Continuing our series of procurement and supply chain related predictions for next year, we have gathered a variety of predictions from leading vendors in the procurement and supply chain space, and will add our own sprinkling of endorsement from analyst Magnus Bergfors in our own roundup piece to follow.
Today let’s hear what Portugal-based global eSourcing and eProcurement cloud-based solutions and eMarketplace provider, VORTAL, has to say.
Addressing middle spend
Buying organisations have so far been focusing mostly on the automation of strategic spend and smaller purchases of pre-specified goods or services with pre-negotiated prices.
In 2020 organisations will start to address the ‘middle spend’ more, by this we mean spend that is not quite strategic enough to be considered ‘high end’ but not totally transactional enough to be considered ‘low end’ – spend that is not strategic enough, nor simple enough, to convert into transactional buying. This can represent a very significant number of transactions and total value, but is typically left to internal customers to handle. We believe this is about to change – and it can be addressed using the same technology used in Strategic Sourcing and Transactional Buying, achieving a collaborative environment and lighter processes and workflows.
Data is becoming more intelligent
Open Data will become more prevalent; initiatives all over the world combined with the technologies, while not entirely new, will appear in affordable packages and set the path to develop algorithms that can assist buyers in decision-making process and market consultation. Buying organisations have not really taken full advantage of the possibilities of data – why is that? We believe it is the distillation of various data sources and the technical knowledge needed to build the appropriate solutions that is lacking in buying organisations. But these tools do exist and can bring endless opportunities.
More outsourcing of Supplier Research
In order to address indirect spending, it is essential to look for suppliers in a varied combination of products/services and geographies. Outsourcing this mission is becoming more commonplace and will continue to be the case in 2020. Supplier scouting, supplier pre-qualification, supplier onboarding and supplier community building and engagement can be a time-consuming and frustrating task, especially as numbers of suppliers in the supply chain grow. Outsourcing this mission is already growing and is set to do so further, especially as supplier community engagement has been proven as an efficient way to address indirect spend.
Thanks to VORTAL – and look out for more solution provider predictions over the next few days. It will make interesting writing for the end of 2020 to see which were most accurate!
Please note that the order of vendor predictions in this series is based entirely on the order in which they dropped onto our digital doorstep, nothing more.
