Anyone who has worked in procurement for more than a year or two has probably found themselves in a situation where they suspect that they are overpaying on a supplier contract. How can you be sure and what should you do if you uncover overpayment? In some cases overpayment issues are based on billing errors, and in other cases, agreed upon contract terms are not being adhered to by suppliers. Either way, third-party compliance audits can be essential.
Ben Evans is the President at Auditech Solutions, a company that provides accounts payable and contract compliance audits to help companies determine whether they are overpaying on invoices. He points out that not only may audits need to be done when a company suspects something is wrong with a set of invoices, but that it may be advantageous to include an audit clause in certain contracts.
In this conversation, Ben and host Philip Ideson:
Procurement has been working to digitally transform spend and supplier related processes for years, but even the companies that have succeeded can always do more. Each procurement process connects to other enterprise processes, functions, and systems. The more integrated all of those components are, the better positioned the company is to respond to disruption and seize competitive advantage.
In this conversation, Tony Harris, Global Vice President, Global Business Network Solutions at SAP, and host Philip Ideson discuss what today's integrated business networks actually are and what use cases he has seen. In addition to sharing his detailed thoughts about data models, spot buying, and business networks, Tony also shares some tips for procurement leaders that want to start on their own business network design and implementation journey.
For example:
Since Philip Ideson started Art of Procurement almost six years ago, a broad range of executives, practitioners, academics, and more have shared over 3.2 Million words of wisdom through our podcasts, webinars, virtual events, and long-form writing. Regardless of their focus or point of view, each person shared our singular goal of helping forward-thinking leaders change the game for their company by elevating procurement’s impact.
In this week’s episode, Philip Ideson delivers a solo show update on the year to date, looking at everything we’ve all been through and how it has changed our lives, our work, and our perspective on the future.
Listen in to hear his opinion on:
Procurement professionals are always plagued by the fact that no one seems to understand what we do. While this is often blamed on language barriers and the fact that procurement is always evolving, at the end of the day it comes down to one harsh reality - procurement does not have a well-established, recognisable brand.
Steve Wills is the Founder and Managing Director of Procurement Central, a specialist training provider based in the UK. Steve formerly served as the Procurement Advisor to the 2012 London Olympic Games’ organizing committee. He has extensive business experience with blue chip organizations and has worked with leaders in industry and commerce as a CPO to transform complex procurement functions.
In this conversation, Steve and Host Philip Ideson discuss procurement’s brand and how function is positioned strategically. This is a topic that is central to procurement executives and leaders, and will only become more so as procurement pushes to change how they are perceived internally and externally.
Steve provides the following thoughts and examples to make the case that procurement should purposefully invest in their brand:
In this week’s episode, which is based on an Art of Procurement Mastermind Community Category Briefing, Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner ask J. Grant Caplan, President of Procurigence, Inc. and Chairperson of the GBTA Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, detailed questions about the current state of the meetings and events to better understand the conditions companies are dealing with and possible steps they can take to restart their meetings programs without incurring unnecessary risk.
He shared his knowledge and experience regarding:
Every time someone interacts with procurement’s people, processes, or technology, it influences what that person thinks of procurement. This perception determines how early procurement is brought into a sourcing decision, if they are approached about a new business need, and how willingly stakeholders participate in procurement-led projects.
Procurement may not often focus significant resources on the ‘intake-to-procure’ process, but distributed buyers are likely to feel different. By meeting buyer needs through an improved intake-to-procure experience, procurement has an opportunity to recast their internal image and finally realize the level of business engagement they have always sought.
In this podcast, which is based on an AOP Live session, Liem Hua, Michael Denari, and Rujul Zaparde discuss
“A lot of procurement managers think, ‘I have my process. It will be digitized, but I'm still in control of the process and it will remain with procurement.’ But digitalization is one step further where you really question everything.”
