Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. Today, I\u2019ll be reviewing a whitepaper entitled \u201cConvergence of Travel and Procurement\u201d from Procurement.travel and thebeat.travel.<\/p>\n
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It has become more and more apparent over the years: leading procurement departments have been expanding their influence over spend and earning responsibility for sourcing new services categories like health benefits, fleet management, and travel. However, there is a reason that these categories were previously outside of Procurement\u2019s portfolio: they each have specialized nuances. The whitepaper says \u201c[travel and meeting purchasing] uses perplexing vernacular, technology and third-party providers, as well as reams of documentation. And there\u2019s no doubt that moving people is vastly more complex than moving goods.\u201d<\/p>\n
The whitepaper expands on the complexities of travel procurement by saying \u201c\u2026while travel services comprise just one commodity category, it can involve hundreds of contracts. Like other service categories, it is complex in that it is difficult to control, considered personal by employees and can quickly impact sales and productivity. Switching suppliers takes time, pricing can be mysterious, distribution is fragmented and comparisons are tough.\u201d<\/p>\n
That being said, the whitepaper concludes that \u201cWhile travel itself has unique characteristics, managing it and buying it are undeniably on a path that adopts strategic procurement methodologies.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the whitepaper is not a step-by-step guide on how to take over travel procurement and make immediate improvements, it is a decent overview of the trend to place travel management in the procurement organization and addresses issues such as spend visibility, SOX compliance, and the need for procurement to become more service-oriented. No registration is required for this whitepaper, so I recommend that you download it\u00a0then hovering over \u201cDownloads\u201d and selecting \u201cProcurement Convergence\u201d from the menu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n