In the next few weeks, the analyst team at Ardent Partners will publish our annual State of Strategic Sourcing benchmark study. This study builds on last year’s research on the topic, and includes the insights and experiences of nearly 250 sourcing and procurement leaders across multiple industries. Commercial opportunities still exist so please reach out to us at sales (at) ardentpartners dotcom if you’re interested in learning more. Here’s a quick summary of the report:

In Section 1, the State of Strategic Sourcing in 2014, we’ll discuss how despite improved economic conditions in the U.S. and abroad, sourcing leaders continue to feel pressured to cut more costs from the sourcing and procurement process, as well as to increase procurement’s overall effectiveness. To do this, we’ll illustrate how sourcing leaders plan to improve their teams’ collaboration with internal stakeholders, like their counterparts in AP/Finance, HR, IT, Legal, and Logistics/Operations, as well as their collaboration with external stakeholders, primarily their suppliers.

We’ll also include an overview of the challenges to implementing these strategies – namely, staff/talent constraints, lack of engagement with line-of-business budget holders and executives, resultant budget constraints, and their lacking technology infrastructure. Finally, we’ll take a look at how sourcing leaders plan to improve their use of technology solutions – both current solutions and future adoptions.

In Section 2, we’ll ask and answer the question “What is strategic sourcing?”, and discuss the evolving definition of strategic sourcing, particularly in the context of globalization, the speed of business change, and recent technology innovations. As a result of these factors, strategic sourcing should continue to evolve towards a process that leverages business process automation and agile, innovative technology solutions. Manual processes are out; automated, repeatable, scalable processes are in.

We’ll also break down the process of strategic sourcing and its main components and discuss what each one is and how they intersect. We’ll also look at collaboration – particularly with internal stakeholders, line-of-business budget holders, and supplies – and the approaches that different sourcing leaders take to do so.

In the next section, we’ll “connect the dots” by addressing the capabilities and technology enablers that drive top sourcing performance. We’ll also perform a Best-in-Class Analysis, where we’ll discuss what Best-in-Class sourcing teams are doing to outperform their competitive set. We’ll also include a series of operational and performance benchmarks so readers can benchmark their organizations others.

We’ll conclude the report with a series of recommendations designed to improve sourcing performance.

We always look forward to publishing our annual strategic sourcing report, and this year is no different. So stay tuned for more from the report as we gear up to publish in the coming weeks.

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