In recent years, the world has changed very rapidly, both technologically and economically. We talked to Henrietta Nemes, Category Buyer at Audax Renewables, about how to meet the challenges of automation, robotization and successive crises.
The last 1-2 years have been characterized by automation and robotization. How has this affected procurement at your company?
There are efforts in our company to include these technologies; we are trying to take advantage of the possibilities of AI, but at the moment, as we are a fairly new organization, procurement is not the area AI is most present in. For the time being, it looks like we will be using it in our other processes, but I am confident that we will soon be able to use it in procurement as well.
At the same time, without disputing the advantages of IT innovations, the use of artificial intelligence raises many questions. I sometimes warn colleagues that, for example, when using ChatGPT, it may not be the best idea to provide any company data. I think it is worth paying attention to these issues. This is going to be a very interesting challenge in the future: on the one hand, we have the importance of data protection, and on the other hand, we have AI, which is getting ever more difficult to avoid. But the choice of systems to use makes a big difference.
The discussion we had last year also touched on the broader context of procurement and logistics. We have all experienced it first hand: we have gone from one crisis to another, with disasters, epidemics and wars affecting the market. How do you see procurement now, in the spring of 2024?
I believe that sustainability and the NIS2 Directive, a cybersecurity certification, are our biggest challenges at the moment. We know there will be tasks that will have to be dropped and there will be tasks that will need much more focus, whether we are talking about pre-evaluation or post-evaluation. I think Fluenta will serve us very well in these tasks.
Of course, these crises, the inflation, the euro and dollar exchange rates are a challenge, but I think we have seen worse.
Are we seeing the end of this crisis-heavy era? Or is it rather a state of affairs that we must now get used to?
Unfortunately, I foresee the latter for the time being. I think we will certainly be kept busy with these challenges for the next few years. We will not only have to get used to how things are, but also adapt to these more difficult circumstances. As far as procurement is concerned: costs have gone up a lot, and, unfortunately, the experience with most products is that once the price goes up, it is very rare to go back down.
This requires companies to be much more agile and flexible. In this unpredictable environment, stable and well-functioning partnerships will become more valuable. Reliability, flexibility and customer focus will be an even more important consideration and competitive advantage than before. Our cooperation with Fluenta is a very good example of this.
Read the first part of our interview with Henrietta Nemes here.
