There are few thought leaders in the Procurement community who are as well read as Kelly Barner. Thanks to her role as Owner and Editor of Buyers Meeting Point, Kelly consistently seeks out and studies procurement trends and the solutions to our greatest challenges, and without doubt has attended the most procurement webinars of anyone in our profession in support of her regular Webinar Notes series! The challenge in this interview was in keeping it under an hour!
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Our conversation focused on two specific areas. We started by discussing the trends that are impacting the future of procurement. One area that specifically interested me was Robotics Process Automation (RPA). While I was conceptually aware of RPA, I hadn’t given a great deal of thought until now to how RPA will have the potential to bring big changes to our profession. If you are in the same boat as me, I would recommend you start learning more about RPA and the impact it will have – both in how we must adapt to help our organizations buy RPA services, and in how RPA will impact the procurement profession itself.
Our second area of discussion was Supply Market Intelligence (SMI), and it was Kelly’s expertise here that originally prompted our interview. From my personal experience, access to SMI is a key differentiator between tactical and strategic procurement organizations. If you don’t lever a library of market and costing intelligence – or if you have the raw data but you do not turn that into actionable intelligence – then you are asking the market places within which you buy to set the commercial terms of any product or service that you buy. Yet despite this, I find a lot of organizations are loath to invest the time – or the money – in developing this source of competitive advantage. In my conversation with Kelly, I wanted to explore what procurement leaders and professionals can do to access the SMI that they need without the cost of doing so becoming prohibitive.
I hope you enjoy the conversation with Kelly as much as I did…!
In this episode, you will learn:
- The origin story of Buyers Meeting Point (BMP), and the role that BMP plays today in the procurement community.
- Key trends impacting the future of procurement.
- An overview of Robotics Process Automation (RPA), and the impact that RPA will have both on the services that procurement helps a business buy, and the procurement function itself.
- The shift in procurement technology away from end-to-end solutions to niche products that will integrate with each other.
- An overview of what Supply Market Intelligence really is.
- Why the acquisition of Supply Market Intelligence need not be an expensive pursuit (hint: the data you need is already out there somewhere).
- Why access to Supply Market Intelligence is critical to building stakeholder and supplier relationships.
- Considerations when building a framework to operationalize the gathering of relevant Supply Market Intelligence.
Links and Resources:
- Kelly Barner on LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Buyers Meeting Point Homepage.
- Supply Market Intelligence for Procurement Professionals: Research, Process and Resources by Jeanette Jones and Kelly Barner.
- Procurement at a Crossroads by Jon Hansen and Kelly Barner.
Thanks for Listening!
