Seasons Greetings & Wishes for Procurement

With the seasonal holiday just days away, many of us are counting down the hours until we clock off and spend time unwinding with loved ones. It’s been some year for sourcing with prices and capacity yoyo-ing, and supply chain disruption a constant.

Spoiler alert: Most procurement professionals expect 2023 to be no different.

While we put the digital binding on our upcoming Voices of Sourcing report (read last year’s here) in which 100+ industry professionals share views on what they need to make next yearsuccessful, we thought we would share the views of some of the Keelvar experts who work with our customers day-in day-out to overcome market challenges on what procurement needs to move forward in 2023.

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David Siedt, Senior Analyst / Pre-Sales Engineer

Dave’s wish for sourcing teams: How much time do you have?  Easy ways of tracking more supplier KPIs, such as on-time delivery and load acceptance percentages, so they can be factored into award decisions. 

A way to strategically source reactive spend with no need to have requesters learn an e-sourcing tool.

The ability to account for varying supplier manufacturing origins on each item with associated varying  and tariffs, RFQ logistics price comparisons to RFPs, sourcing optimization into lower complexity categories…(we stopped Dave there). 

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Glenn Gardner, Regional Sales Director

Glenn’s wish for sourcing teams: Burnout is a major challenge. So, the ability to do more with less work is #1 on my list. New technologies that allow procurement professionals to run more events with less effort, and reduce strain on people, are a must.

#2 on my list is a continued effort to be agile.

A focused ability to react to any market change quickly to get best rates or capacity. It should not take six weeks to run an event.

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Dylan Alperin, Head Of Professional Services

Dylan’s wish for sourcing teams: No more one size fits all P2P solutions that are sub-optimized to fit specific customer needs. 

Empowerment of individual business stakeholders to run fully autonomous requests, so rogue spend finally comes down, yet time to be strategic - to focus on ESG, Risk Management, Supplier Relationship Management, or tackling new categories - goes up. 

Oh, and more real-time data, and more accuracy with it. 

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Jim Greenough, Regional Sales Director

‍Jim wish for sourcing teams: Disruption is no longer a matter of ‘will it happen again’, but when. 

I want to see procurement adopting new strategies and technologies that ensure they are prepared for the next tsunami to hit their supply chain. 

It’s that simple. 

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Alan Holland, Founder & CEO

‍Alan’s wish for sourcing teams: I want to see the range of categories and subcategories of spend that benefit from sourcing optimization increase significantly beyond its historical scope. Automation is the key here.
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I predict Autonomous Sourcing will become a more mainstream approach. 

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Reach out and let us know what’s top of your Christmas list for procurement, or speak with one of our expert team about your sourcing needs for 2023 here.

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