Name: The Future of Procurement Automation & Cost Optimization
Uploaded: 2026-03-27T17:16:08.269Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: The Future of Procurement Automation & Cost Optimization

Transcript for "The Future of Procurement Automation & Cost Optimization": Before Amazon Business, buying for work was chaotic. Now it's easy to find products from thousands of suppliers in one place. Save on every type of purchase from individual items to bulk orders. At any time, you can view your spending on prebuilt, easy to use dashboards. Plus, you can free up cash flow if you choose to extend payment deadlines and view and approve your team's purchases easily. With Amazon Business, things just got a lot more manageable. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar in partnership with Amazon Business. My name is Tom Chapman, senior editor of Procurement Magazine. Today's webinar is part of an ongoing series with Amazon Business where we explore the big issues impacting procurement, supply chain and manufacturing. Make sure you visit the webinar section on the Procurement Magazine website for more insights, expertise and success stories. I'd also just like to mention our Procurement and Supply Chain live event series, which in just a few weeks time will be arriving in Chicago with the US Summit. Now on to business. Today's session is called the future of procurement automation and cost optimization. A lot to unpack there. Today we're going to be looking at how procurement is evolving in response to an operating environment which clearly is shaped by increasing cost pressures, supply chain disruption and rising internal expectations. Procurement these days is now much more than simply managing spend. It's becoming more intelligent and data driven with automation, real time visibility and AI of course helping teams make faster, better decisions. So the question isn't just how to optimize costs, it's how to build procurement functions that are scalable, resilient and strategic. Joining me today, I'm pleased to say we have some experts who bring different perspectives from across procurement, technology and transformation. First of all, have Hidden Palmer, Chief Procurement Officer at Beasley and Ashley Norton, Head of Supply Chain and Manufacturing for The UK and Ireland at NTT Data. It's great to have you both here today with us. Before we get into the discussion, it'd be great if each of you could just introduce yourselves and a bit about your role. Hisson, let's come to you first. Hi Tom, thanks for that. So I'm Hinton, I'm the CPO at Beasley. Beasley is a world leading specialty insurer based in London. I've been a procurement leader for a number of years in many sectors from banking to pharma to consultancy and I've always been across this particular conundrum about how do we speak to the business and create growth and value. So looking forward to the conversation today. Absolutely and Ashley over to you. Yeah thanks Tom. So my name is Ashley Norton, I head up our supply chain and procurement practice from an advisory perspective in The UK. I help clients across multiple industries and sectors solve their problems, and largely we apply technology solutions to help clients solve their problems, but we also look at the business advisory lens in combination to the use of technology so that we can actually package solutions more comprehensively and deploy them at scale and at pace. I previously also ran the advisory procurement practice of all CAP Jomino events, so I've been working with procurement and technology solutions for a number of years, so great to be here. Good stuff, thanks Ashley. Now I want to kick off the conversation with, I think it's fair to say, probably quite a big beefy question to get our teeth into. Hidr, when you look at procurement today, what would you say the biggest shift currently is in terms of that's really shaping how teams operate and deliver value maybe compared to the times of yesteryear? Yeah, I think it's a really challenging question but it's one that procurement has to meet and for me that's about translating the business urgency and the business taxonomy into procurement activity. What I mean by that is we've got to look a little bit less inward about our efficiency, which is the traditional way from a few years ago, to really being and having a grip of business growth and ambition and business challenges and be very outwardly focused on that. So that turns into agility, that turns into adaptability, that turns into resilience, but it also turns into moving away from a cost driven traditional conversation into a business partnering growth driven outcome. Ashlee, your thoughts? Yeah, I some of the words that hit and used there, particularly around growth. Historically the procurement function has been very cost orientated, but the modern organisation, the modern challenges that a CPO will face are far more dynamic and complex than in previous years. If you look at the threats and the issues from a compliance lens, from a risk lens, whether that's sustainability, cyber, ethical, it's so much more challenging than it used to be, and the abundance of data available just makes it almost impossible to effectively manage it in the historical way that organisations have run their operations. So I think that switch to value is necessary for an organisation like Procurement to start demonstrating true value as a strategic partner to the business. And Hinton, how are you seeing on the ground perhaps procurement teams such as maybe your own contribute more directly to that enterprise value? Yeah, it's interesting, right? So there are very few functions today that have the ability to do two things and procurement is one of those. They have the ability to look across the entire organisational landscape and enable it to do something different and be better. So that's a privilege, And you've got access into that because how do you develop the right procurement strategy if you don't do that effectively? That's number one. So you've got access to where the company wants to go by function and directly from a board level. And you need people to understand that and can build that and have credibility in execution, those types of changes. That's number one. Number two then, as I heard you rightly said, the level of scrutiny on resilience, compliance and so on is going off the scale. We're not a compliance function, we still remain as an enabling function but the two things