Editor’s Note: Ardent Partners is pleased to present the thirteenth installment of our annual CPO Rising benchmark procurement research study, CPO Rising 2018: The Age of Intelligence, and make it available for download (click the link), courtesy of our industry partners. This year’s theme, The Age of Intelligence, follows in the wake of Big Data getting bigger and smart technologies getting smarter. Businesses in general and procurement teams in particular have never had more data and information at their disposal, and more robust ways to refine it and extract more intelligence and value from it. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

The major eras of the modern age — Agricultural, Industrial and Digital — have each been identified as revolutions that broke the continuum of human progress and placed it on a new, higher trajectory. More than simply re-categorizing business’ and society’s winners and losers, these revolutions “changed the game” both completely and forever. While many different factors helped to shape and define the eras, each shared common inputs (innovative ideas and new technology) that resulted in a common output (remarkable advances in productivity). Each era was also a direct byproduct of the one that preceded it – for example, the cycles of innovation and the advances in production prowess of the Industrial Revolution ultimately led to computers, software, and the internet as part of the Digital Revolution. Due to the rise of business process automation tools, cloud-based applications, mobile solutions, connected devices, and Big Data permeating the modern business environment, more data is being created each year than ever before. The result is a world that has become increasingly data-driven, and businesses around the globe have an extraordinary opportunity to capitalize on it.

In 2018, businesses and consumers are now fully-engulfed by technology and the data it both creates and captures. The same holds true for procurement departments across the globe that continue to rise in both prominence and impact within their enterprises. This data has the potential to become the next major force and catalyst for the procurement industry. In fact, over the next few years, Ardent Partners predicts that a new type of intelligence will emerge from this data that enables Chief Procurement Officers (“CPO”) to view their operations differently and, by doing so, force these same CPOs to manage differently. For the CPO and their teams, this is the dawning of the Age of Intelligence.

This thirteenth annual CPO-themed report, CPO Rising 2018: The Age of Intelligence, is part of an ongoing dialogue that Ardent Partners’ analysts have had with CPOs and other procurement leaders for more than a decade. The report examines the general competencies and capabilities of procurement organizations today and highlights the management strategies and tactics that leading CPOs use to get the most from their teams. It also presents a comprehensive, industry-wide view into what is happening in the world of procurement and captures the experience, performance, perspective, and intentions of 324 CPOs and other procurement executives. The report includes benchmark statistics, analysis, and recommendations that procurement teams can use to better understand the state of procurement today, gain insight into best practices, benchmark their performance against the Best-in-Class, and ultimately improve their operations and performance. Click to download!

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Tagged in: Ardent Partners Research, Chief Procurement Officer, CPO, Innovation, P2P, Process, Source-to-Settle, Technology