Procurement leader Canda Rozier and senior sourcing veteran Lawrence Kane joined the Sourcing Industry Landscape Podcast to discuss the new age of intelligent automation, based on what they learned in SIG University’s Certified Intelligent Automation Professional (CIAP) program. They outline how intelligent automation can be a powerful tool to promote an organization’s growth and prosperity, and how – when implemented correctly – it can be targeted to improve areas holding back the enterprise.

What is a simple definition of intelligent automation?

Canda Rozier: I think intelligent automation is a fully holistic approach for business transformation that lets companies start to analyze data, provide analytics on the data and deliver digital solutions to optimize business processes and tasks. I think one of the things that has really struck me as I've learned more about and become engaged with intelligent automation is that it's as important to understand what it's not as to understand what it is.

 A lot of intelligent automation projects fail or don’t provide results – why?

Lawrence Kane: It's not a panacea, and it really needs to be implemented systemically because it's a program. It shouldn't be a one-off, because you have to look at your tools and processes and how the enterprise creates value and understand where are the places that you want to go and automate. Where are the places you want to stop doing things, where are the areas that you need to change doing something, right?

Your employees helped you navigate a historical disruption. Now they deserve your investment in their personal and professional development.

Everyone wants to “get back to normal.” I am anxious to safely hug friends and family, talk without the muffling of a mask, enjoy a meal in a restaurant, and travel abroad again. While the saying get back to normal is mostly a turn of phrase, going back to normal in the professional world is impossible.

Procurement professionals are constantly preparing for localized Black Swan events, like natural disasters, geopolitical conflicts, cybercrimes and such. But the impact of COVID is unique in its size and scope. What started as an epidemic in late 2019 quickly spread into a pandemic, consuming the entirety of 2020, and it’s still rearing its ugly head in the world.

Leaders in all sectors need to realize that the world as we know it has changed, and your employees are holding company leadership accountable. If you want to keep the talent you have and be an employer of choice to attract new talent, it’s vital to stop, listen, and learn from the people who help make your business successful.

Here are my recommendations to build a more inclusive, resilient, and agile workforce as we look ahead.

Back to the Office ... or Not

Now that vaccines are making inroads and people can safely congregate again, some look forward to going back to the office full time. After a year of working from home, others don’t want a full-time return to the office.

Before COVID, there was in many companies a conservative attitude about working from home. It was accepted on occasion but not wholly embraced. At Scanmarket, we will not return to a situation where people have to be at the office five days a week. Instead, we will pivot to a hybrid, part-time office model.

In part one and part two of this KPI series, we highlighted some of the foundational measurements for procurement pros and the problems of traditional procurement key performance indicators in terms of how they can be incomplete, misleading and even damaging to a value chain transformation.

So how do you get from tactical procurement metrics to more powerful spend/supply measures that help build new capabilities and favorably impact critical business outcomes?

We have mentioned some of the more expansive sets of metrics that organizations use to measure several areas:

●      Spend/cost management and savings

●      Supplier/supply performance

●      S2P process metrics for process performance

●      Underlying capabilities in talent management, digital, etc.

●      Stakeholder-specific metrics related to the above

In this third installment, we’ll dive a little deeper into some example metrics, but the first order of business is to provide a framework giving the backdrop on the KPIs and use it to hone in on metric types before listing individual KPIs.

SIG University Certified Sourcing Professional (CSP) program graduate William DeMarzo shares his perspective on the old sourcing cliché “don’t leave money on the table." 

In our SIG University CSP course, we learned the benefits of “leaving money on the table” as this negotiation style builds trust, transparency, and a collaborative relationship with suppliers.  Yet, the concept of leaving money on the table seems to be taboo in today’s business environment. Nine of the top ten hits from a Google search of the phrase are articles about why it’s a bad idea, a sign of weakness, or otherwise poor choice to do so. Perhaps this is more a sign of a zero-sum society than a negotiating strategy, but that’s a topic for another essay.

Let’s be clear that there are many business transactions where it is appropriate to pay the lowest price for a product or service. For example, products that have defined specifications, from a #2 pencil to a powerful server, or a service that has a measurable deliverable, should be sourced at the lowest price in the market. But when is leaving money on the table a good strategy?

SIG University Certified Third-Party Risk Management Professional (C3PRMP) program graduate Andrea Solano discusses how taking the C3PRMP program helped her to implement the framework for her team to operate as an optimal risk management and risk mitigation function across her department and enterprise-wide. 

 There are different types of workstreams and specializations that have been around a long time. However, the discipline of Third-Party Risk Management is something that is in the very beginning stages of inception. Currently, it is evolving into a discipline that many organizations shall be implementing as a standard operating function in the Silicon Valley business sector I work at. Working at Silicon Valley, the term Third-Party Risk management is still somewhat foreign and not understood as a critical and vital risk management function.

Third-Party Risk Management Function

The key role that I fulfill within the Third-Party Risk Management life cycle is in the due diligence process, which is the internal audit function that serves as a 2.5 – 3rd line of defense within my organization’s Risk Management Function. The SIG University Third-Party Risk Management training that I have taken throughout these past ten weeks has been highly instrumental for me. It will help create, build-out, and develop an internal audit framework that will be customized to meet the needs of this brand-new Third-Party Risk Management function within my organization.