Procurement has been focused on digital transformation for so long that we accept the change it will have on our work and team structures. That said, none of us is certain how emerging technologies such as RPA and AI will be incorporated into existing platforms, where we should start the process of automating procurement tasks, and what the future implications will be. To find out, akirolabs worked with Cognitive Corporate Consulting to apply the scientific method to different types of procurement tasks to capture the efficiency impact of automation.
Christoph Flöthmann is one of four co-founders at akirolabs, a new and growing procurement collaboration tool focused on helping procurement professionals develop and execute more impactful supply and category strategies. His experience includes time at organizations such as Bayer, The World Bank, DB Schenker, and KPMG.
In this episode, Christoph joins Host Philip Ideson to discuss:
When the first edition of Managing Indirect Spend was published, Joe Payne and Bill Dorn often spoke to customers about what strategic sourcing was and what value it could bring to their organization. 10 years later, much has changed, but a lot has remained the same. Procurement is now much better known and recognized as a valuable corporate function, and yet we are still facing many of the same challenges we were back then.
Authors Joe Payne, Bill Dorn, Dave Pastore, and Jenn Ulrich all work for Corcentric, where they spend their time working with procurement teams to help them transform and mature. Many of their real life experiences are included in the book, allowing procurement leaders to learn from the journeys of others.
In this conversation, the authors speak with Host Philip Ideson about:
Between corporate efforts to digitize operations and an increasingly remote workforce, telecom and technology spend is now more important than ever. Changes to the ownership or structure of a business often lead to opportunities to optimize this category - but only if procurement has it actively under management and knows what to be on the lookout for.
Jeff Poirior is the President & COO of Valicom. He joined us for a recent AOP Live session focused on the unique nuances and opportunities contained in telecom spend. This category requires a specific approach, because - despite the size of the category - very few procurement organizations have a dedicated telecom specialist. This makes it a real challenge to navigate huge data sets and detailed requirements without inflating costs or impacting connectivity and service quality.
In this AOP Live-based session, Jeff Poirior answers live audience questions about:
We recently partnered with UNA to bring their The Sourcing Hero podcast into the Art of Procurement stable.
The Sourcing Hero is a weekly 20-30 minute podcast that captures the stories of people who are rising up and beating the odds to create exceptional value within procurement, and is hosted by Art of Procurement General Manager, Kelly Barner.
Today marks the launch of Season 2 of the podcast, and the first of our collaboration with UNA, and we’re going to run the episode in full in the AOP feed.
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Learning to Recognize Heroes feat. Dr. Dred Scott and Anthony Clervi
Over the last year, most of us have expanded our concept of what it means to be a hero. From teachers to truck drivers, and grocery store workers to hospital staff, we have plenty of community members to look up to. We’ve also learned that anyone, anywhere, in any role has the opportunity to be a hero to the people around them every day - whether it is in their job description or not.
In this very special episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes Dr. Dred Scott, President of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Kansas City, and Anthony Clervi, Principal at Una, to talk about the importance of heroism in all its forms. The Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City has been helping at-risk youth for over 100 years. While much has changed during that time, heroes have always been present - sometimes in the form of the adults working at the club, and other times in the children themselves.
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.
In this episode, Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner provide a series recap and reflect back on the major take-aways from each interview and identify the connecting opportunities that bring them all together into one cohesive vision for data-driven procurement.
As procurement places greater and greater emphasis on building supplier relationships, what impact will that have on the role played by our contracts? Kate Vitasek has been studying the role of contracts in relational procurement for years, and she has seen the contract v. relationship question go wrong many times. She has seen companies tell suppliers that they are in a partnership, only to terminate their contract on 60 days’ notice, and she has seen effective contracts fall into disarray when the buy-side company is acquired by someone else.
As the architect of the Vested business model, she is dedicated to helping companies and their suppliers thrive with the right combination of contracts and relationships. Her latest book is Contracting in the New Economy: Using Relational Contracts to Boost Trust and Collaboration in Strategic Business Relationships, published in May 2021.
In this episode of the podcast, Kate joins Host Philip Ideson to talk about:
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.
