SAP Spend Connect Live: Q&A with Baber Farooq

Baber Farooq, Senior Vice President and Head of Market Strategy for SAP Procurement Solutions spoke to Procurement Magazine during SAP Spend Connect Live.

Baber discussed the innovations unveiled at the event, including for the Spend Control Tower, category management and intake management to help procurement teams harness data and drive strategic transformation.

Could you summarise for us the key spend management innovations unveiled here at a Spend Connect Live?

There are really three things that I want to talk about. Firstly, the innovations we showed in the upcoming release of Spend Control Tower. I think Spend Control Tower was a critical milestone in our data-first strategy. As part of that, some of the upcoming innovations in Spend Control Tower really allow you to gain insights from the data that you have.

Because if you don't have insights from the data that you have, it's frankly quite meaningless, right? Develop a plan from those insights in SAP Ariba Category Management and then after that action that plan in SAP Ariba sourcing. We refer to that as the "triple crown of strategic procurement". So I think that's one of the key sorts of insights and innovations that we delivered at Spend Connect Live that we highlighted to our customers.

The second is category management, continued innovation and category management. It's a critical pillar as part of our strategy, and it's something that we know as productivity needs and requirements for our customers are increasing. It's a more and more important driver for digital transformation in the procurement function.

The last thing that I would sort of say is intake management. We realise that the landscape for procurement is becoming increasingly heterogeneous. And as part of that, having an ability to intake and provide a suite experience, really, even though you have a heterogeneous set of landscapes, we would love for everyone to only use SAP, but we know that that's not always the case. So if you're using a non-SAP system, you can still get the suite experience through the SAP Ariba Intake Management solution.

How do you ensure SAP is constantly creating new innovations and trends rather than chasing?

You have to be aware of where the market is going. If you're not aware of where the market is going, all you're going to be doing is chasing. So we do a tremendous amount of market research.

We do significant work with the Economist Impact to survey the C-suite every year to understand where the market is heading. And that is what allowed us to, two years ago, develop and release SAP Ariba category management and then also announce the intention of Spend Control Tower last year, and then just making it generally available earlier this year.

Both those things, we realised that from a digitisation perspective, category management and spend analytics was a critical milestone for customers that they wanted to increase their capabilities by leaps and bounds.

And we ended up releasing those capabilities as part of that. And then of course, everything we're noticing and realising with intelligence, artificial intelligence, the need to develop capabilities in that area, the use cases to develop, you have to talk to the market that's not talking to five customers, that's looking and approaching the market by talking to thousands of customers.

We do that through a variety of research channels, our own conferences, our own pulse surveys, and it's just what you need to do to be able to capitalise on the market intelligence.

So with Scope 3 to risk management, there's so much for procurement teams to consider these days. How exciting is it to be creating solutions to tackle these issues?

Well, it's very exciting. I mean, I think we're seeing clearly that procurement is taking a more central role in terms of business strategy and planning. That is forcing procurement to look more long-term and be much more data-driven than it has historically. And it's exciting to be building the solutions to help procurement deliver on those intentions and goals. So I think it's very exciting. Undoubtedly,

What's been your biggest takeaway or highlight from Spend Connect Live?

I think when you have customers tell your story, right? When you get customers on stage telling your story, when they're telling our story, that's very powerful and it's inspiring to us to continue building the products moving forward.

How do you anticipate SAP and its procurement solutions to evolve in the next 12 months?

I think you're going to expect a lot more capabilities in terms of being able to analyse and parse data. As I said, data is only powerful if you can harness it. Otherwise, if you can't make sense from the noise, it doesn't really matter how much data you have available to you.

So I think you're going to be a lot more capabilities developing and helping customers harness data. That becomes the fuel for intelligence. All of the artificial intelligence is somewhat meaningless if you can't have the right data set feeding it. So I think innovations across that space are going to be critical for how the industry evolves and that's where we are placing our big bets in terms of evolving our product suite.

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