While the procurement industry is consistently evolving and shifting, 2021 begins after a truly unprecedented year. In 2020, Chief Procurement Officers and their teams were forced to face massive disruptions, extreme threats, and entirely new challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. By and large, procurement leaders worked valiantly to ensure business continuity, build supply chain resilience, and prepare their enterprises for the next economic phase. Against this backdrop, procurement has never been more important to business operations and business results. We continue with some key procurement trends that will continue in 2021.

2021 Big Trend – Technology is the Linchpin to Procurement Operations

Over the last five years, supply management tools have become more user-friendly, accessible, and easily integrated with the enterprise’s technology infrastructure. As a result, their level of usage is increasing, albeit slowly. In turn, users are driving more volume and ultimately more value from them. Digital, automated tools have enabled fewer hands to transact greater volumes of tactical work, which has allowed CPOs and teams to shift their focus to the strategic parts of the business, like relationship-building and long-term planning. They have also helped practitioners and leaders to extract more value out of their processes and make faster, more informed decisions across the source-to-settle process.

But, it has taken a global pandemic that has required a majority of businesses to institute “work from home” mandates to get executives to understand the important role that technology plays in supporting operations and the need for digital transformation to pervade all corners of the enterprise.

The digital transformation of a procurement department is an opportunity to use technology as a means to reimagine the organization’s entire scope of operations and how it performs. Unlike the process automation initiatives that preceded it, a digital transformation does not view technology as a process enabler, but rather, as the fundamental process going forward – it is the alpha and omega and everything in-between.  A successful digital transformation requires many things, including sponsorship, effort, collaboration, vision, expertise, and a supporting technology infrastructure; superior program design also remains a critical element in the speed and impact of the initiative.

2021 Big Trend – Big Data is a Procurement “Game-Changer”

Many of the procurement profession’s biggest and best opportunities to make an impact on overall operations and results still sit in front of it. One of the most compelling of these is procurement’s emerging ability to leverage advanced analytics to convert procurement data into intelligence and then transform that intelligence into value. With the rise of business process automation tools, cloud- based applications, mobile solutions, connected devices, Big Data permeates the modern business. Each year, more data is created 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 2021, many procurement departments are reliant upon process automation tools and technology to drive operations. Their systems create and capture tremendous volumes of information – Procurement’s “Big Data” – which has the potential to become the next major force and catalyst for the profession. A majority of CPOs agree, with many focused on gaining better data visibility and analytical capabilities to help procurement ascend to the next level of performance.

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