Procurement has been swept up in nearly non-stop change for the last two decades, and yet, we continue to talk about the need for transformation? Is this due to their failures or their successes? In Conrad Snover’s opinion, it is a little bit of both.

Conrad Snover is the President of ProcureAbility and he was joined by Betsy Pancik, their Vice President of Customer Success, for a recent AOP Live session. They believe that how procurement is structured can either help them achieve overall business alignment and an improved customer experience, or can slow processes down and hold them back from delivering full value. 

In this AOP Live-based session, Conrad Snover and Betsy Pancik answer live audience questions about:

• What a procurement operating model is and how that aligns with procurement’s organizational structure
• The evolving requirements of procurement talent and how the available skill sets may need to change during and after transformation 
• Which transformational concerns can be addressed - and even advanced - by selecting the right procurement operating model

As digital transformation progresses, corporate leadership teams are increasing their focus on the quality and availability of data. Spend analysis is just one internal data resource in a sea of data ecosystems, but it has the potential to serve as the foundational connection point for all procurement analytics.

For this special series, Art of Procurement partnered with Sievo and Buyers Meeting Point to take a deep dive into procurement data ecosystems. We will explore how procurement leaders can meet their analytical requirements while also exploiting the full cross-functional value of data - data that enables corporate growth and competitive advantage. 

Every two weeks between April and July 2021, Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner will speak with senior level executives at Sievo, riskmethods, Basware, supplier.io, and EcoVadis - companies at the forefront of the procurement data revolution. Listeners can also download the ebook behind the podcast series in the Links section below.

In this episode, Kelly Barner and Neeraj Shah, CEO of supplier.io, discuss the new sense of urgency many companies have around supplier diversity programs and the data management requirements that creates.

• The diversity-specific transformation journey many (especially large) companies have taken and what has changed
• Procurement’s responsibility to the suppliers that are brought into the bid process through supplier diversity outreach
• The role that spend analytics data plays in advancing supplier diversity and tracking progress against states goals, both internally and in publicly-released reports

The book “Profit from Procurement: How to Add 30% to Your Bottom Line by Breaking Down Silos” was recently published by Alex Klein, Simon Whatson, and Jose Oliveira of procurement consultancy Efficio. To mark the official release, they invited AOP Founder and Managing Director Philip Ideson to moderate their virtual book launch. 

In this podcast conversation, the co-authors discuss the key themes of the book which was written to help inspire action and provide a roadmap for readers to increase profitability through the levers of strategic procurement. 

The key themes of the book highlighted and discussed by Philip, Alex, Simon, and Jose are:

• Why challenging times - such as a pandemic or a global recession - represent the best opportunity for procurement to draw attention to their capabilities
• The importance of using the right language when procurement talks to the business, aligning our thoughts with their objectives
• How procurement can address ‘value beyond savings’ while still acknowledging that savings is important

As digital transformation progresses, corporate leadership teams are increasing their focus on the quality and availability of data. Spend analysis is just one internal data resource in a sea of data ecosystems, but it has the potential to serve as the foundational connection point for all procurement analytics.

For this special series, Art of Procurement partnered with Sievo and Buyers Meeting Point to take a deep dive into procurement data ecosystems. We will explore how procurement leaders can meet their analytical requirements while also exploiting the full cross-functional value of data - data that enables corporate growth and competitive advantage. 

Every two weeks between April and July 2021, Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner will speak with senior level executives at Sievo, riskmethods, Basware, supplier.io, and EcoVadis - companies at the forefront of the procurement data revolution. Listeners can also download the ebook behind the podcast series in the Links section below.

In this episode, Philip Ideson and Heiko Schwarz, Founder and CEO of riskmethods discuss the complex web of data, automation, and human skills that are required to proactively monitor and manage risk worldwide from one central location.

• Finding the optimal balance of automation and human ingenuity in the fight against risk
• The two sides of the ‘risk management coin’ that can help procurement better monitor risk and build out enterprise resilience
• The multi-tiered conversations that every corporate leadership team needs to have (and have again) to establish their detailed risk appetite

Marketing has always been a difficult category for procurement to bring under management. In the earliest days, it was placed beyond our scope, and more recently, the lack of alignment with the business around ‘value’ versus savings has created an impasse. As a result, marketing operations spend (including branded merchandise, print, and point of sale) have fallen victim to fragmentation, maverick spending, and underdeveloped category strategies. 

In this episode, which is based on a recent AOP Live session with Phil Schoonmaker, CEO of SupplyLogic, we discuss the current state of the marketing supply chain and how procurement can assess their baseline environment using both quantitative and qualitative data.

• How procurement may have been missing out on the opportunity to have a greater top line impact by defining the marketing spend category too narrowly
• The importance of achieving total price transparency across suppliers for specific product and service categories
• How Phil sees leading procurement organizations giving control back to requestors in the marketing category