HACKETT GROUP:
SHOULD PEOPLE
BE AT THE TOP OF
CPOS’ AGENDA? Nicolas Walden, Senior Director, Hackett Group, discusses the importance of investing in people when realising intelligent procurement practices WRITTEN BY: GEORGIA WILSON
I
n today’s modern organisations, the procurement function is expanding. Merely a few years ago executives in the function were primarily focused on sourcing and contracting suppliers; a much narrower, basic approach, with technology lagging behind many other functions. “We lacked that investment, and the investment that we did have was often in limited or difficult to use tools. We found that many procurement teams were actually resisting the use and the adoption of technology. But moving forward to where we are now, from 2021 going into 2022, there has been a huge amount of investment. All
44
January 2022
these startups, private equities, fundings, tens of hundreds of millions have gone into a whole raft of new modern tools with all these great new features and functionality and a majority of procurement functions realise that they really do need to accelerate the adoption towards these modern tools, right? So it's a very big change to where we were from only a few years ago,” reflects Nicolas Walden, Senior Director, Procurement Executive Advisory Membership Programmes, Hackett Group. “These days robots, AI and smart intelligence are becoming embedded into the features and functionalities of these platforms. So where are we going next?