Thursday 23 February 2017

Procurement 0.4 - are you at risk of relegation?

An excellent Pilot Study into Procurement 0.4 has recently been published by Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML) and Bundesverband Materialwirtschaft, Einkauf und Logistik e.V. (BME) - fortunately it is also available as an English translation.

Procurement 4.0 goes way beyond spend analytics and Cloud hosted S2P - perhaps we will come to view them as 'entry grade'. In layman's terms Procurement 4.0 relates to how businesses will harness the opportunities provided by the digital revolution.  I say 'businesses' because one of the casualties, if the profession don't quickly start to think in terms of Digital Procurement Strategy , may well be the traditional Function which could be digitised as a non-value adding function out of existence.  Of course, that threat can be turned into a very real opportunity and help shift the wise to being recognised as indispensable due to their valuable strategic contribution!

Nevertheless, back to the IML/BME report, it's based on interviews with leading German procurement managers.  Interestingly, none of whom think it is desirable for Procurement to take on the role of being a 'follower' in driving forward Industry 4.0!

The report envisages Procurement 4.0 will bring significant changes in:

  • Technologies and systems;
  • Organisation and processes;
  • Management and people; and
  • Business Models.
Basically a transformation of the function or a relegation of a function?!?  This is radical stuff and I would love to see us see us seizing the opportunity as opposed to being viewed as part of the problem.  A good starting position would be reading the IML/BMW report or my own whitepaper and having a discussion with colleagues to develop your response.