Procurement leaders today are faced with new, increasingly complex challenges.
Our attenuated global supply chains are fastmoving, highly interdependent and sensitive to shock. And the number of data points in most supply chains, and hence the raw amount of information generated, has increased many fold over the last several years. That this is a good thing does not necessarily follow.
Our attenuated global supply chains are fastmoving, highly interdependent and sensitive to shock. And the number of data points in most supply chains, and hence the raw amount of information generated, has increased many fold over the last several years. That this is a good thing does not necessarily follow.
With procurement's rising profile in many leading global enterprises, chief procurement officers (CPOs) and other senior procurement leaders have more balls in the air than ever. Their expanded portfolio includes financial performance, supporting enterprise growth and expansion plans, managing attenuated supply chains and global supplier relationships, and hedging risk to name but a few.
The ability to improve performance in any one of these areas requires clear visibility into performance. This is far easier said than done – true visibility into performance requires numerous metrics and components, all of which need baselines, benchmarks and actual transactional or operational data.
A lot of this information is buried in ERP data silos or expansive reports (aka data dumps). As such, it is neither useful nor actionable. And this data-induced paralysis perpetuates reactive “firefighting” rather than proactive performance management.