Recent headlines are dominated by the news that the University of Oxford research team is seeing promising results from early trials of its Covid-19 vaccine candidate. Now we must turn our attention to the vital technology that ensures that doses of any viable vaccine reach locations in a state without the need for retesting.
One of the key things around Intelligent Automation (IA) is to ensure it has a strong business foundation not just in planning, execution and validation but also in assessing and reporting business benefits. While this may seem simple, it’s often not done well in most organizations and leads to a skewed view of business benefits from automating business processes.
When the COVID crisis hit, organizations had no choice but to respond to the challenges they faced by leveraging the resources they and their suppliers had at their disposal. Clearly, some were better prepared and responded with more resilience than others. Now we are many months into the crisis, and it's time to look at what went wrong and what organizations should change going forward.
Quantitative and scientific approaches to cost estimation have existed for decades and are increasingly accessible to procurement teams via technologies that automate data analysis.
In many cases, these new capabilities simply accelerate the manual work that procurement professionals were doing using pivot tables and advanced Excel functions (e.g., show only rows with less than five days lead time) that effectively filter large numbers of line items in seconds.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in the required virtual supply chain work across companies. Aside from the pandemic, teams workingvirtually is a macro trend that newer generations making up a growing portion of the workforce expect. Looking ahead, if supply chain leaders want to attract and retain the best and brightest talent, they will need to facilitate work in new and different ways.
Technology has advanced significantly since the days when procurement leaders were only managing RFIs and RFPs among their “little black book” of trusted suppliers. Today, big data and artificial intelligence now offer an expansive view of an entire supplier market and unprecedented access to vast wells of verified data. This advancement has opened the door to a new approach that can completely transform the strength of procurement decisions and enable procurement teams to impact a company’s bottom line in new and sometimes unexpected ways.
When municipal and county governments need significant facility and infrastructure updates, but don’t have the funds available, they must identify new and creative ways to cut costs.
For example, Turner County, Georgia, needed to control expenses and upgrade its facilities and infrastructure to ensure its residents receive vital services. They began by analyzing the county’s energy and operational costs.
Business process outsourcing saves companies significant time and money, enabling them to focus on their core business activities. And nowhere is this more impactful than in the document processing arena. Billions of pages of documents move between companies, their partners/suppliers and customers each year.
When the COVID-19 global pandemic struck, businesses faced the task of rapidly shifting office-based employees to remote environments. Today, the primary focus is on managing these makeshift workplace models more efficiently. In the process, long-term initiatives are now on the back burner.
If you’re laundering money or financing terrorism, what keeps you up at night?
Beyond the day-to-day intrigues of a life of crime, you have a money trail to worry about. Sure, you fear the sophisticated law enforcement and intelligence agencies with the power to track you, shut you down, and put you behind bars. But what about the thousands of watchful eyes observing your money as it flows through banks, casinos, real estate and other covert financial conduits?
Given the attention on Bitcoin, the underlying blockchain technology has been brought to the forefront for organizations looking to explore the benefits and feasibility of managing the supply chain. The level of trust, transparency, and efficiency promised by this technology opens the possibility of revolutionizing how we handle transactions.
Remote work is expected to be the biggest business change coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, but not the only one.
Having a sound tail spend management strategy has never been more important than it is today. It’s a key differentiator – and competitive advantage – in a down economy in which cash is king and cutting costs is a high priority. Procurement teams can no longer rely on direct materials for savings—those costs have been negotiated to death.
At U.S. insurance companies, policyholders’ claims represent 70% to 75% of the total cost. This makes complete sense, of course, since policyholder benefits are the sole reason why anyone buys insurance products and services.
The problem is, at insurance companies, procurement is limited to supporting indirect spend — real estate, marketing, finance, etc. — which accounts for less than 10% of the organization’s total costs and severely limits our ability to provide substantive value.
When SCTE•ISBE, a cable telecommunications industry group, launched the Explorer initiative, which encompasses seven new working groups to set standards for the industry, it surprised some professionals that companies from outside the industry signed on.
