To date, 89% of businesses in the United States have adopted a digital-first enterprise strategy.
And according to Tech Pro Research, 70% of businesses already have a digital transformation strategy in place or are drafting one.
Procurement digital transformation, in particular, promises to increase productivity, reduce operating costs, improve the end-user experience while keeping businesses competitive.
In this blog, we’re going to break down digital transformation, its importance in your procurement strategy, and four areas to focus your digital transformation efforts.
Let’s get right into it.
What is Digital Transformation?
Deloitte defines digital transformation (DX) as:
“…the end-to-end business transformation of an organization, from strategy to operations, from leadership to enterprise-wide culture, enabled by exponential technologies.”
Digital transformation is about harnessing the power of technology and using it to build agile and flexible procurement operations.
Transformation begins by evaluating your current operations and asking questions like, “What technology can we adopt to improve this system/make this process easier/faster/more cost-efficient?”
In a nutshell, procurement digital transformation is simply reimagining how you do business in this digital age.
Why Digital Transformation?
The end goal of procurement digital transformation is to improve life for every entity along the supply chain – vendor (your suppliers), the buyer (your employees), and product end-user (your customers).
With technology now a mainstay in almost every function of business, enterprises are in dire need of solutions that allow them to leverage technology in procurement.
ProcurePort is a fantastic example of how this can be accomplished. Seeing the need for intuitive e-procurement platforms all the way back in 2000, developers came up with digital innovations that revolutionized how sourcing teams did business.
Today, ProcurePort has widened its service offering.
Available cloud-based capabilities include supply chain risk management software, spend analysis software, procure-to-pay software, and reverse auction software at competitive prices.
This all brings us to the key areas of your business that stand to benefit from digital transformation.
4 Important Areas for Digital Transformation
1. Partner Experience
There are three areas to focus on in the partner experience, namely:
- Stakeholder experience: where you can use technology to customize your service offering so that your stakeholders get hyper-personalized service when interacting with you.
- Savings: consider which technologies can assist you in mitigating costs and boosting efficiency
- Classifying stakeholders: most enterprises deal with scores of vendors at any given time. Being able to determine needs and requests and meet each one in a timely fashion is important.
2. Procurement-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Are you a procurement organization wondering how to better your service offering for your clients? Or just a sourcing team eager to simplify procurement for your enterprise?
By harnessing the power of technology and packaging your own offering as procurement-as-a-service, you are essentially allowing digital transformation to take place.
By consolidating your service offering, you make life easier for all involved leading to an improved buying experience.
3. Data Capture and Analytics
Procurement teams rely on data to make informed business decisions that drive the enterprise forward. This cannot be achieved without agile technology that has the ability to capture important metrics.
The ability to sift through enormous quantities of information in order to derive actionable insights will be a top priority.
Empowering employees with the technological resources, skills, and training necessary to interpret analytics will only serve to enhance the company’s overall procurement strategy.
4. Legacy Technology
Progressive procurement digital transformation cannot take place without a careful evaluation of the technology that’s already in place in the organization.
What legacy systems are you using? Are they effective? Do they get the job done? Or do they actually make matters worse?
What do you actually require in order to make the procurement journey easier? Help with spend analysis, RFQ, contract management? Identify the areas that you’re struggling with in order to find solutions that can assist.
Conclusion
Companies must evolve if they want to stay relevant and competitive.
Procurement digital transformation is just one of the many ways this can be done.
If you’re interested in robust procurement solutions that can radically alter and improve your operations contact us today.