Procurement has to move beyond its traditional role of merely sourcing goods and services at the cheapest price.

It needs to deliver strategic value to the organization, utilizing the power of AI to automate repetitive, transactional processes and free up procurement teams to drive better business outcomes as strategic deal-makers and value creators.

Here are six steps that procurement leaders should take to enable their teams to become true business partners:

1. Make Data-Driven Decisions
   Use new AI-powered technology to make more informed and intelligent sourcing decisions that utilize features such as E-negotiation to expose cost/qualitative supplier differences and fully enable category strategies to facilitate business sourcing, optimizing costs, improving efficiency, and increasing speed-to-market.
   
   
2. Embrace Game-Changing Tech
   Showcase how better managing company spend with NLP-driven interactive dialogue fueled by a bot that understands over 7,000 spend categories is a tangible business use case for generative AI, increasing productivity and efficiency, and reducing OpEx from day one.
   
   
3. Do More With Less
   With no training or procurement experience needed due to the consumer-like UX and Al bot guiding every step of the process, autonomous sourcing technology enables leaner procurement teams to run more projects, while actually having more time to focus on strategic tasks that add wider business value. 
   
   
4. Develop Supplier Relationships
   Transform relationships with your suppliers from transactional to strategic, reviewing provider proposals by AI bot with complete qualitative, quantitative and compliance analysis, increasing your speed of decision making, and driving collaboration and innovation with both internal and external partners.
   
   
5. Think Long-term 
   Add more, longer-term strategic value to the business by using AI-powered technology that collects information from each completed sourcing project and applies to ML models, making every future event more intuitive, personal and insightful for  stakeholders across the organization.
   
   
6. Attract Top Talent
   To transform into an impactful business partner who delivers real value, you need to attract and retain today’s best talent, offering them the innovative, intelligent, and consumer-like technology and platforms they are used to in their personal lives.
   
   

As McKinsey concludes in its recent report Procurement 2023: Ten CPO actions to defy the toughest challenges: “Procurement leaders who demonstrate value to the enterprise can become full-fledged strategic partners to CEOs, CFOs, and COOs. No longer should CPOs be merely guardians of a portion of enterprise costs. Now is the time for procurement leaders to step into a new horizon of value creation.”

If you are interested in learning more about the exciting opportunities for procurement in its new role as 'Business Partner', reach out to us here.