This year’s CEE E-procurement Summit was held on 28th March in Slovakia. Of course, we had to participate, as we were interested in what procurement experts were the most concerned about on the international level. Here are the freshest topics!
Main procurement trends in 2023:
- Sustainability
- Simplifying and optimizing approval chains
- Digitization: automation, robotization (RPA)
- Risk management, deeper examination of supply chains
You can download our full account of the event here.
What impact does procurement have on sustainability?
Companies are increasingly recognizing that the path to reduce their ecological footprint leads through their procurement department. After all, it is up to procurement staff to decide how to make their purchases: whether to accept the potentially higher price of importing from nearby countries, or whether to opt for cheaper but more environmentally damaging overseas shipments. In any case, in 2023, one of the main questions could become one of moral responsibility: is it better for companies to lower prices or to buy sustainably?
Digitization, robotization, approval chains
Process automation and visualization of processes and information to increase efficiency should be a number one priority for the development of procurement.
It is a generally recognized fact that larger companies have re-examined approval processes during the digitization of their workflows. As a result, many have chosen to reduce the number of approvers to a total of two people; the general consensus is that this has a surprisingly large effect on the speed and simplicity of workflows.
Several presentations were concerned with robotization and automation, and all presenters underlined the fact that these are the next steps in digitization; thus, it seems inevitable that these will have to be implemented in procurement as well.
The presenters also stressed the importance of making this profession more appealing for the younger generations, as procurement needs their knowledge in big data, process mining, AI, analytics, and so much more that could strengthen the position of procurement departments in their companies.
Risk management
It is essential to increase the focus on risk management not only for tier 1 suppliers, but for tier 2 and 3 as well. It is important to understand the entire supply chain, as this is a key question of sustainability in 2023.
In the long run, the above steps may serve to promote the rise of the procurement department within the company.
You can access our full account of the event by filling out the form below.
Video summary of the Summit:
You can access our detailed account of the presentations at the summit by filling out hte following form:
