Be bold, be brave, think big

Through 2019 at Procurement Leaders we'll be exploring what the future holds for our function, sharing stories of how our members are pushing new boundaries and setting themselves up for future success. 

We'll be having fun doing so; hosting debates, interviewing progressive CPOs and other diverse groups of thought leaders from across the business ecosystem, sharing theories and challenging each other as well.

We want to understand how the function must evolve to stay relevant and central to business-value creation, and, crucially, we want to understand the investments that need to be made today for that future vision to become a reality.

And while words come easy, we'll also report back on what our members are doing, where they're spending their time, energy and investment cash; as well as the projects, programmes and initiatives they're launching. Crucially, we'll explore where procurement is helping to drive true strategic value to their organisations as equal and trusted business partner.

My view is that the future of the procurement function will continue to evolve from one primarily focused on savings and compliance to one that designs complex value networks and collaborates strategically, both internally and externally, to deliver business value and innovation.

But to get there, the function must reenergise itself to:

• Embrace new approaches and technologies to remove friction from inter-organisational collaboration while adopting digital approaches to make the procurement process entirely seamless and efficient. Procurement will be tasked with providing real-time market insight to help drive predictive analysis and intelligence business decisions.
• Procurement will be responsible for developing and maintaining supply ecosystems, tapping into and helping to facilitate co-creation between a variety of third parties from different backgrounds and with diverse financial and cultural footprints.
• The function will scout for capability and innovation using traditional methods but, increasingly, digital technologies and platforms linking their business and product-platform needs with external capability and innovation; all within a commercially viable and risk-appropriate model. 

Some of our members have put in place "Bold Move" programmes, others are laser focused on creating a cognitive function and others still in building their own AI Lab, utilising the vast volumes of real-time data they have at their disposal.

There's some impressive work taking place already, some visionary thinking and I'm looking forward to playing whatever small role we can in supporting the future trajectory of this function.

In short; be bold, be brave and think big.