Procurement Is Taking Risk Management Seriously

Proactive Risk Management is on the RISE

Feb 07, 2024

My Friends,

A change of pace is in order today as I am in a reflective mood. In the last week, I realised that Procurement is truly getting its time in the sunshine. I realised this as I reached 25000 followers on LinkedIn which felt like a huge milestone.

It felt huge because:

I talk about Niche elements of procurement, such as the skillset you need to make it as a digital procurement pro.
I push the need for digital procurement first and foremost.
I focus in on vendor management, contract management, risk management, and relationship management above sourcing (sourcing-type posts get way more traction than anything else).

But despite this, it’s clear that the digital message for procurement is gaining traction. And that’s where I see my role to the procurement community. Through this newsletter, I want to push on here and become your trusted digital procurement advisor.

For many years, I’ve tried my hand at creating content about Procurement. In the early days, I used to get some engagement.

I’ve created long form written content since 2019 across different platforms such as Medium, Quora, and my own hosted website before moving it to Substack last year.

I’ve cracked on with LinkedIn focusing on the need for digital contract management and digital procurement since 2020.

All with the singular goal of raising awareness that procurement teams can move away from Microsoft Office as their procurement tech stack and start doing work that creates a difference within their organisation.

It’s clear that time is coming.

There’s too much in the procurement waters for it not to happen.

There’s a wave of new Intake solutions.

Many of which layer Process Orchestration on top.

Many solutions are turning their efforts into a Suite to capture customers and get them digitalised faster than ever at a competitive price.

Best-of-breed is still there and will work with orchestration (I think it will only work with orchestration).

New tech partnerships are happening weekly.

Consolidations and acquisitions are happening.

We’re in for a wild year for digital procurement in 2024. I hope you stay here and enjoy the ride, and learn something along the way.

On that note, I make no secret that my goal here is to help the World of Procurement paid community first. They get access to my best and brightest ideas, challenges, and insights. I’m committing bigger than ever to continue to serve you. I appreciate you.

I’ll be putting out a deep dive this Friday on how to grow a personal following on LinkedIn. I’m thinking of doing this in video format to really nerd out about it.

What I'm Reading

I’ve been diving deep in DORA this week.

Not to mention Black Swans and Grey Rhinos.

What I'm Thinking (about Procurement)

Procurement is spending more time on Risk Management. It’s super interesting to see.

82% of you told me that you proactively manage risks in your organisation. I’m going to take this with a grain of salt. This number feels to high based on the 1-2-1 conversations I’ve had in the DMs. I think many have selected this who still predominantly use spreadsheets and track events that could happen or that are happening. They’ve not yet deployed tech to assist them.

However, this poll showed me that we are progressing as people take risk management more seriously than ever!

One Procurement Tech Focused Insight

Last week, Kavida.ai invited me to their webinar to review the use cases of their new Gen AI-powered Copilot for Procurement and Supply Chain Managers. I’ve been talking with Anam (who you should all go and follow on LinkedIn) for months now, and I’ve been wildly impressed with what they are building.

Check out the webinar demo here.

I’d also suggest you sign up and play with the Copilot here. You only need 5 suppliers with basic info in a spreadsheet to get started.

Test Copilot

One Piece of Content I've Found Useful

My man

Tom Mills

from

Procurement Bites by Tom Mills

is crushing it with content. I enjoyed this piece. I’ve been meaning to put some content out about Procurement Interviews. I’ve got lots of content in progress, around 60% written or scripted for videos. But check this POV out.