<divDon’t miss updates on Procurement & Supply Chain, Subscribe here!>I hope that you have enjoyed the article, “Procurement Trends Today, Goals Tomorrow.”
Last week, I delivered a presentation at a conference where I went into depth on the very topics covered in the article – the current procurement trends that will be future goals. I had an interesting question from an attendee at the very end of my presentation.
She asked: “Because you’ve been in procurement a while, what previous trends have you seen turn into goals?”
I’ve obviously seen more than I had time to mention but, reflecting on what procurement looked like in the mid-90’s, here are a few that I squeezed in…
- Reverse auctions as a percentage of sourcing events (this has since gotten less frequently used as people have realized that reverse auctions are only appropriate for a subset of all sourcing opportunities)
- Outsourced/offshored/global spend as a percentage of total spend
- Percentage of compliance with eProcurement system usage
- Procurement transactions completed by offshore contractors
- GPO use that replaces unmanaged spend
- Pcards (which, last year, I predicted would start to see a shift from plastic to digital)
While looking at these procurement trends that became “the standards” since the mid-1990’s, I think that the trends brewing today stand to more significantly alter the future of procurement. It will be exciting to see what the procurement goals of tomorrow are!
