Insights / Supplier Management / Agility Requires a Solid Platform from your e-Procurement Solution Provider

Agility Requires a Solid Platform from your e-Procurement Solution Provider

June 04, 2020 | 2 min read

According to McKinsey principal Wouter Aghina, “It’s critical to be agile and quickly respond to change and actually benefit from change. And if you think that you’re still in a corner where this doesn’t hold true, wait for the disruption to come. Tomorrow it will be relevant for you.”

Aghina also stated that agility needs two things: the ability to move fast and a stable foundation of things that don’t change. This stability is what Aghina says is the springboard for the company.

By asking the innovation question any time they’re having a strategic conversation with a supplier, procurement teams drive 50 percent of the innovation.

Obviously, any e-procurement solution must be able to provide the stable foundation that agility needs to thrive. Below are a few things that can help organizations evaluate solutions, so they can select the provider that will best support their ability to move fast and capitalize on every opportunity.

Step 1: Evaluate the Provider’s Ability to Support Agility

One of the first things to consider when selecting a provider is if they have a successful track record supporting organizations with similar needs.

Step 2: Investigate Opportunities to Customize the Platform

Whether an organization has a dedicated development team or not, it is important to consider each vendor’s development resources. The simple fact is that every organization has unique needs and the needs of today will almost surely not be the needs of tomorrow.

Knowing that any system will need to be tailored for each individual organization at some point, the question becomes: when the need for custom features or integrations arises will the internal development team be able to address the need quickly?

Additionally, it is important to consider how flexible a platform is and if it can be customized by the users to ensure a tight fit to existing business processes.

Step 3: Custom Reports & Planning

As the business environment evolves the need for new data insights will emerge. In order to reap the benefits of an agile procurement team, each organization must understand what activities are driving success and what areas must be improved. If a platform doesn’t support customizable data views and real-time reports it will almost undoubtedly affect its ability to support the organization.

One final recommendation is to look to the future before selecting a vendor. While an organization’s needs may be small today, being faced with the need to migrate to a new system in the future could have significant opportunity costs.

If you would need help evolving your organization to a modular platform, there are great resources and helpful experts here.