By Christian Lanng, CEO, Tradeshift
The timing of the UK Department of Health's adoption of PEPPOL ("Pan-European Public Procurement Online) may just help accelerate the economic recovery in EU member countries. With billions of euros tied up in supply chain paperwork, small and medium-sized businesses stand to benefit from faster, digitised procurement transactions.
By Steve Hall, Editor of Procurement Leaders
You can’t entirely blame a procurement executive for having a chip on their shoulder – they’re responsible for millions, even billions of spend, but yet they risk becoming outsiders in the organisation; siloed off or constrained by the demands of other functions that limit their impact.
Sometimes procurement’s fault is a product of its own misconceptions; functions have grown up delivering easy savings by beating up suppliers and when that ‘low-hanging fruit’ has all been harvested, they’re left without the capabilities to deliver value to stakeholders.
Maybe, then, it’s not just other functions that are learning what procurement is and what it does – teams are learning about themselves. Here’s five reasons that’s been such a difficult journey.
By Patrice Orenes-Lerma
For an organisation’s procurement function to operate at full efficiency, it needs to connect seamlessly to other corporate-wide systems. This can be achieved – with the right processes and the right technologies linking them together. But it’s not easy. Sometimes, processes can slip and the overall procurement effort suffers, leading to missed deadlines, cost overruns and reduced profitability. How can you tell if your procurement process needs fixing? Here are eight signs things are going awry – and some corresponding tips on ways to improve business processes.