have to intercept. Your method has to accommodate that without becoming a drag because you still want agility and you still want pace in that, right? Because things change in the marketplace. Opportunities exist and then dissipate very quickly so you need to be able to be ahead of that and that means you need to have fantastic relationships and trust with those people who are shaping the company because you're one of those. So how we do a little bit of that at Beasleaf as an example and previously when I was advising on this through consultancy is tapping into what that looks like from a growth perspective. So over recent times AI has been a traditional topic. But for what end? So if my value stops at negotiating the deal with an AI supplier then I've missed an opportunity. If my value starts at what we're trying to achieve as a business that AI can enable, I can find the right partner with them and I can exercise, execute that and create the right outcome for that business entity that creates agility and growth opportunity. And that could be buying a company, it could be engaging the right capability or it could be moving into using an asset today more effectively. Some fantastic points there. So Nassi, I want to get your thoughts on that as well but also I wonder just in conjunction with that what changes are perhaps needed internally certainly to really enable procurement to stand out and be seen as a true strategic partner? Well I think firstly one needs to look at your own function to understand how to behave and how to act externally within the wider value chain. I'm going use the word 'value chain' carefully because historically supply chain and procurement have been responsible for the supply base, but actually what they're responsible for now is the value chain, which is a much wider and broader, more complex ecosystem of partners, and often that ecosystem of partners is hidden for various reasons, and sometimes organisations in certain industries and sectors can have vastly complex and large exponential value chains. The question is how do you internally look at yourself with processes and with technology to enable you to be much more expansive in how you add value to the enterprise, and that value will come through from lots of the areas that we just started to touch on, whether it's compliance, whether it's, you know, cost traditional because costs will always be there, well let's just be frank it will always be there but how would you augment that cost requirement with all of the other requirements that now come into CPOs and procurement functions? Part of the answer is process and how you operate, so the operating model, but that impacted by the technology that you choose to use. All of those things coming together is how you actually start to shape how you behave as an organisation to start to drive and add more value, and that's when you have really, really interesting discussions about well how do we measure ourselves, how do we now demonstrate that value to the organisation, because traditionally it's been something different, right, in terms of piecewise variance or cost down or whatever it's been. So there's a journey and I think often organisations want to jump on technology just because it's the shiny thing to do, but there's a requirement to do things in the right way and I think sometimes that's missed. Can I just add to that, Tom? I think Ash made some really great points there about how you measure yourself and that's very much what I was saying about the inward traditional way of measuring things. The business and the boardroom is thinking about how the business is going to survive and how resilience is going to be enacted and how agility can be sustained or how sustainability can be met and intersected. If you measure yourself in those terms and you speak in those terms then you're going to get much more traction in my experience with the organisation. Your method then has to enable you to execute at that pace and that level of expectation but and then the cost becomes a parameter within that equation as opposed to the outcome of the equation. Absolutely, yeah, no it's an interesting scenario I suppose an interesting sort of perhaps flip to the maybe old school way of thinking. Now of course we are going to be talking a lot today about automation which you know goes without saying is a major focus across procurement and supply chain right now. Actually in those regulated environments, where are you maybe seeing the most immediate impact of automation across procurement workflows? So, from a regulated environment perspective, a regulated industry and there are different regulations within different industries but we generally start to think about compliance and the risk associated with non compliance, so those industries will be focused on the specific regulations that they have to adhere to, and sometimes they're really challenging and really, really tricky. So I won't go into specific industries and start to talk about unique requirements, because I think we've got quite a broad conversation, but I think the interest and the appetite to avoid liability and penalties for the various different compliances that exist. I think an easy one to talk about is probably sustainability and ESG, deforestation and the risk associated with not understanding the actual supply base and whether it impacts the deforestation regulations, okay, lots of industries are affected by that. The risk is not complying and then being significantly financially and reputationally penalised. So I guess it almost steps us back into the conversation we were having just a couple of minutes ago, it's about understanding how you can bring in that capability and monetise it, because I think the missing piece which we've probably seen time and time again, is there's really, really good capabilities that have been developed and brought into organisations, but leaders have not necessarily known how to monetise that value to demonstrate it to the board and the C suites, and that's part of the missing piece of the jigsaw I think. Hinton, how are organisations managing to actually introduce automation? I don't know if there's some light you can shed on this while actually still meeting those regulatory requirements, supply due diligence, controls, audit trails, you know, how can that balance be struck? I think it can be struck and is being struck but as these earlier observations about technology being that shining thing, if