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The next eWorld Procurement and Supply event in London is just one week away, but there’s still enough time to book your free place.

汇集了采购practition eWorld 2022ers, consultants, solution providers and media for a day of keynotes, focused briefings, case studies and networking opportunities, and for the first time in two years you can do this in person at the Grand Connaught Rooms.

Titled “Bouncing Back Better: Building a Resilient & Sustainable Future” eWorld is hosting senior procurement, supply chain and finance executives from organizations across the commercial and public sectors to talk about their learnings, experiences and opinions. Learn about the latest developments in technology, market trends and take part in discussing the hot topics in the world of procurement today.

We recently heard of a difficulty facing a CPO within the financial services field when he, newly placed in charge of creating a procurement team, found he couldn’t recruit. His challenge was to populate all procurement roles across various locations; the difficulty lay in that despite this being a well-paid sector and an exciting opportunity for procurement professionals, he couldn’t find the candidates to fill the roles.

In the age of “the great resignation” one would assume a huge talent pool out there ripe for the picking — apparently not.

“In actual fact, for the category managers, strategic sourcing professionals, digital procurement experts and so on, the recruitment industry is experiencing limited success — and that’s symptomatic of the whole market right now,” explains Andrew Daley of Edbury Daley international procurement and supply chain technology recruitment. Daley sums up: “In my opinion, for our sector ‘the great resignation’ is a myth – I’ve seen no evidence of it at all, in fact, quite the opposite. We have never had to work harder to get procurement talent" Here's why ...

Sustainability has reached a turning point in procurement. In a recent webinar detailing the findings of a Keelvar survey of sourcing professionals, I found it fascinating that despite supply chain disruptions remaining an acute pain point for the industry, it was sustainability that received top billing from respondents as the supplier attribute most likely to increase in value for their organizations over the next five years.

While this may not have always been the case for businesses with supply chains, best-in-class companies are taking action in the face of a changing global landscape that looks poorly on environmental polluters, and they are increasingly aligning with customer preference for more sustainably produced goods. It is becoming imperative that businesses look at sustainability as strategically important: procurement, particularly sourcing, is at the nexus of that shift in mindset. That said, the obstacles facing organizations with supply chains looking to lessen their impact on the environment are numerous.

For example, critical to achieving sustainability goals that could have a tangible positive impact on our planet's future will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but the tactics required to make good on these efforts are not always easy or straightforward ... find out why.

The global challenges, and changes, that businesses have endured over the past 18 months have left many organizations prioritising investment in procurement digitization, not just to automate and future-proof their P2P processes, but just as importantly to help with their ESG/GRC agendas.

How do you know which procurement technology solution providers have augmented their offerings with ESG capabilities? And how do you know the best partner to choose for you?

At eWorld London in March 2022 Spend Matters’ Global Head of Strategic Accounts Jenny Draper, will be delivering advice and intelligence gathered from Spend Matters’ own substantial data-backed research into the global procurement, finance and supply chain technology landscape to help with your ESG tech decisions. Here's what to expect:

We talk to an expert in the field of marketing procurement services to understand better why you might need to take a strategic partnership approach, how to recognize a good partner, and what they can offer you.

George Roumanis is Global Partner with marketing procurement specialists RightSpend, an online platform and consultancy that provides fact-based insights into marketing agency fees, costs and relationship development. He talks about how you can get a better deal for your money, more ROI from your agency and for your brand, and enhance your value proposition to the business, and how this is more achievable when you have not only expert advice, but insights from real-world data to back it up.

Hot on the heels of Tuesday's SAP-Icertis deal in the CLM market, today Germany-based SAP announced its intention to acquire a majority stake in Taulia, a provider of working capital management solutions.

"The move is aimed at giving companies better access to liquidity and improving their cash flows," the SAP press release states. "The acquisition further expands SAP’s Business Network and strengthens SAP’s solutions for the CFO office. Taulia will operate as an independent company with its own brand in the SAP Group."

Look for theSpend Matters PROrapid analysis on this dealfrom our analysts here.

New Year resolutions are a traditional means of thinking about what we would like to do differently. The start of a new year is usually an occasion to reflect on the closing year and think about the year that starts. Whether 'making resolutions' works or not is strongly debated! Predictions for the year to come are also a classic. However, looking back at 2021 and 2020, it would be futile and irrelevant to make predictions considering the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world we live in today. Therefore, at Spend Matters, we thought that asking fellow procurement and supply chain professionals about their wishes for the market for 2022 would be a more appropriate way to understand where the procurement world should/could/has to "boldly" go.

We were delighted to receive a massive amount of feedback from procurement tech and service providers, totalling some 30+ sets of wishes, which we condensed and published in a series of articles of interest to practitioner and vendor alike. We are now, with the end of January looming, closing this series by providing a wrap-up and our own take on the key themes that emerged.

Finishing off the contributions to our series of New Year wishes (rather than 'predictions') for the procurement, supply and services marketplace for the year ahead, today we hear from cloud-based business spend management automation technology provider Jaggaer.

Jaggaer wishes that ESG is driven in large part through intelligent solutions, that organizations carve out more time for supplier collaboration and that organizations devote more time toward developing responsible AI. Read more in their discussion here.

B2B payments technology provider, TransferMate, discusses how the theory of ‘marginal gains’ – extracting efficiencies from everywhere — can be applied to procurement with dramatic outcomes. In the past, marginal gains for procurement professionals meant cutting costs. Looking for those 1% savings in every deal was their bread-and-butter, and one of the most straightforward ways of measuring performance.

TransferMate exlains how agility, resiliency and efficiency are now becoming the watchwords of the forward-thinking CPOs of the world, and offers four steps to follow in order to take up this new mantle — the four fundamental pillars you need to review are 1) the suppliers you’re using, 2) the people using your systems, 3) the system itself and 4) how CPOs actively manage this system.

DevelopMyTeam is an on-line self-assessment-based tool that helps team leaders get insights about their team members’ skills maturity and capability levels, both individually and as an ensemble. For procurement and supply-related functions, because it maps skills with gaps in the team, it enables the CPO or head of procurement to cultivate plans for the development of individuals and the team overall towards delivering more value for the business.

As Spend Matters is primarily involved with the technology that can make the procurement practitioner’s life easier and more efficient, we were interested in this piece of software which was chiefly architected just over a year ago by procurement strategist, coach and trainer, Nick Ralphs.

We spoke with Ralphs to understand more.

At the close of our series of wishes for the procurement, supply and services markets for the year ahead from expert tech and service providers, today we hear from procurement and supply chain consultancy Proxima, cloud-based supply chain relationship development platform, Suppeco, and SRM and supply chain risk management specialist SupplHi.

我们陷害他们如何希望周围的“愿望”see their markets evolve, whether that be in terms of software or service, workforce or talent, suites vs best of breed or even the evolution of partnerships and ecosystems. Today's wishes range from focusing more on our commitment to delivering positive change, to hard-coding relationship value to the top line, to more collaboration across industry verticals.

Read more here.

Coming to the close of our series of wishes for the procurement, supply and services markets for the year ahead from expert tech and service providers, today we hear from multinational management consultancy BearingPoint and AI contract lifecycle management specialist Malbek.

我们陷害他们如何希望周围的“愿望”see their markets evolve, whether that be in terms of software or service, workforce or talent, suites vs best of breed or even the evolution of partnerships and ecosystems. Today's wishes range from a renewed focus on identifying, qualifying and developing suppliers/sources closer to home, with particular emphasis on North America and Mexico, and a greater focus on universally accepted contract terms.

Read more here.