Why Procurement needs more Digital competency
You need to understand and be competent in Digital Procurement.
For me, our profession is no longer Procurement.
It is Digital Procurement.
I’ve been posting about the need to understand Procurement Tech for 3 years to advance our profession.
And by Procurement Tech, I mean software that can fundamentally change the way we Procurement Professionals undertake the role.
As my followers have increased and my LinkedIn posts gain more views, I’ve seen the negativity for Procurement Tech insidiously creep out of the woodwork.
It terrifies me because I know for certain that Procurement Professionals adapt and change their mantra from cost-cutting to value-generating, inclusive of revenue generation.
Or they become instinct.
I’ve bet my career on this.
I was on track this year to land at least a Head of Procurement role.
At 28, I took on the role of Head of Supplier Legal and Compliance (in short, this was Head of Contract Management, and after some internal changes, that role title was simplified to Supplier Contracts Lead).
In short, I’m saying I was doing well as a Procurement and Contract Management professional.
My Director in my last role, during our last formal review together before we both left, said to me:
“One thing you’ve done from day one here is to push for a technology-first approach - I’ve really liked that about you”.
That was the most significant feedback I’ve had in my career because that’s my sole belief in managing our suppliers and contracts.
Technology first will make the difference.
I don’t buy into the notion that you need everything in good order, with an end-to-end manual process built out. Procurement and Contract software will do things you cannot even imagine.
And this is why I joined Gatekeeper recently. Gatekeeper is a Vendor and Contract Management Platform that allows you to Restores Visibility, Take Control, and Safeguard Compliance.
Building Procurement and Contract software is a beautiful challenge that I urge many of you to have a go at.
You can always jump back into Procurement. But your knowledge in this space will be an incredible asset to the software company. When you do get back into Procurement, you’ll be better equipped.
I want to give you an insight into how I think about Digital Procurement.
I remember the first time I went on the internet. I must have been 9 or 10. Quite late by millennial standards, but my family didn’t understand computers, let alone the internet, in the 90s.
I was presented with an AOL home page. It had boxes all across the home page with different areas. I struggle to remember them all, but there was one for email, search, news, and perhaps the weather and goodness knows what else.
Why am I telling you this?
Because before I had access to that homepage, I needed to watch the weather on the news. Or I’d listen to it on the radio to find out how wet it was going to be after school and if I was going to get soaked playing football.
The same idea applies to the news.
I could talk to anyone in the world.
And then there was the magic when you typed in neopets.com - what a time to be on the internet.
The internet gave me the power to find what I needed when I wanted it.
Now, staring at my apple watch, I can see last night I got somewhere between 6-7 hours of sleep, my resting heart rate is 55bpm, my VO2 max score is high. Through Squarespace I can see my procurement website is pulling in more organic traffic, and on Udemy, I can see how much money I’m making from my online assets. I can talk with my team or family whenever I need to through Slack, Zoom, and FaceTime.
At will.
No friction.
It just shows me what I need.
So when I took my first procurement role in 2015 and was introduced to a clunky ERP that did “POs, too,” I was flabbergasted. What on earth was this?
The product looked less mature than that early AOL webpage I had first explored 16 years ago.
I then discovered that no contracts were stored electronically - they were all paper files.
There was no process to follow online anywhere. It was in some policy document accessible with 17 clicks on a clunky SharePoint copycat site (yes - not even a real SharePoint).
WTF have I done to myself.
I told them I was done - I quit. This work is ridiculous.
This cannot be how we are working. No joke - I don’t mess around if things aren’t a good fit. This was in Government, and change in Government is prolonged (they are still using this software today).
They gave me projects to drive change. I was happy for a bit.
But I was shocked.
With the sheer capabilities of technology all around us, the tech in Procurement shouldn’t be this bad.
After completing yet another Excel spreadsheet, I left for pastures green, and the story was the same everywhere.
I would talk to my colleagues and show them other solutions out there. I’d say, hey, this company digitalises all of our contracts. Or this one lets us run RFPs through it so we can move away from these Excel scoring sheets that everyone hates.
I heard the same things time and time again.
No - this does the job. We don’t need that to do the job.
But we do.
The future is here.
We’ve got solutions out there harnessing AI, extrapolating data from huge databases to discover risks or contract clauses that don’t work for us.
We’ve got procurement tech that can auto-score RFQs and RFPs - who needs a person to manage this on Excel. Heck - it will even find all of the suppliers for you.
And my favourite example…Alexa.
“Hey, Alexa, can you buy me a pack of Oreos, please. Make that 2”. They turn up the next day. For some of you in the city, they turn up the same day.
The future is here.
You need to be ahead of the technology curve to understand how you can harness technology in this space. If you don’t, and you think you’re adding value by:
completing another Excel cell entry
managing an RFX
Evaluating an RFX
Sending out POs
Manually entering data
And a million other tasks you’re doing… you’re out of the job. I don’t know when. It could be a few years in some organisations. I bet it’s in the next decade, though.
Be on the right side of the software in this space.