you lead with the tech that isn't going to solve the problem, that's going to create a different problem. You have to lead with what is it that you're trying to solve and the efficiency gain off the back of that. So if you're doing supplier due diligence or third party risk management, then you've got to think about what elements of that journey, that business process could I collapse with the application of technology accelerators? It could be risk insights, it could be sustainability monitoring, it could be financial health that that organisation you're engaging, their supply chain, their fourth parties. Technologies can drive that for you much more effectively than a questionnaire could in traditional ways. So there are examples. You can collapse process and generate insight to create the traction for the different conversation you want to have with your stakeholder. I think that's very powerful but you need real talent in your workforce to do that. And to not transact something. You need talent to interpret and then bring that insight to bear for your stakeholder and clients. The efficiency can be gained through optimized automation but then in the end you're accelerating something that if you haven't got the right people who can then interpret it and then articulate it into a business change then that's just putting more pressure on you. I focus very much on the talent characteristic that the insight will enable us to then have a different level of conversation to move the business forward. This webinar is brought to you by Procurement Magazine in partnership with Amazon Business. Amazon Business is your one stop destination for everything your organisation needs. Think of it as the Amazon you already know and love, but specifically re engineered for the way you work. Amazon Business gives you access to business only pricing on millions of items and quantity discounts that scale with your growth. It's about spending less time bogged down in those manual tasks and more time on what really matters. So head over to Amazon Business and make the power of Amazon work for you. You both mentioned there the importance of approaching maybe these technology implementations, I should say, with the right mindset, the right approach, not necessarily seeing that technology is the silver bullet so to speak. Where then actually are organisations maybe underestimating the effort when rolling out automation at scale, you know, particularly as it relates to governance and compliance. You know, organisations approaching these rollouts perhaps slightly naively? I think when we talk about technology deployment, often the missing part for me is the connectivity or the understanding to the organisational strategy. So it's the translation of the strategy through to the function or the department and the understanding of technology choices and the value it brings to those functional use cases which should match the organisational strategy. So you need to go through that journey, I think in Hitton's words, of understanding yourself, because until you understand yourself and how you enable the strategy to become realisation, then you can't realistically make the right choices about technology and you can't realistically know whether automation is the right solution for you. Now on the premise that automation is right, it's a question of where to deploy, where is it safe, and you get into all the other questions about well okay, do I have the right data? Is the data good enough? Is it repeatable? Is it robust? Where is it safe to deploy? Where can we actually afford to get it wrong and learn and then go again without actually damaging our reputation or you know, regulated and maybe it's even worse in terms of causing a seriousness. So you have to be very careful where you choose, and part of that choice will be around people and capability, and it will also be about the data and the risk. Absolutely. Hinton, any thoughts to add there? Yeah, you're spot on. Talked about the people bit, but the data bit is absolutely critical and having decision grade data or intelligence is really where you want to get to. But to get there you need to do a lot of work on making sure that data is trustworthy. So if I'm automating something I've got low confidence in, I'm going to have even less confidence in what it's suggesting I need to do next. So I need to really invest in making sure the data is not just clean once but sustainably clean. So I can then develop insight and decision grade intelligence from it that my board can then pivot and make a decision on. I think that's really vital. So you can either go down the route of full suite or orchestrated procurement activity But in the end, the data is really driving the decisions that the organisation is going to have to make, but also the perception of you as procurement. So if you're really enabling the organisation through insight and intel, that automation is allowing you to do much quicker, then you're going to be more likely in the conversation as opposed to receiving the output of the decision. I'm glad data has come up already because something we really wanted to sort of talk about today was amplifying that spend visibility and really generating supplier value through data. Ashley, can you shed a bit of light on how organizations are using P2P and those S2C platforms to improve their spend visibility and really create a more complete view of supplier performance? I mean, dependent on the organisation and the size of the business, I would say some not all some will have P2P and source to contract solutions, and most of those top tier software solutions have an element of embedded AI into those solutions, and it's quickly and vastly evolving. I believe that the choice of the use cases on where to drive the use of that technology is going to be where organisations carefully but wisely deploy that technology. I think everyone's learning at the moment with this. Everybody will promise a lot to sell solutions and sell technology, and the truth is, as we were just saying, you need to approach this quite wisely and quite carefully and actually get the fundamentals right and build the actual foundations of AI enablement and technology solutions in a very structured and careful way. I think as long as you do it in that way you stand a far better chance of generating value which creates momentum to continue that value with confidence. The worst thing to do is to try and build solutions with embedded