In this episode, Kelly Barner and Magnus Bergfors, Global Business Director of Basware, discuss the evolving role of procure-to-pay in helping procurement satisfy business objectives while also improving the internal user and supplier experiences.
The bi-annual Deloitte CPO Report has been a source of insight and information for procurement leaders for years. In the last report, released in 2019, the core topic was mastering complexity. Little did Deloitte - or the participating CPOs - know, the whole world was about to get a crash course in mastering complexity.
Ryan Flynn is a Principal at Deloitte Consulting and one of the co-authors of the 2021 CPO Report: Agility serves as the solution to an increasingly complex procurement landscape. Their research and the resulting report focus on top CPO priorities, talent, risk and suppliers management, and what allows procurement leaders to be “agility masters” in today’s complex business landscape.
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.
In this episode, Kelly Barner and Pierre-Francois Thaler, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of EcoVadis, discuss the different scopes, organizational models, and ways of tracking, certifying, and reporting on investments in sustainability.
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:
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 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:
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.
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.
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 Sievo Co-Founder and CEO Sammeli Sammalkorpi discuss procurement’s expanding mandate from the business and how - with the help of quality data and analytics - they can deliver above and beyond expectations:
Why it has been so difficult up to this point to get a solid grasp on procurement analytics
The evidence suggesting that humans and automation will be working in partnership for a long time
How procurement can manage and benefit from the data ecosystem that surrounds them
At Mastermind LIVE Spring 2021, Art of Procurement had the opportunity to bring together a visionary panel of procurement leaders to discuss the urgency of the present moment and what can and should be done to support corporate growth. The panel included:
Facilitated by Philip Ideson, this discussion-based session was focused on procurement’s sense of urgency as we pursue a growth agenda, the need for supplier collaboration and mutually beneficial third-party relationships, and the strategies and technology that will empower procurement to scale. While we heard some reflection on the challenges of the past year, most of the discussion was forward looking, taking procurement’s capabilities today and building on them.
In this episode, which was recorded live at Mastermind LIVE Spring, Philip asked the panelists about:
Procurement’s organizational structure is as important as the processes and technology they use. Their operational model has to position them to deliver what the company needs most - requirements that may not remain fixed. When the business needs something different from procurement, their structure will have to evolve as well.
Robert Bonnar is currently the Global Procurement Director at SHV Energy, but he has worked in procurement in a number of industries. As he puts it, “I did cars, drugs, booze, and now energy.” But even that colorful description doesn't capture the breadth of his experience. He has also focused in a number of procurement disciplines, including direct and indirect procurement and supplier-enabled innovation.
In this conversation, Robert speaks with Host Philip Ideson about:
According to the Procurement 2021 Pulse Check by WNS Denali and ProcureCon Europe, only 9% of CPOs are satisfied with the current level of stakeholder alignment in their organization.
9%. In 2021.
I was so surprised by that number that I decided to dedicate this episode of the podcast to it.
In this podcast, we’ll explore the differences between what the alignment journey and the corresponding operating model changes mean for small, mid-sized, and larger companies, as well as the solutions to be considered. As you listen, think about how aligned YOUR procurement function is with the business and what you might do to address it.
In today’s fast-paced world, imagery is just as important for communicating meaning as the words we use. That is why the Mastermind LIVE Spring logo includes a clock with its hands set at 5 minutes until midnight.
This is a moment for urgency - but not panic. The business world needs leaders, and the AOP team firmly believes that those leaders are currently in the ranks of the procurement profession. Stepping up to lead is a serious decision, not one to be taken lightly. That is why we have built a very purposeful agenda for our spring event, one that will inspire you, help you feel the strength of the community, and prepare to take action.
In this special podcast episode, Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner and joined by Gravitas Detroit President and Founder Jan Griffiths, who will be the MC for Mastermind LIVE Spring on April 13th and 14th from 10am - 1pm ET.
Listen in and you will hear: