Executive Summary
Procurement technology—largely divided into Source-to-Contract and Procure-to-Pay—has become a de facto platform for companies' purchase teams to manage their procurement of goods and services, suppliers, and budgets. Procurement technology today offers extensive integration, visibility, and controls to the enterprise, helping purchasing executives operate more efficiently while saving from such economies. But it isn't stopping here.
“The Future of Procurement Technology” envisions tomorrow's procurement offices, trends in procurement technology evolution, and how they will impact a company's fortunes. From a multimodular set of tools that drive the markets today, the procurement ecosystem is moving to a unified Source-to-Settle platform for tomorrow.
At GEP, we consider FIVE key drivers that propel Procurement Technology into tomorrow:
- Procurement-as-a-Platform: The entire procurement process is driven from a platform where every user has access to all features and processes without having to manage multiple silo modules
- Native mobility: The entire procurement platform will be conceived, designed and operated as mobile. The platform will be backward compatible with the web and not other way round
- Built-in social collaboration: Our view is that tomorrow’s procurement technology will include social intelligence that will bring suppliers and buyers closer, with higher efficiency and transparency
- Creative Features: Tomorrow’s procurement platform will have creative features such as sourcing workbench, supplier enabled innovation, knowledge management, market intelligence among other things
- Intuitive intelligence: The complex analytics and dashboards of today will become intuitive alert-and-report mechanisms for tomorrow, proactively delivering actionable information to users using big data and newly developed analytical Tools