AI, whether that be source to contract or PTP solutions, it just falls apart because the foundations are not quite because every solution requires the foundation of what we were just speaking about a couple of moments ago with Hinton and myself. Absolutely, yeah foundations certainly all important. Hinton, anything to add there from your sort of slightly different perspective? Yeah, think the application of AI is throughout the journey from source to play because good procurement teams are doing it with the right workforce. I'll give you a couple of examples. So if you're really good at business partnering, then you're going to really know where the business strategy is going next. Actually AI insight into what's been going on, what the experience has been, will accelerate that process and the insight could be different if you then mesh that with outside views. Similarly, there's lots of movement around contract intelligence. So you've got an asset there within the contract but typically a good sourcing professional would know what's in the contract and be able to then pivot with that. Actually the application of AI around contract intelligence allows you to do that at pace and at scale in terms of downstream value add, which could be payment terms, incentives, automated payments and so on and so on. That you've got assets in your locker that you're not tapping into effectively in a traditional way, the application of technology advancement allows you to do that in a very accelerated, repeatable, scalable way. That's very much what I see as that difference and that translates into better decisions and more trusted closer relationships but also the buying experience of your organisation is a real uplift and a sea change from what it used to be into what it could become tomorrow. Absolutely. Ashley, are you able to sort of expand for us really just on the extent to which automation is helping procurement teams move from not just reporting on data to actually using it to drive better supply decisions and value along the way. So I like to sort of think about this in a very constructive way, where if you think about a modern organisation that might have thousands of suppliers and you might have a team of thirty, forty or 50 procurement professionals, and let's assume that there is a normal turnover with those individuals in that function, right, and you've got thousands of contracts. Think about the effort it takes to actually understand and know the contracts that we were just talking about it's almost impossible. Contracts are long, they're quite complex at times to understand, so you often miss many, many opportunities to do things differently or actually exercise and execute what's already there. A perfect example in a previous organisation where I was in a functional leadership role was we were paying a supplier fifteen days too early millions of pounds. Now the cash flow associated with that was huge, and it was only when the supplier told us that we were paying early because we requested a deferral on payment for various issues that we were having, it's like how can that be the case? Now the reality is that lots of organisations just can't deal with the volume of contracts that they've got, so using that NLP technology to do a lot of the legwork through automation and allowing people then to do some of the other things that are coming, like we talked about compliance and risk. Let them do the more value add and the more tricky activities that are now coming on a day to day and a week to week basis. So I think it's just the migration of what we want people to do, what we need them to do, and allowing technology to do all this stuff which can be done quite frankly, and some of it can be because you don't need foundational data at a certain level to execute an LP and contract screening. You don't need it, right, because your contracts are the contracts, let it do what it can do. It's what you choose to use the insights with is the real question. Yeah, absolutely. Hinton can you relate to a lot of what Ashley is saying there you know especially in terms of really just leaving your professionals to be able to focus on that value add work? Yeah it completely resonates with me. It's very much what we try and do at my place that I've done elsewhere and advise others on is what is it you need to spend your time on? Because that's the value you're going to create for the organisation. If you're weighed down with things that actually could be more workflowed, more automated, then you're never going to give it the dedicated time and think the thought power that it requires for it to be a successful outcome. So there's lots of transactional routine activities that efficiency could be applied because you want to create what I call headspace to apply that to the complex activities, the sensitive activities, the strategic activities. Procurement has that privilege of, as I said at the start, a line of sight of where the business wants to go and its challenges and you're one of the things that can unlock that and make that success with the line of sight we have. And if you haven't got the headspace to do that, how's that going to materialize? So by automating an application of efficiency plays, can do that because it's a human first interaction. To be creative you can have to be human first, In my experience, you're the one bringing the judgment to the table and the insight is something that can be automated to furnish you with the right tools for that conversation and that outcome. Just picking up on some of those points, a lot of the organisations that I work with historically will speak about a top 50 or a top 10% of their suppliers, right? The reality is in most organisations every supplier is important, it's just to what degree, so if you can free up 50% more time because now you're automating some of those administrative tasks which can be done, why not spend that 50% extra time on developing the relationships with more suppliers and growing that partner ecosystem and developing in nourishing efficiencies? It's just as simple and every organisation will choose to use their their freed up capacity differently, right, because we're all different and we've all got our own views of what's important to us. But the beauty is that you can decide as a business how to execute that freedom capacity and we'll all choose differently, but it's the ability to do that. Just to rightly spot on, because it's easy to pick today's Google. It