A New Year of Procurement Events Is Almost Upon Us. Time to Get Ready for the Next Round of …

Bullshit. (Cafe Press wants to sell you a cap. We have no affiliation, but we like this cap in particular.)

SI has already logged over 50 Sourcing and Procurement events for 2020, and it hasn’t even tried to list them all! There is not that much new stuff to talk about every year (and, to be honest, it would be difficult in some years to fill just one 3-4 day event with all new material), so you know what that means. Either:

  1. Replay the skipping record. (The Bird is the Word, after all!)
  2. Resuscitate some long dead hype (which is probably a reality after a decade or two, but old news just the same).
  3. Talk about some “future” development that is so far off in the future that it’s totally useless to anyone who is attending the event.

In particular, get ready for a year of:

  • Community Themes: we know community intelligence is incredibly useful across S2P (market price intelligence, supplier performance, best practices, group buying, etc. etc. etc.), but we need more practical implementations today
  • Automation: after all, two decades old technology will likely get confused with AI if there are enough embedded rules, right?
  • Procurement 4.0: we only started the 3.0 journey about 3 years ago with the appearance of the first S2P suites … it will likely be at least 5 more years before we see the full realization of Procurement 3.0, and before anything appears with the first hints of 4.0 functionality (and there’s no way your C-Suite is waiting 5 years for a return on investment)

And now you know why the doctor doesn’t go to many events. As for you, the best events are, to be honest, typically vendor events that have multiple streams with educational material (from peers) appropriate to where you are in your Sourcing and Procurement Journey. There will be one or two decent events each year where a lot of the content will be relevant, new content, based on where we are now, but a lot will be the same old same old. So choose your events with care, unless you like the broken record (and still think The Bird is the Word!)