Ardent Partners hosted The CPO Rising 2K20 Virtual Series – The Resiliency Imperative as a way to bring together our global community of procurement, finance, and supply management professionals and collectively tackle the big issues we were all facing and continue to face as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. As a special treat for all our readers, Ardent is excited to present the recorded sessions from that Virtual Series.

Alan Holland and David Siedt from Keelvar discuss how we can bring to bear speed and best practices to the sourcing of a wide-range of categories. The duo examine how sourcing optimization can impact the speed and responsiveness of a sourcing team and also how sourcing bots can address changes faster than can be done by humans. Some of the key insights from the session include:

“Many sourcing challenges that companies face today existed before the COVID-19 pandemic – capacity limitations, supplier limitations, supplier shutdowns, freight expense volatility that can be addressed by sourcing optimization.”

“If you are evaluating any sourcing optimization solution, you want to make sure it has these four components – (1) Flexible bid inputs (2) Systematic traffic light bid feedback (3) Point & click scenario analysis and (4) Easy to use and adopt by suppliers and buyers.”

“With sourcing automation and bots, sourcing teams can take the higher frequency, ad hoc categories and speed up the sourcing with less team involvement.” 

“What you really want to do as a sourcing function is to collect information from your suppliers in structured form so that you can apply machine learning protocols to continuously improve your strategy, the types of suppliers you should be learning, and what works best over time.”

Tagged in: Chief Procurement Officer, CPO, CPO Rising 2K20, CPO Rising Summit, Innovation, People, Sourcing, Strategy, Technology, The Resiliency Imperative