Service 04 of 06

Digital Procurement & Innovation

Buying the platform is the easy part. Most procurement technology disappoints not because the software is bad but because nothing about how people work was changed to suit it.

6 areas of work
On this page04
  1. Overview
  2. Brought in when
  3. What this covers
  4. Where it comes up

Overview

We define what a procurement technology estate should look like, which parts of it you need, and in what order. We do not resell platforms and hold no vendor partnerships, so the recommendation is not a product pitch.

Then we help make it stick: process redesign, data that is clean enough to be worth reporting on, and adoption planned as deliberately as the configuration.

Brought in when

  • A system has been bought and nobody is using it.
  • Spend data exists in four places and none of them agree.
  • You need to choose a source-to-pay or contract management platform and want advice with no commercial interest in the answer.
  • Approvals take weeks because the workflow was designed around an org chart that has since changed.
  • Reporting takes a person three days a month to assemble by hand.
  • Procurement data protection and supplier due diligence obligations need to be met properly.

What this covers

Six areas of work.

Architectural discovery

An honest assessment of the current technology estate, covering what you have, what it is doing, what overlaps and what nobody uses. Then a target architecture that fits how the organisation operates.

E-procurement strategy

Designing buying channels that people will use: catalogues, marketplaces and self-service routes for the low-value, high-volume spend that otherwise consumes most of a procurement team's week.

Procurement technology advisory

Independent evaluation, selection and integration support across e-procurement platforms, contract lifecycle management tools and supplier portals. Requirements defined before the demos start, so the demos are useful.

Source-to-pay solutions

Selecting, implementing and improving source-to-pay: sourcing through contracting, ordering, receipting and payment as one process, with procurement, finance and compliance working from the same record.

Process automation & data analytics

Removing the manual handling that slows procurement down, and building spend visibility that is reliable enough to make decisions on: classification, reporting and the analysis that shows where the leverage sits.

Cybersecurity & compliance

Procurement holds supplier, contract and pricing data, and increasingly personal data too. This covers UK GDPR obligations, supplier security due diligence and the practical controls around who can see and change what.

Where it comes up

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Next step

Discuss a procurement technology challenge.

Whether you are choosing a platform, rescuing one nobody uses, or trying to get reliable numbers out of the one you have, the first conversation is the same.