Alex Saric: Improving Procurement Visibility with Cloud S2P

In today's global marketplace, organisations face unprecedented challenges in managing their supply chains. With complexities spanning multiple tiers, countries, and rapidly changing geopolitical landscapes, maintaining visibility and control has never been more critical. 

Supply chains worldwide are growing increasingly intricate, spanning numerous suppliers and their extended networks. Industries like defence, aerospace, manufacturing, and automotive face mounting complexities as supply chain risks evolve rapidly. Gartner reports that 53% of supply chain leaders struggle with complexity hindering change implementation. To address this hurdle, businesses require adaptable technology capable of providing transparency and managing escalating intricacies.

Alex Saric, Chief Marketing Officer at Ivalua spoke on the importance of visibility in supply chain management, the role of technology in overcoming challenges, and the future outlook for procurement strategies. 

How vital is visibility in managing multi-tiered, multinational supply chains amidst escalating global complexity and event unpredictability?

For organisations with supply chains spanning numerous tiers, across different countries, and involving multiple moving parts, deep visibility is critical. However, rising supply chain complexity makes this extremely difficult. And without visibility and control of the entire supplier base, organisations can't react quickly to supply chain shocks or identify and onboard new suppliers at pace. 

Visibility has become even more important with increased geopolitical instability. Blockages caused by sanctions, war, and other geopolitical events are becoming more frequent and unpredictable, requiring organisations to be agile in order to adapt. For example, how many procurement leaders would have predicted Denmark closing shipping lanes due to a faulty missile launcher? 

But today, many organisations are unfortunately stuck in the past when it comes to managing risk, or even identifying opportunities to find savings and innovate. They rely on outdated manual processes and Excel spreadsheets, dispersed data, and rigid ERP systems, leading to gaps in visibility. The changing supply chain environment is underlying exactly why organisations must take a smarter, more flexible approach to procurement. This is further exacerbated by the growing and often competing priorities that must be managed in the supply chain, from performance to cost to risk and sustainability.​​​​​​​

Which pivotal technologies empower businesses to attain comprehensive visibility across intricate supply chains, facilitating adept decision-making, risk mitigation, and innovation?

To achieve full visibility across complex supply chains, businesses must equip themselves with the right tools that enable them to make effective decisions, mitigate disruption and identify areas to innovate and add value.

Cloud-based Source-to-Pay (S2P) technology offers tremendous strategic value by providing a single source of truth and helping organisations manage all spend and suppliers. Effective S2P increases supply chain observability and improves collaboration with suppliers on mitigating risk, innovating, improving sustainability and more. 

But not all S2P solutions are created equal. Many organisations rely on outdated legacy S2P technology or suites cobbled together via acquisition featuring multiple data models. Such systems limit data quality and access, making it difficult to make quick, informed decisions and understand the tradeoffs involved in specific supplier decisions. These limited tools have caused many organisations to use S2P purely for their indirect spend (supplies that support operations, for example office supplies and equipment), because direct spend (the materials used to make the product a company sells) is too complex.

Meanwhile, as geopolitical uncertainty grows and disruption becomes increasingly common, companies stuck using poorly architected S2P technology will never achieve complete visibility. These businesses will lose clarity on disruption, meaning goods may not arrive on time, damaging relationships and reputation. They frequently make decisions based on limited data, advancing one objective at the unknown expense of others.

Organisations need smart procurement platforms that can pull in data and insights on the entire supply chain, including sub-tier suppliers, to identify dependencies and properly assess risk. They must be able to provide a single source of truth for all relevant supplier information, from suppliers, internal sources and 3rd party information providers.

How can businesses ensure their procurement platforms stay agile amidst evolving supply chain data demands and regulatory standards, while seamlessly integrating emerging technologies like AI and Generative AI?

Platforms also need to be flexible enough to expand data models and embrace emerging technology that can further deepen observability into complex supply chains. New types of data are becoming available and reporting requirements continue to evolve. For example, today detailed visibility into labour practices and carbon emissions throughout the supply chain is required in many countries. In the future, it is likely businesses will have to monitor full product lifecycle details and manage Digital Product Passports (DPPs). Organisations will need to address the growing demand for transparency into where goods originate, from first supplier to the customer. Such transparency is vital for managing disruption as well as regulatory compliance. To accommodate such changes, systems need to be able to support adding entirely new data tables and leveraging that data in intelligent workflows to drive compliance with company policies and priorities.

Businesses should also look to embedded AI solutions to reduce complexity and assist in contract management, supplier performance management and other critical processes to improve efficiency and decision-making. With the advances in Generative AI, many vendors are offering use cases for the supply chain. These will continue to expand and leaders should be sure that solutions also support them in refining and creating their own use cases to not be hindered by vendor roadmaps and R&D investment. To realise the true potential of Generative AI, leaders must think holistically and ensure they have an adequate data foundation and roadmap strategy. Supply chain leaders should closely align with the CIO in doing so.

How do outdated processes and systems obstruct the grasp of modern supply chain intricacies, and what benefits do businesses stand to gain by adopting cutting-edge procurement platforms and systems?

Outdated processes and systems – be it Excel spreadsheets or legacy technology – are unable to comprehend the complexity of modern supply chains. Only with modern platforms and systems can complex supply chains be made simple, providing both transparency and a platform for businesses to adopt automated processes that save time and make supply chains more agile. 

By taking a smarter approach to procurement, organisations gain a 360-degree view of all spend and supplier data in one place. With complete visibility into modern supply chains, procurement will be better placed to predict and manage risk, navigate uncertainty, and identify opportunities for future growth.

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