Procurement continues to remain hot, as more digital technology firms have received phenomenal amounts of funding and partnership opportunities.
With clear evidence the space is gaining even more interest, why does the romance continue to grow stronger for procurement and technology?
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Earlier this year, Felix Plapperer and the Paua Ventures team explained why we fell in love with Procurement. We reflected on significant financing rounds, strategic relevance and clear ROI for companies to make BIG savings, including untapped potential for startups as new offerings continue to disrupt the traditional procurement space with digital options and solutions.
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Why are we still in love with Procurement?
#ProcureTech community – There are many aspiring entrepreneurs and industry professionals appearing, providing digital solutions for procurement departments’ problems. It is also an attractive and lucrative space, with many impressive funding rounds, backings and acquisitions, such as Microsoft’s acquisition of Suplari, a spend intelligence cloud platform.
In addition, this landscape continues to grow as technology helps optimise complex systems within supply chain, sustainability, vendor management.
Data is bubbling in the Procuretech landscape, with some key players to continue looking out for:
- Intelligent automation – A study by McKinsey revealed some employees have reported spending 60% of their time on manual tasks that a robot could complete. IA executes single tasks faster and better than humans.
- Predictive analytics – this technology draws insight from internal and external data to inform humans and/or machine decisions around procurement related questions, e.g. what to purchase from whom, when, who much should be spent?
- Risk, sustainability and collaboration along the supply chain – solid partnerships between customers and vendors have helped tackle tough issues. Some vendors have helped procurement teams find the right suppliers, monitor supply chain risk and reduce savings where possible by using their digital technologies. Dave Ingram, CPO at Unilever, has spoken about how automation tools can be a big value adding buyer tool.
- Category specific, vertical marketplaces – high complexity and multi-stakeholder buying processes have required the help of platforms delivering value-based workflow tools and data intelligence
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You may be wondering if tech will soon take over … Don’t worry, humans have not been forgotten!
The world continues to get busier than ever due to our constant exposure to online activity, which is why investing in such technologies can help us save more time to focus on strategic areas, thus securing our love and excitement for the future of Procurement and what continues to be discovered, as more areas, vendors and options emerge for us to use.
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