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In Procurement, as in many verticals, UX is a critical yet often overlooked component. Despite the growing roster of technology tools in the field, Procurement still suffers from cumbersome processes. Seemingly simple, common tasks like purchase orders may take dozens of steps to complete, spread out across numerous siloed stakeholders. Too many tasks and processes require change management. Or worse: user training!
A secondary issue is one that enterprises of all kinds keep bumping into: There are so many apps for so many things, and it’s hard to use them all effectively.
So much of it boils down to a UX problem. If your processes are brittle or broken; if there are too many steps; if nobody knows what the processes are or even where to find them; if it’s easier to skip your processes and work around them. Those are all reasons users will do anything but follow your processes.
How do you improve the process experience and increase process adoption? Try procurement orchestration. It’s essentially a Procurement-specific version of process orchestration that’s more focused on the parts of pieces of the procurement process. (A process orchestration platform like Tonkean, which can add data sources from essentially any enterprise app, can already do procurement orchestration.)
Dig into this newsletter to learn more about what procurement orchestration is—but let’s start with the latest news in the industry.
If you have some insightful news or knowledge about the world of Ops to share, let us know!
The Procurement tech stack continues to grow and evolve. As is often the case, it seems like what’s happening is that for each and every task, item, process, and workflow attached to Procurement, there’s seemingly an app that appears to address it. And of course, there are platforms that claim to provide everything you need in one convenient place.
You can see in Dr. Elouise Epstein’s Modern Procurement Platform Tech Stack spider map just how many players there currently are in the game, and the various areas that they address.
There are small standalone parts of the tech stack in there, like supplier intelligence, supplier relationship management, component scouting, rebate management, and more. There are also groupings that contain a number of vendors, like risk, category solutions, and ESG.
At the center of it all are the platforms these apps roll up to: UX, App Store, Data Foundation, and Intel. Dr. Epstein is most excited about the UX part.
“We are witnessing a critically important innovation happening right now…the Intake/UX/Process Orchestration layer at the top,” wrote Dr. Epstein, Partner at Kearney, in a LinkedIn post. “This has the potential to be the [proverbial] 1 app to rule them all or at least the single smart interface to all the capabilities on the chart.”
Notably, the platforms on the map are set atop Google Bard and ChatGPT, which indicates how much the intelligence of AI underpins what they offer, including Tonkean.
Operations professionals in Procurement need to harness this power of AI by understanding its strengths and limitations and then implementing it strategically with these tools. That’s how to stay ahead of the game in digital transformation.
Tell us about clever solutions, success stories, and yes gift ideas you want your Ops peers to know about for future newsletters.
On this episode of Modern Business Operations, host Sagi Eliyahu is joined by Dawn Tiura, CEO and President at SIG (Sourcing Industry Group), a global association that provides networking opportunities to executives in sourcing, procurement and outsourcing from Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, to talk about Cognitive Procurement.
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