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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted enterprises all over the world leaving many scrambling for access to the working capital they need to survive. Organizations are laboring to ensure that both they, and their supply chains, have enough cash on hand to preserve the present but also enable the future. In this session, Christian Lanng, CEO of Tradeshift, discussed the role Supply Chain Finance can play today in helping organizations (1) increase liquidity and free up cash flow and, by doing so, (2) improve the sustainability of both organizations and their suppliers. Among Christian’s many insights included:

• “We need to have a reckoning in the way our supply chains are designed, because they have shown themselves to be very fragile.”
• “The COVID-19 pandemic has been the great revealer of which companies have taken digital transformation and digitalization of their supply chain seriously.  In a way you are getting a huge separation between those who have executed well and those who have passed digitalization down the line.”
• “The first instinct of CFOs is to conserve cash on the balance sheet, and the first idea how to do this is to extend payment terms but this has the net effect of magnifying the impact on the supply chain.”
• “We will see a move to ‘sell-side’ finance (also known as accounts receivable finance), where the buyer is part of the program and endorses it but they are not underwriting it. Growth in the future will come from this.”

THE CPO RISING 2020 DIGITAL SUMMIT:

Tagged in: CFO, Chief Procurement Officer, CPO Rising 2K20, CPO Rising Summit, Strategy, supply chain finance, Technology, The Resiliency Imperative