A Big THANK YOU to Print Procurement Guru Sarah Scudder for the following highlights of the key takeaways from my panel discussion at Horizon 2019 in Charleston, South Carolina, last week.
Be sure to click on her name to visit her LinkedIn profile to see what she is up to because she is an industry mover and shaker.
Thought leadership panel day one at #zycushorizon19 with Jon W. Hansen, Brian Roche, George Charalambous, Matt Mehalick and John O’Connell, MBA.
The topic? The dos and dont’s of doing a #procurement #digitaltransformation.
Takeaways:
- Stop relying on excel spreadsheets.
- #Marketing is buying more #itservices and boy do marketing professionals move fast. Marketing wants to be first to market. People don’t remember the 2nd and 3rd to market. You don’t want procurement to be an obstacle (welcome to my world!).
- The improvements in #technology are making waste and non compliant behavior less abundant.
- It’s more about the behavior than the technology itself.
- A pile of papers = a job. This has to change. It’s a people and team building resistance.
- Procurement gets to take the lead to make automation real.
- #Sourcing touches every department in a company (win!). – Doing things digitally is about change management.
- Technology has removed the excuse between digital promise and realization.

colin cram
November 16, 2019
It sounds very interesting. The point that I particularly like is that digitisation is about change management. That is what it should be. However, it seems to me that too many organisations see digitisation as a means to do what they do now, but more efficiently – and that seems to be what many providers of digital products offer. That may suit procurement people and – dare I suggest it – in some cases provide the justification for retention of the procurement director’s position – or at least not changing its terms of reference too much I would like to see providers of digital procurement solutions use the purpose/objectives of the business as their starting point in designing digitisation. There could sometimes result in some radical new approaches.
piblogger
November 17, 2019
Thoughtful input as usual, Colin 8)