Understand ecosystem management

To be a successful CPO you need to build a strong procurement ecosystem that serves each party involved – both third party suppliers in the case of the outsourcing that we previously mentioned , as well as in-house teams . Any skills , assets or technologies that aren ’ t directly available in the business must be worked , by you , into a dynamic and active ecosystem of partners that gives a competitive advantage .

Forget your doomsday scenarios of robots taking over the world – they ’ re way off . If you want to take procurement to the next level it ’ s essential to start leveraging the power of robotic process automation ( RPA ) sooner rather than later . RPA reduces transactional operations duties and significantly boosts your ROI . Accenture gives the example of a leading global energy company that saved $ 2.5mn annually by automating over 100 procurement , finance and accounting tasks . Not only that , the business saw a 67 % in manual average handling time too .

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