Dr Sanjay Goyal, Vice President – Supply Chain Management, Lite Bite Foods Pvt. Ltd
It’s no longer business as usual for procurement and supply chain. The scale and speed of transformation require progressive thought leadership to proactively develop a blueprint enabling the organisations to convert this disruption into an opportunity for competitive advantage and growth. Today’s leading procurement organisations recognize that technology and automation will continue to improve all aspects of the procurement operating model, driving efficiencies and effectiveness.
As leaders in the field of procurement and supply chain, CPOs must identify the core values within an organisation that can be disrupted by emerging technologies. CPOs can be game changers for their organisations by shifting gears towards interconnected global supply chains through the use of robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and analytics from traditional analogue methods.
Digital adoption is fairly daunting for some organisations, but with good strategy and clear vision, it can be an easy and fairly seamless transition. According to Boston Consulting Group (BCG), digital transformation helps organisations with 5-10% cost savings and 30-50% increase in efficiencies across the spectrum of business.
The digital procurement platform will enable modernization through:
- Extreme Automation
- Adaptive Integration
- Predictive AI everywhere
- Analytics and data visualization
- Blockchain
In the procurement functions of the future, intelligent use of technology in the end-to-end procurement cycle will enable organisations to enrich discussions and negotiations, leading to an outcome-based procurement landscape.
Intelligent insights and analytics will help in creating resilient and responsive supply chains and move the needle towards value creation. We will have to raise the bar from transactional purchasing to transformational procurement, and technology will be the biggest enabler, bringing rich analytics to play a very critical role in the fundamental functions around:
- Strategic Sourcing
- Spend Management
- Risk Mitigation
- Procure to Pay
- Demand Planning, forecasting and inventory management
As we move into the new world order, business and industry will expect more agile and lean supply chains, focusing speed to market and hence, cognitive and predictive technology will become a great enabler to build a robust supply chain. While there will be extreme pressure on margin expansion, procurement of the future will also play a critical role in enhancing the top line and be at the forefront of growth
Dr Sanjay Goyal,
Vice President – Supply Chain Management, Lite Bite Foods Pvt. Ltd