takes much more insight and data driven capability to discover tomorrow's Google. And that's really what you want to provide to your stakeholder and the business to grow and do what it needs to do. And if you're bogged down with inefficient activities in your method then you're never going to get there. They're going to find them for themselves and then you'll just be dealing with the contract and the cost. So I really do strongly agree with what Ashley's saying there. Create capacity, create the curiosity to discover what's really going to be impactful for tomorrow and by automating and simplifying your method and then leveraging the digital workforce, the agentic workforce in addition to the human workforce will allow you to get there in a much more accelerated way. Great stuff. Thanks to you both that one. Just as a bit of passing advice, know we've obviously covered elements of this already but actually just in summary then, how would you say procurement teams can really better translate that data and those insights into long term business outcomes. I truly believe the next chapter for procurement is to articulate itself in a way that it hasn't done historically, which is about being a growth enabler and actually adding value in different dimensions than cost, and that's going to take some time, it's going to take some practice, and it's actually going to take some open mindedness from the C suite and the leadership within organisations to understand there are different dimensions in playing out. It's not the traditional world that we all lived in, and unfortunately we all tend to learn through pain, and there are plenty of instances over the last five, six, seven years or more where we've seen that pain through not having the visibility, from not having the relationships and the understanding of the expansive network of suppliers and focusing only on the traditional things. That won't work and we keep talking about it not working going forward, but five years on from Covid, the reality is are we any different really? I would argue small pockets, yes, but for the most part there's still a lot of work to do. So we just have to find new ways and coming back to that point of how do we measure ourselves, how do we articulate that value add, that growth enablement, they're the things that will start to prick the attention of the leaders and the C suites of the future. Absolutely. Are we any different? Are we learning? I think we are learning, and through Covid it's been a superb accelerator for the value we can bring an organisation, but my observation is that takes leadership, takes a bit of courage to stumble occasionally to get it right in the long term. My view is we've got to tell our story differently, more effectively, with more confidence. We're gateway to growth, we're the gateway to an ecosystem of organizations that already have figured out some of these solutions. If we can't be that connector, if we can't be that enabler, then the business will skip over and do it themselves because those business models are collapsing. So I very much need I believe that we need to think differently and behave differently but also use the language of the business to enable us to create growth within that business. Good stuff. Now I mentioned the last question being some parting words. We do just about have time for one of our audience questions. We've had a few come in. I'm just going to pick one out now. I'll choose this one. It's quite an interesting one. It reads, I work in a small business with limited resources. How can we start using automation and data to improve procurement practices without becoming overwhelmed? Ashley, do you want to tackle that one first of all? Yeah, I would advise any smaller organisation to quickly take an assessment of what their priorities and their use cases are. By use cases I mean what do they actually need and want to achieve from the function of procurement, right, what's my list of priorities? And if it's to drive efficiency of how we review our contracts and how we renew those contracts, then talk to some independent advisers about the right approach for simple, low investment technology solutions, and by doing that you're focusing on an area where perhaps you're less susceptible to data risk or data breaches. So I would say start simple, start with one or two use cases, get a little piece of advice, it doesn't have to be super expensive, and then use a technology partner to help you to deliver those early use cases that you identified, and then you're on your journey and then hopefully it starts to build that momentum and it starts to become a self fulfilling roadmap of transformation. Absolutely. Hinton, anything to add there just finally? Yeah, I think I'd say two things. Don't have to invent it yourself anymore. It's out there and you're the gatekeeper to go in to discover that partner. It probably already exists in your ecosystem. You haven't asked the right question and got them involved by being curious. So you don't have to invent yourself. There is a partner who can help you through that and accelerate. Number two is if you're not thinking about that, your board is because they're looking at your portfolio going you're my gatekeeper on business resilience, you're my gatekeeper on growth, you're gatekeeper on compliance, you need to help me. So if they're thinking about it, need to think about it and your ecosystem will help you execute it. Fantastic. I think a good way to end. Does sadly bring us to the end of today's session. My thanks to all of you of course for watching and a big big thank you to Hitton. Thank you Hitton and to Ashley as well. Thank you both for joining us Pleasure. Thank Thank you. The report, the recording, I should say, will be available very shortly. So if you so desire, you can come back and watch it all over again. You can also capture more webinars over on the Procurement Magazine website. Just head over to procurementmagazine.com. Thanks again to you for joining us. Bye for now. Before Amazon Business, buying for work was chaotic. Now it's easy to find products from thousands of suppliers in one place. Save on every type of purchase from individual items to bulk orders. At any time, you can view your spending on prebuilt, easy to use dashboards. Dashboards. Plus, you can free up cash flow if you choose to extend payment deadlines and view and approve your team's purchases easily. With Amazon Business, things just got a lot more manageable.