Digital dilemma for procurement professionals

96% of procurement executives agree that digitization would advance their strategic goals, but less than 5% are fully digitized according to a new study sponsored by Globality and Digital Procurement World.

Wednesday, 20th November 2019 Posted 4 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Globality has released a research report titled “Procurement at the Inflection Point – Digitization, AI and the Pending Disruption of a Corporate Mainstay.” The findings show that global procurement executives are seeing significant benefits as they adopt digital technologies for procurement and sourcing. The survey was completed in conjunction with Digital Procurement World, the largest community of digital procurement leaders and the only conference that brings together the entire digital procurement ecosystem, representing every sector of the industry.

The survey of senior-level procurement executives across the United States and Europe reveals that these leaders are grappling with myriad challenges: corporate services spending is skyrocketing, and service providers engaged by companies continue to grow in number and complexity. The survey also shows that the status quo is not sustainable, and leaders are looking to digitization to drive goals, including spend management, process and staff optimization and improved analytics.

Digitization is still nascent, and the findings show that most respondents are still in the early deployment or even planning stages of utilizing technology to move away from analog processes. Leaders are increasingly interested in technologies like AI and are just starting to see the benefits of how adoption can accelerate their company’s strategic goals. They’re looking to transform a space that is still largely viewed as a highly manual, inefficient area for business.

These are some of the highlights from the report:

96 percent of respondents see strong or some potential for digitization of procurement to accelerate their company’s overall strategic goals.
Corporate spending on services is high, with over 30 percent of respondents saying their company’s services spending exceeds 50 percent of total spending.
Improved efficiency for the procurement team ranked first in respondents’ outcome expectations for adopting AI in their operations.
Respondents selected clear organization vision and corporate-level executive support as the leading factors that would have the greatest impact on procurement transformation.

“The findings from this survey substantiate what enterprise customers have been telling us for years. They are looking for a solution that enables them to dynamically find the best provider at the right price for every project. They want the process to be fast and efficient, but it also needs to minimize the biases that currently exist with traditional procurement sourcing,” said Joel Hyatt, Globality’s cofounder, chairman, and CEO. “Our Platform makes this possible, utilizing AI and machine learning to decrease time to market and increase spend effectiveness, and we’re excited to work with leading global enterprises that are at the forefront of this digital transformation.”

“Digital Procurement World was created specifically because of the untapped opportunity for procurement professionals to truly digitize across the entire ecosystem and revolutionize how sourcing is done today,” added Matthias Gutzmann, a well-known figure in the global procurement space and founder of the Digital Procurement World event. “It’s clear that leaders are clamoring for this and looking for the best partners and solutions to work with to make this vision possible. It’s exciting to partner with innovative companies like Globality that are already at the forefront of making procurement digitization a reality.”