicable to specific industry vertical.
RFx and Auctioning process – Electronic RFx document submission and receiving an electronic response from suppliers’ has been a norm for quite some time for their obvious advantages. This process is getting sophisticated with digital signatures that ensure document safety, project management interface and document storage facilities offered by various product companies. The whole solution not only helps in managing a particular event but also ensures that knowledge captured is stored for any future reference.
In auctioning, hosted v/s owned auction engine models still fight it out tooth and nail though there is a visibly increasing trend towards owning a reverse auction tool to have advantages of increased flexibility and better value proposition. Both RFx as well as Reverse auctions are very important tools in supplier discovery process today.
At the end of RFx or Live auction, creating a local or ERP contract / Purchase order at a click of button is, again, another important functionality that most of the packages offer.
While I completely understand that the above description is an extremely high level overview of the package functionalities in sourcing domain, through my posts going further, I will attempt to deep dive in some of these in order to bring more clarity.
Till then, happy reading. Your comments would be highly appreciated and I will try to fine tune course of this blog to accommodate some of those comments.
Bye till we connect again,
Regards,
Atul Chorbele
