Last week, a member joined one of Procurement Leaders’ regular CPO Connect calls to share an in-depth case study about the end-to-end management of one of their strategic spend categories (strategic to the company, not just procurement).
I won’t go into detail about the programme here, but one thing the CPO said has stuck with me for two reasons. First, because it reflects part of our 2027 research programme and, second, it illustrates just how sophisticated the function has now become.
“Building resilience in this environment requires new practices, new investment and new capabilities,” the CPO said. “Just being reactive doesn’t work anymore.” In this type of environment, resilience and “anti-fragility” is a real and important competitive advantage.
With a holistic approach to managing their value chain, the ultimate goal is to create value across the entire commodity ecosystem while addressing fragility that has become more acute than ever due to the various issues we all know about. This is the sophistication I refer to.
Separately, about a month ago, we launched our 2027 research framework following extensive work among the Procurement Leaders’ CPO community and with direct and unfiltered feedback from our Advisory Board. It led us to the concept of how CPOs must focus their energy on reengineering enterprise value, with deep dives into adaptive networks, future-ready talent and ecosystem innovation.
I’ve shared various thoughts in this column about innovation and talent, but where do adaptive networks fit in, I hear you ask.
In the context of our research ambitions for 2027, it means how leading companies are trying to move beyond building a real-time, reactive capability for dealing with disruption to building supply networks that can navigate around it.
This means adopting an end-to-end value chain approach, putting in place the digital capabilities to identify potential weaknesses before they manifest and using that insight to prescribe proactivity.
This might come across as overly ambitious but, during that unfiltered feedback session I mentioned earlier, one of our board members looked me straight in the eye and said: “Real-time action is no longer enough.”
It’s clear that the sophistication levels of this function are becoming undeniably impressive.
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