Can Procurement See Past The End Of Its Nose?
Procurement must learn to think the unthinkable, predict the world weather forecast and look further than the end of it’s own nose when it comes to technology in order to remain relevant!
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The Procurious London Roundtable was sponsored by Basware.
Procurement 4.0, Cognitive Procurement and Thinking the Unthinkable were among the hot topics canvassed at last week’s inaugural meeting of the Procurious London Roundtable.
Packed with leading-edge speakers, a ready supply of valuable expertise, peer-led market intelligence, and networking, CPOs were unanimous that a reimagined Procurement must be the business’ source of market intelligence on these issues – if it is to secure and maintain a “seat at the table”.
Speakers addressed everything from global politics to AI and making it ito the C-Suite. If you’re intrigued to hear what they had to say, look no further; we’ve managed to pack the finer points into one, handy article!
Learning To Talk Across The Lily-Pads
Nik Gowing, BBC Broadcaster, Visiting Professor at King’s College and Big Ideas Summit 2016 Speaker, joined the roundtable to provide an update on Thinking The Unthinkable. Unthinkables are critical events that are not being considered or prepared for by organisations or by our governments around the world.
From Brexit to the election of President Trump; from Putin’s invasion of Crimea to upcoming European elections, unthinkables have been occurring frequently over the last few years and they’re not letting up! In fact, if anything, unthinkable events are happening more rapidly than ever before.
Nik firmly believes that, in a world of social-media, time-scales for unthinkables which were once 20 years could now be 20 months, 20 days or as little as 20 minutes!
Take the infamous United Airlines (UA) flight as an example. Last month, a passenger was violently dragged off a plane, the incident was filmed and then instantly shared around the globe. In a matter of minutes, UA’s reputation was destroyed and has perhaps threatened the way airlines will operate in the future.
Nic’s advice for preparing for the future? Instead of destroying mavericks within our organisations, we need to turn them into visionaries and harness a culture where they can thrive. Nic has likened the current situation to frogs on lily pads – everyone is sitting in the same pond but not talking to one another – we need to find a way to come together and talk.
Grab An Umbrella And Face The Future
Justin Crump, CEO Sibylline, shared Nic’s concerns for the future and expressed his desire for organisations to address the current void of awareness about, and study of, the corporate security intelligence environment.
An intelligence-led approach to managing risk and predicting disruptions to your business is absolutely the way to go. It allows you to work out when you might be forced to take risks and when it’s worth taking them!
But how do you go about doing this? It all starts with reading your morning paper with purpose! Justin suggests you ask yourself why you’re reading it and how and why it’s relevant or interesting to you. Consider where your clients work and where your supply-chain is based. If missiles started flying over a particular country, would it be critically damaging to your business?
It’s possible, and preferable, to turn reading the news into a data-collection process by collating information and highlighting the important areas to disseminate to people within your organisation.
If in doubt, implement the ADAM model:
ASSESS – Understand your business and your world and what these interactions mean to you
DECIDE – Derive actions to help mitigate risks and refine into an achievable plan
ACT – Implement planned actions
MONITOR – Use ongoing world risk register outputs to understand what is changing in your world. This will help you predict the world weather forecast and figure out when you’ll be needing an umbrella!
Looking Further Than The End of Your Nose
Eric Wilson, head of Basware‘s Purchase-to-Pay business for the Americas and APAC, discussed the critical actions CPOs can take today in order to safeguard against technology obsolescence. When 90 per cent of technology is about to become irrelevant can procurement implement a watertight process that evolves with industry trends?
Eric asked our roundtable attendees to consider the following scenario:
A new CPO comes into an organisation and instantly sees that there is a problem with procure-to-pay and maverick spend. They know they can save a whole load of money for the business. They challenge their employees to develop a business case, which a cross functional team evaluates and a score-card of criteria is developed. Whilst this might sound like a totally reasonable approach there is a one major problem. Eric explained that the challenge with this process is that it focuses five inches in front of the CPO’s face; they’ve seen a problem and they’ve fixed it.
Remember Siebel? Not so long ago it was the best CRM system you could possibly use and was responsible for shifting the entire workplace environment into customer relationship management. Anyone who hadn’t bought Siebel already was about to and huge investments were made.
But, almost overnight, it became completely obsolete thanks to arrival of the Cloud. Siebel went bust, many a CMO lost their job and money was wasted, all because no-body looked further ahead.
Eric explained that the next wave of procurement technology is not just about the traditional goals of visibility, control and savings. Harnessing the value of the transactional data running through the system will be key.
Given the way tech is trending, particularly AI, within three years 90 per cent of procurement tech will be obsolete. People will not raise requisitions – robots will! And procurement must prepare for that.
What’s Holding Up Cognitive?
Pascal d’Arc, former GM of Cognitive Scale, talked us through the journey to cognitive and what some of the practical applications are in today’s world. Is cognitive really all the fuss it’s hyped up to be?
Judging by some of the fascinating examples Pascal gave us, absolutely! One such example was a cognitive system that had been given the ability to experiment with building a drone. The resulting machine had a frame shape which was modelled on the pelvis of a flying squirrel, representing something very close to nature.
But why is the progress of advancing and using cognitive tech so slow, what’s holding us back in procurement? According to Pascal it comes down to a number of things:
- The technology so far has been very experimental. There has been a sense of frustration towards IBM but they are still experimenting
- Expectations are huge. We are often missing the low hanging fruit when it comes to deciding what to tackle
- Procurement isn’t a key investment area…yet! Fintech and healthcare are the current priorities
Aiming For The C-Suite
Damian Walsh, Partner at Heidrick & Struggles, gave our CPOs some top tips on what it takes to get to the very top. How do you successfully move on to a bigger CPO role, step up to CEO or take on a non-executive role.
- Whatever it is you want to do, tailor your approach accordingly
- Be clear about what you want and position yourself for it
- Be clear about what you have to offer – think in terms of business solutions. There is no such thing as a “transport”company any more
- Get your CV in order and make sure it’s accurate- so many people don’t!
- Manage the search firms – be selective and understanding and clear about what you’re looking for
- Work on your personal brand- thought leadership, speaking engagements etc.
- Work your business and personal networks
The Procurious London Roundtable was sponsored by Basware.
If you’d like to secure your seat for our second London Roundtable on 11th October 2017, please register your interest with Olga via [email protected].
