“The industry is evolving faster than our willingness to accept it.” - John Ward, Portfolio Director, ProcureCon North America, Worldwide Business Research
For 25 years, ProcureCon has been a cornerstone for procurement education and community-building with their well-known annual event series. It’s been a must-attend for practitioners for a quarter of a century, which means it has also been around for all the changes, disruption, and transformation that is still taking place to this day.
In this episode, I spoke about the evolution of ProcureCon (and, more broadly, procurement) with Frank Musero, Divisional Director, Content and Strategy, ProcureCon, B2B and Finance Events at Worldwide Business Research; Michael Dunlap, Portfolio Director, Worldwide Business Research; and John Ward, Portfolio Director, ProcureCon North America, Worldwide Business Research.
Frank, Michael, and John each shared their respective views on how the needs of the procurement community have changed over the years and the ways the well-known event series has had to pivot and adapt in order to keep up with new realities, trends, and challenges facing procurement.
Here, in their own words, are some of the more poignant moments from our conversation as they chart ProcureCon’s – and procurement’s – decades-long maturity journey.
Procurement’s Evolution from Job to Career
“When I first started, procurement was literally trying to figure out how to transition from purchasing to strategic sourcing, to figure out where their value was and how to demonstrate what procurement actually was supposed to do.
“Now, we’re seeing young people getting into this as a degree and really trying to come in from the ground up with new ideas and new things to help propel procurement as a part of the supply chain and as a part of the corporation instead of just this thing you do before you end your professional life. So, it's become a career as opposed to just a job.” – Frank Musero
Changing Demographics in Procurement
“I’ve noticed that, especially over the past 12 years, a lot of CPOs and Heads of Indirect from large manufacturing companies go and become CPOs of smaller tech companies because they can influence the corporation better. They can take their expertise from these large corporations and really do some innovative things.
“It's about procurement demonstrating their value to not just their customers and their stakeholders, but also the c-suite above them. So, it's definitely become more fluid in terms of who's moving where.” – Frank Musero
SaaS Explosion
“The biggest change I’ve seen at our category level events is just the explosion of SaaS providers and SaaS subscription and SaaS negotiations. That’s definitely impacted our ProcureCon IT conference, which historically was a mix between hardware software and telecom. Now, it's pretty much all software.” – Michael Dunlap
Quick Wins to Close the Innovation to Implementation Gap
“I’ve seen a seismic shift especially among the buyer community that comes to our events, which is their appetite for small moves, big wins. They’re looking for easily attainable benchmarks that they can implement with the path of least resistance, because a lot of them sit on islands by themselves or with a team of two or three.
“What they really want is to get the easy answer and close the gap between innovation and implementation. For them, it’s like going from Mount Everest, where the technology is, to the Mariana Trench, where the implementation and process are. They’re just really hungry to see how much they can close that gap.” – John Ward
Removing Pain Points with AI
“Back at an event in September, this term came up: “eliminating the suck.” I listened to practitioners talk about this during a virtual town hall where they said they spend 40 percent of their work week on things they hate doing. They want to spend more time on driving strategic value. If they can figure out a way to focus on the things that are going to make them more strategically valuable in their organizations, then that’s a game changer.” – John Ward
