In September, the Fairmarkit team and I had the pleasure of bringing procurement and sourcing leaders together at our inaugural customer event, Soar24. It was an inspiring and energetic day filled with hands-on learning, workshops, and actionable insights into how leveraging purpose-aligned technology and expertise throughout the procurement cycle can add value to an organization.
At Soar24, I had the privilege of connecting with procurement leaders from a variety of organizations and industries of different sizes, representing 35 companies already on the journey to add value through their procurement functions. Notably, most of the leaders I talked with reported through the CFO office. I can relate to the mandates and pressure these leaders undoubtedly face. CFOs have a unique perspective and purview across the entire organization and play an essential role in determining strategic and innovative ways to reduce cost, scale, and ultimately find new value drivers. But driving value through innovation is not just for revenue-generating teams.
The need to do more with the same (or less) is prevalent in today’s enterprises across all business lines. Procurement leaders and teams can leverage tools, GenAI, and expertise to uncover value beyond cost savings.
Uncovering Value
One of the roundtable discussions at Soar24 was dedicated solely to this topic. How are procurement professionals measuring and communicating benefits outside of cost savings to their organizations? Fairmarkit dashboards provide real-time cost savings, but there are countless ways to quantify the value that implementing and running on an autonomous sourcing tool can provide.
The energy and excitement around this topic were palpable, and while we could only scratch the surface of the many ways to derive value during our session, a few key takeaways emerged.
Metrics Exploration
Metrics vary greatly depending on the organization. Learning how other organizations use data to measure and report success metrics can help build reporting cadences for increased visibility.
💡 Tip: Data is one of the core inputs for producing good metrics, and finding ways to make metrics more forward-looking can be more valuable for proactive decision-making.
Sharing Insights
Procurement leaders can broaden their view of the business and encourage knowledge transfer across impact areas by creating a culture of shared insight and cross-functional partnerships.
💡 Tip: Share dashboards and success metrics with other teams to drive innovative collaboration and celebrate wins
Increasing Demand
Teams can demonstrate value by championing strategic initiatives that align with the organization’s goals.
💡 Tip: Look for ways purchasing decisions and strategies can be a strategic asset to support growth.
These takeaways are just the broad brush strokes of tactics that can strategically add value to an organization. As an individual contributor and a team, procurement professionals have unlimited opportunities to drive actionable insights into quantifying value by leveraging tools like Fairmarkit, workflow maturities, cross-functional collaboration, and more.
With that, I am excited to share our upcoming webinar, Beyond Cost Savings. This session will dive deeper into the takeaways listed above and discuss best practices to create, share, and monitor value added by procurement functions within an organization. Register now:
