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Two organizations leveraging technology in pursuit of agility.

In Part One of this two-part blog series, Determine Chief Product Officer Julien Nadaud laid out the fundamental thinking and strategy behind what it takes to move toward a more agile procurement framework and operations. Part Two below delves into some of the specifics that two Determine customers used to streamline, modernize and “agilify” their organizations. As Ardent Partners points out, agile is the future of procurement success — here are some examples of how that looks.

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Making the move from concept to reality.

In this two-part blog series, Determine Chief Product Officer Julien Nadaud explores what it takes to strengthen your procurement strategies and make them easier with just one word: agile. Part One looks at the groundwork required to rebuild your present agile procurement strategies, and in Part Two he’ll summarize two case studies surrounding specific examples of agility in action. The idea of “agility” is getting a lot of play in the procurement world these days, but it is real, achievable and what success will increasingly look like .

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Customers, compliance and clicks: How procurement is reinventing retail success.

The retail industry operates in a high-visibility, consumer-focused environment. That brings with it a host of opportunities, but also exposes it to the vagaries and shifting whims of target audiences, which are increasingly demanding as well as sliced into ever smaller, more specific demographics. In order for retailers to be successful in a heavily competitive marketplace, they must adopt advanced procurement strategies and technologies that go far beyond the traditional focus on cost savings efforts alone .

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Valued Determine customer Éditions Lefebvre Sarrut (ELS) took up the challenge of achieving a Procure-to-Pay solution implementation in just 20 days. Gilles Grenier, IT Procurement Manager, reveals the best practices and methods used to achieve this successfully.

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Realizing the Full Benefits of Center led Procurement

As procurement organizations of all sizes and maturity levels embark on transformation projects, many consider it within scope to re-evaluate the structure of their team and how procurement interacts with the rest of the enterprise. Center led procurement has been considered a best practice for some time now, preferable to both centralized and decentralized procurement structures. And yet, procurement must be constantly re-evaluating their structure and priorities.

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Everyone has heard about chatbots, or intelligent assistants. The battle between Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Microsoft Cortana is raging: They are embedded in our smartphones and are mainly driven by voice, augmenting our ability to access information and do things; these assistants are also in many homes, and have become mainstream in consumer smart objects and IoT devices. Now we’re wondering how soon they will be just as common on our desks at work.

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Procurement was center stage again this month (fitting, in terms of it being a summer of trade uncertainty). We covered the discipline from a number of different angles, from taxes to tactics. But in looking back, one thought from Andrew Bartolini, founder of Ardent Partners, stood out as particularly relevant to how procurement as a whole is developing: “While intelligence is critical, a precise measure of procurement intelligence is less important than the performance it generates. In point of fact, as a department (and the entire profession) matures, the definition of procurement intelligence becomes a moving target; and it becomes relative to nearly all stakeholders in the source-to-settle spectrum.”

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Bring sustainable value to the bottom line.

Increasingly, procurement is being looked to for the added value it can bring to the organizational table. Expectations are on the rise as well, with big data and advanced analytics driving decision making to new levels by enabling teams to generate new insights and achieve unprecedented proactive capabilities. As covered in recent reports by both Ardent Partners and PayStream Advisors, demonstrating procurement’s value can include many components depending on the priorities of any particular company. But with increased reliance on cloud platform P2P solutions, showing procurement ROI is a great place to start.

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Procurement’s desire to be agile is as well-documented and frequently discussed as our interest in transformation. In both cases, however, we are at risk of falling into the ‘strategy trap’ – the lack of clarity, direction and actionability that accompany all things non-tactical.

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The world is mainly divided in two blocks in term of tax: the Value-Added-Tax, or VAT, that has been adopted by 166 countries out of 193 in the world; and the US, which is almost the only country that has sales tax. Some countries have still a very complex tax system that has not been unified between the provinces, like Canada, however the Good and Services Tax (GST) works mainly like the VAT.

There are a lot of differences in the way these two main tax systems work. Robust tax management can simplify the complexity for procurement.

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