There’s no question that big data and artificial intelligence are transforming business processes, and procurement is no exception. In the past, global sourcing was a costly process that was only effective for businesses with a global presence. Thanks to digitization, it is now available to every business at a fraction of the cost of the conventional approach.
Digital sourcing, for instance, allows even a small procurement team with limited resources to discover and evaluate thousands of new suppliers within seconds, giving them a far greater chance to find higher-quality and lower-cost material sources.
Not only is strategic sourcing much faster with digitization, it also requires much less effort. Cloud-based solutions can be developed with no investment in IT infrastructure, and since evaluating candidates and processing each stage of the funnel is highly automated, sourcing initiatives that used to take months can be completed in weeks. Procurement professionals are unburdened to focus more time on their value-adding core tasks.
Whether you want to drive more competition within your existing supplier base or quickly develop suppliers for a new market segment or geography, digital sourcing has become the proven digital solutions for procurement.
But how can you ensure the anticipated returns from your digital investment?
Digital solutions for procurement
In our experience, to get the full benefit you envision from digital sourcing, it’s important to first align your people so that their individual efforts are all aimed to drive the best collective performance as a unit. If there is underlying misalignment, ambiguity around processes, or inadequate visibility of adherence, there won’t be a solid foundation to realize the full potential of digitization, and it can be impossible to assess the true impact of all your hard work.
Prior, during, and following the implementation, it’s essential to give just as much attention to the human factors as you give to the process and system changes. By engaging your people at the point of execution, you can attain your short- and long-term strategic objectives while realizing a more sustainable return on IT and people investments.
Because of the way Proudfoot enables your people to embrace the change and helps your operation to effectively adapt, digital sourcing can very quickly drive significant reduction in costs, even for already high-performing procurement teams. Starting with just a few pilot materials, we can help you qualify global suppliers for large material fields with many components in a matter of weeks.
We empower your people with an advanced artificial intelligence that can tap into millions of data points collected from sources across the world, leveraging universal language recognition and instant validation of supplier success factors. We empower your organization with all of the capability, speed, and efficiency advantages promised by digital but without sacrificing the analytical quality and flexibility so characteristic of human beings.
Request a Digital Sourcing Impact Analysis
Contact Proudfoot to initiate a digital sourcing impact analysis. We will assess your spend portfolio and identify your best opportunities to capture procurement cost reduction without sacrificing quality, and quantify the time savings and productivity impact for your organization.
