SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ten years ago, procurement was viewed largely as a backroom function. Today, it is a strategic capability that companies leverage to fuel competitive advantage and growth. What will procurement look like in another decade? To find out, Ariba, Inc. (Nasdaq: ARBA), the leading provider of collaborative business commerce solutions, has opened a dialog with the world’s top procurement executives and practitioners. The project, called Vision 2020, aims to help shape the future of procurement through an online forum (www.futureofprocurement.com) in which leading thinkers can share their insights on an ongoing basis.
“Procurement has undergone a significant transformation over the last ten years, but more change is in store,” said Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing Officer, Ariba. “As companies move to gain competitive advantage, procurement executives are increasingly leveraging new business models that allow them to improve productivity and profits and deliver their organizations to new worlds of excellence.”
So what do these executives think the future holds?
- Everything will be Automated. Procure-to-pay (P2P), sourcing, contract management and other automation engines will be integrated up and down supply chains, fully adopted, and operating flawlessly.
- Information Will Be Synthesized. Ready access to accurate, timely, structured data on spending, risk and performance will create unprecedented abilities to integrate information in support of sourcing decisions and performance management.
- Virtual Will Replace Physical. Forget jumping on planes and sitting at conference tables. Smart phones, tablets, embedded chips, and not-yet-imagined devices—will create a massively virtual work environment for procurement and suppliers.
- Data Will Become Predictive. Procurement has spent the last decade looking backward in time—at money spent last year, supplier performance in the past week, month or quarter. The coming decade will bring information and models that look forward.
- Prices Will Become Transparent. Market pricing for goods and services will become so transparent—due to e-sourcing, cloud sourcing, outsourcing, and procurement's intrepid scrutiny into categories still cloaked in pricing mystery—that negotiation will become a lost art form.
- Spend Management Will Disappear. Companies will still care about managing their spending, they just won't have large, discrete, enterprise-level organizations dedicated to doing it.
- Outsourcing Will Explode. Many current procurement and sourcing activities—the ones that do not get redistributed to internal end users of goods and services—will be outsourced.
- Sourcing Geeks Will Vanish. While valued highly in today's marketplace, people who excel at sourcing processes or at being power users of procurement and sourcing automation technologies will find themselves working for third-party services firms—or not at all.
- Attention Will Turn Outward. The last 10-15 years have seen intense inward focus by procurement. In the coming ten years, the emerging supply management network will turn its attention outward to end-customers, suppliers, and the innovation that ties them together.
- Price Will Give Way to Value. There is optimism that procurement is going to crack the code on business-value segmentation and measurement in the coming ten years.
“From our initial dialog, it is clear that procurement executives think procurement in 2020 will be a loose network—versus a tight function—of supplier-facing professionals embedded into business lines and processes wherever needed and constantly moving and reinventing their roles as business conditions shift,” Minahan concluded.
For additional predictions, or to join the conversation, visit: www.futureofprocurement.com
About Ariba, Inc.
Ariba, Inc. is the leading provider of
collaborative business commerce solutions. Ariba combines
industry-leading technology with the world's largest web-based trading
community to help companies discover, connect and collaborate with a
global network of partners – all in a cloud-based environment. Using the
Ariba® Commerce Cloud, businesses of all sizes can buy, sell
and manage cash more efficiently and effectively. Over 340,000 companies
around the globe use the Ariba Commerce Cloud to simplify
inter-enterprise commerce and enhance results. Why not join them? To get
on the path to Better Commerce visit: www.ariba.com/commercecloud/
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