A Smarter Procurement Through Digitalization

By CIOReview | Wednesday, August 29, 2018

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In today’s globalized world, digital-centric challenges in the procurement processes are quite evident whether it’s in the form of value generation with the use of big data or efficiency improvement through the application of advanced analytics. The overwhelming challenges and pressure to keep up with the pace of the industry has made digitization a necessity for procurement organizations. The digital disruption wave has led to the transformational shift in procurement from the primary reliance on transactional data towards the real-time business intelligence with external data integration.

Digital networks allow organizations to foster collaboration, spur innovation, and drive much of the strategic value that fuels growth by linking together both buyers and suppliers in real time. Digitization of procurement processes yields several benefits such as supporting daily business and administrative tasks as well as the complex decision-making processes. Data accessibility is the key for procurement organizations to adapt digitalization entirely as the ability to capture and use such vast data is foundational. Obtaining and extracting information from transactional data like PO line-item data, contract data, delivery time, and returns from suppliers for insights into internal data and coupling it with the external data like the market intelligence, category expertise, and industry benchmarks will help the organizations gather and analyze more real-time data to drive more accurate, smarter decisions.

Data accessibility needs advanced real-time analytics to help the managers use procurement data (both internal and external) to deliver better insights for influencing vital strategic decisions. Companies can also empower their employees with consumer-grade user experience to put the proper procurement strategy in place for tapping into the real benefits of digitalization and increase end-user productivity.