Fast-track to future-ready procurement

Innovating in procurement means being more proactive and predictive. This goes beyond driving cost savings and toward working new ways—collaborating with business stakeholders across departments to understand their needs—planning together using data insights to predict future trends, supporting sustainability and more. When procurement is a true business partner, it can unleash breakthrough value. This kind of innovation requires a data-powered operating model and operations maturity.

The future of procurement starts here

Accenture’s global research indicates that operating model maturity is advancing among global organizations. Our research and experience reveal four levels of operations maturity: stable, efficient, predictive and future-ready. Each level is grounded in and enabled by increasingly more sophisticated technology, talent, processes and data insights.

On average, we found future-ready organizations to be:

Procurement leaders say that their organization’s operations maturity has improved and they are optimistic about more progress in the next three years.

Just 4% of procurement leaders say that their organizations were predictive three years ago. None had future-ready operations. Today, 61% view their operations as predictive, and 2% call them future-ready. By 2023, 65% expect to have predictive operations, and 26% expect to be future-ready.

A deeper dive into operations maturity

To better understand procurement leaders’ views of operations maturity, consider how we measure future readiness. It reflects an organization’s ability to scale eight characteristics of operating model maturity: analytics, automation, data, stakeholder experiences, AI, business-technology collaboration, functional and industry leading practices and workforce agility.

Procurement leaders rate their organizations slightly above average for two of the eight characteristics (agile and stakeholder) in wide use or use at scale, which aligns with the fact that most see their organizations as being predictive.

Knowledge is power

We have identified three procurement strategies to accelerate their move towards a future-ready state.

Now is the time to make your move to intelligent operations

The work of procurement may often be undervalued, but it is the backbone of the business. As CPOs embrace their growing strategic role and take that proverbial “seat at the table,” they can help the business along its journey to future readiness by leading by example.

Many of the keys of operations maturity—such as automation, data insight, an agile workforce, cloud at scale, and ecosystem relationships—exist in procurement today. This gives CPOs an excellent foundation to build on as they continue to push toward intelligent operations in their own area as well.

Here’s how:

Client case studies