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8 interpretations of agile procurement.

When you work in a particular field or industry, the lexicon / jargon / shorthand speech that’s commonly used becomes an afterthought, even if you don’t always know the exact meaning. You just get used to using the words that everybody else uses. In source-to-pay, “agile” and “agility” are getting a lot of play right now. So, when someone at IACCM (The International Association for Contract and Commercial Management) recently asked us to clarify what does “agile procurement” really mean, I asked around.

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How a low code platform solves business challenges better, faster and more easily.

Low code platforms are very hot nowadays. Forrester estimates the market to reach $15 billion by 2020, and cloud application leaders like Salesforce are massively investing in it. In fact, Outsystems, a low code platform provider, just raised $360M, probably because of their great position in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High-Productivity Application Platform as a Service. In essence, a low code platform lets you focus on solving problems instead of thinking about the technology.

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Businesses need to be more responsive to regulatory changes; an agile CLM approach can help.

You’ve heard of HIPAA, Dodd-Frank, GDPR and Sarbanes-Oxley, but what about HITECH, Stark Law, CECL, IFRS 17, TIR57? There is no shortage of acronyms in the regulatory world, and no shortage of regulations whether you’re in financial services, healthcare / life sciences, pharmaceuticals or many other industries. One of the biggest issues with regulatory compliance is that the rules are always changing — and the changes seem to be accelerating. Which means your contract management needs to be even more agile and responsive.

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New players are currently devising solutions designed by and for contract managers.”

— Thierry Vidal, Director of Contract Management at NAVAL GROUP

The quote above, made by Thierry Vidal, Head of the Process and Tools Commission of the French Contract Management Association, was in the association’s December newsletter. Through a series of interviews with leading contract practitioners, The Journal of Contract Management provides a look at what contract management needs your software solution should support — beyond the usual alerts, clauses, workflows and e-signatures. In short, don’t settle for merely “adequate.”

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A DEC representative once pointed out how the terms “conservation” and “efficiency” are often (wrongly) used interchangeably. The first means doing with less, the second means optimizing what’s available. Obviously, efficiency is a better way to go. The same can be said of procurement; instead of just trying to cut spend constantly, isn’t it better to manage that spend more efficiently (through P2P automation, for instance)? The result of a more stringent approach to spend management may very well be a noticeable, if not significant, increase in procurement ROI . We’ll show you a simple way to run those numbers.

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If necessity is the mother of invention, then reinvention must be the offspring of a continuous improvement process. Back in flight school, there was an industry group with a major professional education component, whose slogan was “When you’re good, you’re always learning.” The more source-to-pay professionals and practitioners I meet, and the more research and whitepapers I read, that same slogan could easily apply to procurement, sourcing and contract management, as well. As one Determine customer sagely told me at a recent User Group, “Comfort zones makes me uncomfortable.”

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