Q&A: Zip’s Michael Rooney on the Future of Procurement

Zip Forward London brought together more than 300 procurement and finance leaders. Over the space of one day, leaders had the opportunity to strategise and develop a bold new vision for the future of the industry. 

At the event, Procurement Magazine spoke to Michael Rooney, Director of the Enterprise Transformation Office at Zip about the future of procurement, the biggest challenges in Europe and AI. 

Tell us about yourself

I'm Michael Rooney. I lead our enterprise transformation office efforts in Europe. 

We are a global team, a small army now, of ex-procurement leaders, ex-procurement professionals, a number of ex-CPOs actually, that are working across different industry verticals with our prospects and our customers to help bring the transformation journey to life, and to help bring that procurement and transformation experience to our customer journey.

We do that because whilst we have a world-class product, it's just as important what goes into the products in terms of process, policies and how it's deployed to your business. So we help to bring that kind of procurement transformation experience to that process.

What would you say are the biggest challenges that European enterprises are trying to solve right now?

I'm speaking to European leaders day in, day out. And I think there are kind of two perspectives. When you look externally at the macro environment, you've got shifting regulations, you've got global disruptions, literally a new global disruption every day at the moment, and you've got the acceleration of AI. 

Those are really three converging trends that are driving progress. And on the last one, AI, there is a huge amount of optimism, but there's also a kind of reality, especially in Europe, around what you need to be ready for. 

So I think that is a challenge that's top of mind for leaders.

But then internally, when you think about within an organisation, you've got requesters who are more confused than ever. They don't understand the processes, they've got a fragmented system landscape, and ultimately, procurement is struggling to deliver the value that the business needs at the pace that the business needs. 

So I think those are some of the challenges that we're seeing internally and externally. 

And I think what procurement leaders need to think about is how they can take advantage of the technology that's available today and use that as an accelerant, not a silver bullet, but an accelerant, to really drive their transformation.

When you look ahead to 2030 and beyond, where do you see procurement going?

When I look ahead, I always like to think about things from a people, process, technology, and data perspective. From a people perspective, the operating model is shifting. 

It's definitely moving away from this traditional sort of top-down mandate-type approach, much more towards a business-centric approach where it's going to be critical to focus on the end-to-end experience for the business requesters.

From a process perspective, I think the procurement policy is dead. We've got customers who are saying they've not looked at the procurement policy in years because the policy is embedded into the platform. 

The rules are embedded in the platform. From a category strategy perspective, gone are the days of having a PowerPoint category strategy that lives and breathes within the system. 

So there's a huge transformation from a process perspective, and I think that's going to enable processes to be much more dynamic and able to adapt to whatever the needs of the business are at the time.

From a systems and data perspective, on systems, there's definitely a convergence happening between suite technology and orchestration technology.

We started off with intake, but the needs are going way beyond that now, and customers want to be able to orchestrate their entire journey end-to-end, intake-to-pay and the adjacent processes around that as well.

And then from a data perspective, I think this is huge for procurement. Procurement is going to be the hub for intelligence within a large enterprise. 

And we're seeing that already. If you think about the number of systems, the number of stakeholders, and the number of touchpoints that the procurement process has, especially with orchestration, we're able to collect all of that data and contextualise it in the procurement process. 

So the relationship that procurement is going to have with business stakeholders is going to shift away from being a transactional one, where's my PO, when's my vendor going to get paid, into much more of a strategic role.

What are the first steps you would recommend to a leader starting their AI journey?

I think it's no different to any other type of transformation. It's important to think about those things I mentioned earlier around people, process, technology and data, but really understand your current state, understand the business pain and build relationships with people who have got that business pain. 

Be able to quantify that so you can really understand the scale of the problem, and then start to think about what you're trying to solve for. What are the strategic anchors that you're aiming for in your future state?

When it comes to designing the future state, I think this is a huge opportunity to think about how you can do things differently in light of the technology that's available to you. In light of the fact that AI can now do a lot of the work, you have to re-engineer your processes. 

Take this opportunity, re-engineer those processes and then prove value fast. Start small, prove value really fast and then scale quickly. I think that's the key to success for our most successful customers.