In the Pulse of Procurement 2014 Blog series, we will be discussing different facets of the report in each of the blogs and delve deeper into the underlying factors responsible for some key findings. This initial blog from the series will focus on the Procurement Pain Areas for 2014.

The findings of the report suggest that business intelligence remains to be the biggest pain point amongst procurement execs. This has been cited for both internal information quality, with 47% respondents mentioning a need for better quality of internal information, and external information quality, with 37% respondents seeking for higher quality of external data.

Having good Information quality (both internal and external) is critical when it comes to decision making. For example, consider a category manager who lacks quality information for the category he/she manages, lack of such information would disable him/her in taking appropriate category sourcing decisions. This can have a direct impact on the organization. Technology implementation without quality information flowing through it would doom the entire project.

Consider another example related to supplier on-boarding, owing to globalization organizations are constantly working with vendors from across to globe to source goods and services at economical cost. However, this also requires the organizations to keep a close watch on the regulatory requirements.

Suppose an organization in the US is on-boarding a supplier from China due to availability of required goods at an attractive price, the big concern in such situations is to determine the credibility and authenticity of the data provided by the supplier. Procurement technology today enables businesses to get real time authentication of information through third party integration feature.  Zycus’ Supplier Management Solution offers third party integration with organizations, such as Ernst & Young, Dunn & Bradstreet and Equifax, to provide real-time authentication of Credit & Risk information, Parent-Child linkages, Supplier Evaluation Scores, Supplier Risk Analysis, etc. that would help validate the claims made by the suppliers and thus reduce the time and effort required by procurement professionals to on-board suppliers.

Another noticeable expectation from the global procurement leaders in the upcoming years is need for more integrated and predictive procurement information that encompasses forward looking analytics that integrate external supply market intelligence.

While “Integration” has become the new buzz-word with 57% of respondents quoting the need for procurement information to be integrated across processes as the top business intelligence priority. Enhanced Technology Enablement is at the heart of this evolving and maturing function with over 40% respondents affirming the need for predictive procurement information for the future of business intelligence. Even though organizations are looking for integrated and predictive procurement information, they still are rooting for simplicity as a means to obtain this objective. This seems to be an important criteria for organizations doing due diligence for automated solutions

In the next part of this series we will be covering some Procurement Benchmarks and a trend analysis that has been observed from the study.

We would love to hear your views/comments regarding the findings of the report and how, in your opinion, these findings affect your organization and the industry.

Click the download button below to access the report- “Pulse of Procurement 2014 Research Report”