“Strategic procurement has always been one of the best ways in which you can rapidly control costs ”
— Natascha Schijven , Partner , Supply Chain & Manufacturing Operations , Deloitte
and effectively deduce the core gist required for more accurate and accelerated decision making . That ’ s what ’ s needed to survive in the new Industry 4.0 era .”
For Schijven , then , what does digital mean ? “ To me , it ’ s all about the conversion of data into key ‘ nuggets ’ of information , so inherently it ’ s all about the analytics , harnessing the ability to have everything that used to be on paper digitized , empowering centralized cross-functional analysis . It means leveraging Big Data technology and having the latest advanced analytics get to work on all those petabytes of data to inform short- , mid- , and long-term sourcing decisions . This is how we help produce insights clients never dreamt were possible before , because all the data that was decentralized across hundreds of laptops , different enterprise systems and thousands of bits of paper is now in one centralized database or stack . That ’ s what it means to me .”
Looking at strategic sourcing more specifically , digital means “ having everything from your PDF material and artwork specs , through to your policies , contractual and operational procurement data centralized ”. “ Putting statistical , optimization and other digital analytics to work within a rigorous strategic sourcing process on all that combined to rapidly produce exhaustive insights human intelligence never could – that ’ s how I would explain the benefits of analytics empowered strategic sourcing to a CPO ,” says Schijven . In order to effectively capitalize on digital in strategic sourcing , a key priority is to have the right talent in place . “ There ’ s a big shift in capability ; the skillset required to extract value is vastly different . Next generation sourcing managers need to be trained in advanced analytics and
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