siliconindia | | September 20178Headquartered in London, The Smart Cube is a global professional services firm specialized in delivering custom research and analytics services to enable businesses have an efficient business transformation to propel their company forward.By Ayush Garg, Associate Vice President, The Smart Cuberocurement, as a core function, directly impacts a company's bottom-line through reducing costs and op-timising spend and buying behaviours. Organizations which are efficient in the source-to-pay cycle generate a 1­2 percent reduction in total spend year-on-year, says a Genpact research. According to the research, this happens to be the output of `average' sourcing and procurement organi-zations, which focus on simple efficiency from source to pay. The `best-in-class' sourcing and procurement organizations, on the other hand, create up to a 4­5 percent reduction. What makes them `best-in-class' is process effectiveness, and there are certain commonalities in the way they work to establish process-robustness. Here are the key trends that are shaping the procurement function:Predictive Analysis for Better Spend ManagementFor most Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs), meeting their `spend and savings' targets is the biggest objective. Deloitte's Global CPO Survey 2016 found that cost reduction is the top prior-ity for 74 percent of CPOs. Tools and technologies have aided and abetted the procurement function in conducting spend analysis, mak-ing it more efficient over the years ­ and in fact CPOs are planning to make the maximum technology investments in spend analysis, ac-cording to Deloitte. However, the focus has largely been on dissecting historical data to segment spend into categories and sub-categories, suppliers, business divisions and geographies. But this visibility cannot always help prevent cost escalations caused by factors such as volatility in PTRENDS REDEFINING THE PROCUREMENT FUNCTIONIN MY OPINION
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