We all know the transformational potential of today’s emerging technologies. But, in most cases, technology alone isn’t enough to unlock that potential. Decades of low-impact digital transformations have demonstrated the importance of strategic change management, contextualization and implementation. If you want to make the most of the digital procurement opportunity, you’ll need to look beyond technology and do these five key things:
1. Evolve your skills and capabilities
Great digital procurement capabilities are intuitive by design, and easy for teams to pick up. But any amount of new tooling or workflow change needs to be supported by digital skills development and training. Your people need to understand how to use new digital tools, as well as what they can do with them. Upskilling should be personalized to show everyone how to shift their personal workflows to accommodate new digital capabilities. Any new training must also clearly show your people why they should be excited about the potential of your new technologies.
Without those elements, adoption will suffer. People will revert to the processes they already know, and the value you’re trying to deliver through digital procurement enablement will fail to materialize.
2. Rebuild and reimagine processes
Today’s powerful technologies present an opportunity to transform how procurement operates. If you want to enable that scale of evolution and realign your operations with the new expectations placed on procurement, you’ll need to reimagine and rebuild some of your processes and rethink your operating model. Digital technologies often fail to deliver their full value for organizations because teams simply drop new tools into various areas of their current processes. Broadly, that might enable them to slightly improve how they do things, but it won’t help them achieve anything truly new. With new stakeholder demands to meet, and diverse new capabilities available to help procurement meet them, now is the time for significant process overhaul.
By reimagining procurement’s potential from the ground up and building the processes required to make it a reality, teams can lay a foundation for continuous, differentiated value creation.
3. Enable tech-first mindset
Embedding new technology into your organization isn’t just a matter of giving everyone access to relevant tools. It demands a digital-first culture where everyone embraces their new capabilities by default, and engages with them together. It takes strong change management, driven by knowledgeable leaders and advocates that can inspire and affect cultural change at scale.
4. Increase capacity and scalability
New capabilities like automation and rapid insight delivery can effectively free up capacity and create the space for procurement experts to deliver value in new ways. But they don’t directly increase your capacity to deliver – or help it scale. In line with your new processes, workflows and goals, teams may find they need to bring in new human experts to augment their new digital capabilities. Outsourced insight resources can deliver that in a highly scalable way, helping teams access the skills and perspectives they need, when they need them.
5. Deliver intelligence in human-centric ways
Change that’s focused on digital tools, new processes and upskilled people must all come together to cut the time it takes to turn data into meaningful actions that create value. That means ensuring high availability of insights at the point of use, contextualizing and tailoring tools for different job roles, and empowering everyone to act on the intelligence they’re served, fast.
