P&SC LIVE New York: The Procurement Strategy Forum

July 19, 2024

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The Procurement Strategy Forum at Procurement & Supply Chain LIVE New York 2024

Leading executives from Cognizant, ServiceNow, CBRE and the US House of Representatives shared valuable insight at Procurement & Supply Chain LIVE New York

Procurement & Supply Chain LIVE New York brought together top leaders from the industry, providing attendees with a wealth of knowledge through fireside chats, keynotes and panel discussions.

Executives and experts offered first-hand experiences and critical insights into the procurement and supply chain industry.

One of the event's highlights was the Procurement Strategy Forum, sponsored by ServiceNow. This forum featured exclusive insights and expert advice on procurement strategies from industry leaders.

Implementing supplier diversity

The forum began with a focus on supplier diversity and inclusion within procurement strategies.

Melanie Temkin, Chief Procurement Officer at Cognizant, emphasised the need to align goals with the organisation's diversity and inclusion objectives and integrate these into the procurement process.

“I think it's really important to set goals aligned to the greater organisation around diversity and inclusion, not only with your supply base, but also as related to your employees as well,” she said.

“Really making it embedded as part of the overall procurement process, ensuring that we're constantly assessing new suppliers, with capabilities that have those designations as well and really educating and training not only your internal procurement team, but your key stakeholders of the importance of having a diverse supply base.”

Birchard Allen, Chief Procurement Officer at the US House of Representatives, shared that they adopt an organic approach by engaging with a community of contractors and vendors through outreach opportunities to identify new players.

“We have a community of contractors and vendors that we deal with, but we also have reach-out opportunities, so that we can meet, greet, press the flesh to understand who is a new player out there and who might be interested in participating in any type of procurement that the House may have to offer," he said.

"We go about doing it that way, and then organically, you know, we just end up seeing a lot of new faces, when we actually conduct procurements in the Washington, DC area. That's really gratifying when that happens, in an organic way.”

The role of technology in procurement processes

The forum's discussion then shifted to the crucial role of technology and AI in procurement strategies.

Bob Bruning, Chief Procurement Officer at CBRE, talked about their investments in procurement technology, including new source-to-contract and procure-to-pay systems, and a revamped supplier onboarding and risk screening process.

“We're looking forward over the next three years to put together a technology roadmap to really bring in a lot more automation into everything we're doing," Bruning said.

"You could put AI in front of anything that procurement does and make it better and smarter, and looking forward, we'll probably be putting about 50% of our overall IT investment into AI over the next few years.”

Dean Ocampo, Director of Products, Finance and Supply Chain at ServiceNow, highlighted the importance of optimising technology in procurement. He discussed cross-domain and cross-team work, focusing on workflow automation and collaboration for better decision-making.

“There is just putting AI to work, putting aside generative AI, there's just the plain old school regression and classification AI algorithms that have a lot of application,” he said.

“We look at a lot of procurement and are still doing a lot of the science experiments. It's time for that to come into regular business output and really put it to work for us, in part, be a part of that cross-team collaboration.”

P&SC LIVE continues to expand

Procurement & Supply Chain LIVE continues to expand its repertoire of events, with more to come in 2024 and 2025. Discover our essential diary dates below.

2024 diary dates: