Top 3 Business Process Improvement Initiatives for Procurement in 2024:

What does your procurement team need to do in order to succeed in 2024? There’s no one simple answer.

No matter the industry in which your organization focuses, procurement teams are facing levels of uncertainty that are constantly complicated by economic and geopolitical factors that can make it increasingly difficult to design strategies that guarantee you’re able to meet essential goals and benchmarks. 

Navigating this uncertainty can feel overwhelming. As priorities shift and mount—whether those include identifying cost savings opportunities, ensuring an adequate supply of materials for their end products, or executing digital transformation initiatives—it’s easy for enterprises to feel overwhelmed.

Luckily, there is a way forward. That’s why we were proud to host our most recent webinar: The Top 3 Business Process Improvement Initiatives for Procurement in 2024. 

For those who were unable to attend, we’ve put together this comprehensive recap of the conversation, pulling together all the best advice from our esteemed panelists— Frank McKay (Chief Supply Chain & Procurement Officer, Jabil), Cazzie Williams (Director of Electronics, Kearny), Ken Bradley (Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, Lytica), Lloyd Kaplan (Managing Partner, Pacific Global Consulting) and moderator Ian Lawless (Head of Content Partnerships & Events Director, Procurement Leaders).

How Do I Identify the Process Improvements That Will Help Procurement?

As each of our panelists emphasized, the best way to analyze the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of procurement strategy comes down to visibility—across people, process, and technology. When assessing where your procurement team might be struggling, it’s essential to be honest with yourself about the team’s ability to self-assess their performance.

The best place to start is by asking questions about the consistency of the procurement team’s results, and whether they’re in a position where they can see potential gaps:

• Are they able to regularly get a comprehensive sense of how your business is performing?
• Can they easily access information about your supply chain, and any breakdowns or hindrances?
• Are they having difficulty accessing this information? If so, why?

“It helps to envision the transmission of data through your technology stack as a plumbing system. Certainly, there might be issues with the pipes (your technology), but there can also be issues with the water (the data that flows through that technology). In order to properly address procurement shortfalls, you not only have to see the whole picture, but you need to take the time to identify what specifically is holding your procurement team back.” – Lloyd Kaplan, Managing Partner, Pacific Global Consulting

Useless information is just as detrimental as flimsy technology, and asking yourself the above questions is the best way to identify the true culprit in any procurement conundrum.

How Do I Prioritize My Business Initiatives for 2024?

While it may sound obvious, the first step to prioritizing initiatives that might empower procurement teams is getting an honest sense of where your biggest hurdles lie and how they’re hamstringing your organization overall. In our panelists’ experience, data integrity is often the clearest issue, though that can stem from a range of factors. However, by attacking this problem as swiftly and comprehensively as possible, businesses are likely to see a range of procurement issues disappear, on both a macro and micro level.

Prioritization requires a fearless assessment of where you’re falling short, and how those potential shortcomings are influencing or exacerbating other challenges. The best way to stop a chain reaction that hurts procurement is to stabilize the first and largest domino, and keep it from falling.

How Can I Harness Data and Technology to Support Business Process Improvement Initiatives?

According to Ken Bradley, there are three major considerations when it comes to harnessing data and technology effectively for procurement: 

1. Cost
2. Security
3. Compliance. 

Understanding which of these is a weak spot, or, more importantly, which of these will require additional efforts for a given initiative, is critical to actually making your data and solutions work for you.

But these considerations go beyond the procurement team. Every organization is an ecosystem with one team’s initiatives impacting multiple other teams in turn. Thus, inter-team communication as to how information and technology is being leveraged proves to be a key component to ensuring mutual success and providing collaborative avenues by which another team’s usage and/or refinement of different data can actually make said data even more valuable for procurement.

The Top 3 Business Process Improvement Initiatives that Procurement Teams Should Focus on in 2024

While there’s a lot a lot to digest in a conversation like this, our panelists provided three major takeaways from the wealth of advice they shared—the ideal strategies and initiatives that will help procurement teams achieve the most in 2024:

• Focus on your data—cleanliness, accuracy, and communication across platforms.
• Stay close to your supplier community.
• Assure your C-Suite and investors that you’re harnessing your resources to plan for the unplanned.

“Organizations must articulate their data objectives clearly and precisely, aligning them with desired outcomes and holding themselves accountable to these metrics. Leveraging external resources, such as Lytica, provides opportunities to enhance existing knowledge and gain insights that may have been previously overlooked, thereby improving decision-making processes.” – Frank McKay, Chief Supply Chain & Procurement Officer, Jabil.

If you’d like to learn more, listen to the entire webinar here!