Digital Procurement

A current area I am looking at closely.   An area to also make things precise, smart, and  predicatively alert.  Strategic considerations also make much sense,

Digital procurement: For lasting value, go broad and deep   To get the most from procurement digitization, leaders must raise their ambitions along with their skills.  In McKinsey  By Amine Abidi, Fabio Russo, Marc Sommerer, and Alexander Streif

Procurement digitization seems to be on every CPO’s agenda nowadays. But too many CPOs tell us of frustration at digitization projects that take too long, cost too much, and produce results that are too slow and meager.

Some organizations discover that their IT capabilities aren’t mature enough to implement certain digital solutions. Others finish implementing new tools only to find that users simply fail to adopt them, or that scaling up across the whole enterprise takes too much time and effort. But when prompted to examine why digitization has fallen short, many CPOs point to three central factors.

First, amid the initial rush to pilot proposed solutions, no one may ever have completely defined what digitization’s scope should be. Second, digitization may have been driven more by what technology could do than by the real value it could create. Third, procurement may have focused mainly on solving its internal challenges, rather than on what the company as a whole needs.

In our experience, these three problems share the same root cause: starting too small, usually by looking for the right off-the-shelf solutions for single pain points. The truth is that we have found only one way to realize the full potential of digitized procurement: through a user-oriented, end-to-end transformation of the entire source-to-pay (S2P) process, so that the users involved in procurement can operate in a fully digital environment. That goal translates into a single focus for procurement digitization: the user experience. .... "