Your Procurement New Year Resolutions

To save you time, the doctor has updated his short-list of the most important.

1. I WILL NOT READ PREDICTION ARTICLES

As the doctor has stated many, many, times, most predictions are old news or remanufactured shoes, as clearly explained in our long series on The Future of Procurement, where we tackled the same predictions you hear year after year after year and explained how some are, sadly, as old as commerce itself. Thus, there is no need to waste your time on them.

2. I WILL IMPLEMENT A BoB PLATFORM (FOUNDATION)

Last year we advised you to implement at least one new BoB Module or System, because, even if your organization is in the Hackett Group top 8%, the doctor can guarantee that there is at least one major Supply Management system or Source to Pay module you are missing (or lacking critical functionality in). In order to do a great job, you need a great system.

But, in addition to a great system, you need a great platform with a centralized data store and back office capability because the best system in the world is useless unless the right people are using it and everyone is working off of the same data and results with the access appropriate for them.

And very few organizations have a shared platform for S2C or P2P activities, and even less for P2P. And while the doctor encourages using BoB platforms as they can generate spectacular results when properly applied, those results need to be realized — which can’t happen unless the right employees can access the data in the applications they need to use. This means everything needs to be connected. This requires a platform.

Moreover, a platform with an open API, an open data store, and the ability to act as a master data store for all entities and transactions in the platform. Anything less is not a platform.

3. I WILL CONTINUE TO IMPROVE AT LEAST ONE TIME CONSUMING TACTICAL PROCESS PER QUARTER

There is absolutely no value in tactical work. This is where you hand over as much as you can to the machine that can do it faster, better, and cheaper than you. You can’t do millions of calculations and comparisons a second — it can. You can’t consolidate data from 20 different sources into a 20 page report in less than a minute — it can. Plus, as per the doctor‘s series on AI in Procurement (Today Part I, Part II; Tomorrow Part I, Part II, Part III; and The Day After Tomorrow) over on Spend Matters Pro and his upcoming series on AI in Sourcing over on Spend Matters Pro [membership required], now that assisted intelligence is widely available, and augmented intelligence is coming, there’s no excuse to do unnecessary tactical work.

Plus, as we clearly indicated last year, what you need to focus on is strategic work. Analyzing the top recommendations that come out of the Cognitive Procurement system to make sure they make sense, that the system didn’t miss anything, and that it works for your organization. And then figuring out if you have the experience and expertise to ignore a system market buy recommendation to go negotiate a better deal with top (incumbent) suppliers because your 20 years of insights gives you an edge that cannot be encoded. Or if the projected results from a market auction with the top 6 suppliers is better than your team would ever do with their complete lack of category experience. Your value is your ability to use your intelligence, not your ability to push paper. Let the dumb machines do that, and do what you were hired for!