My guest today is Christian Lanng, the co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Tradeshift.
I’m really happy to welcome Christian back to the show. He first joined me in August of 2016, all the way back in episode 80! It was one of my most enjoyable interviews because Christian has strong views on the future of procurement and the intersection of technology and supply chains.
In today’s conversation, I wanted to follow up to see what, in his mind, has changed since we last spoke – is technology evolving as fast as predicted? How does Christian see organizations starting to adapt? I was also interested to learn how Tradeshift determines which ‘future technologies’ to invest in, and why they recently became members of the Hyperledger project, a global, open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry Blockchain technologies.
“I don’t think procurement as it exists today will even exist in five years. I don’t think we need to put that label on it. But buying and selling will certainly exist.” – Christian Lanng
Highlights from the Show Include:
- Christian explains how learning to function in a ‘broken world’ often leads procurement and supply chain to settle for incremental impact.
- Christian talks about why getting to 100% digital is the first step towards a successful starting point for a procurement transformation.
- Christian shares how to read the early signs for the need to make changes based on information from our supply chain.
- Christian points out that procurement is not the only corporate function that has faced disruption in recent years.
- Christian explains why the time has come for procurement to ‘let go’ of the traditional trappings of corporate influence.
- Christian talks about the critical (and growing) role of guided buying in corporate procurement.
- Christian outlines where in the procurement process AI will do a better job than overtasked humans who are just ‘clicking the button’ anyway.
Links and Resources:
- Subscribe to the Art of Procurement podcast.
- Christian Lanng on LinkedIn
- AOP Episode 80
- Tradeshift
- Hyperledger
