2024 Will be HUGE for Procurement

The linked 2024 episode belongs to its original publication period. A forecast about that year should be read as a forecast, rather than evidence of the market today. The useful follow-up is to ask which themes became visible in your own operating process and which still depend on assumptions.

Take one theme, such as connected data or greater automation, and identify the work it is supposed to improve. Record the present delay, error or effort. Then ask what would have to change for the prediction to become a useful capability in your organisation. A system connection might need clearer supplier identifiers before it can support reliable reporting.

Run a representative example instead of accepting a broad claim about transformation. Include an incomplete request and a failed handover. Observe whether the proposed technology finishes the work and whether someone can explain its output. Record the correction and review effort alongside the visible speed of the demonstration.

The result is a better planning conversation. You can distinguish a market theme from an organisational readiness gap, assign an owner to the gap and decide whether the next step is a pilot, a data repair or a process change.

Before quoting an adoption statistic or making a new vendor decision, check its current primary source and scope. Keep the archived video for perspective. Use current evidence and your own operating baseline for the decision you are making now.

3 Procurement Trends for 2024 You Need To Know

Hey Procurement Legend,

Welcome to 2024. I genuinely believe Procurement is in a good spot going into 2024. There is a consensus that procurement needs to change to remain relevant and deliver on its mandate to the business.

However, that mandate has been placed on procurement as the workload inevitably widens as the need to manage our suppliers and even their suppliers extends.

Your mandate to the business might be different to others in the World of Procurement community.

While some of you are focused on cutting costs, some might be prioritising risk management or moving into the digital realm.

There’s no wrong answer here.

Much of what we do within our teams comes down to the maturity of the team and the business.

But there is undoubtedly a push to do procurement better than ever.

I don’t think this would have happened without the explosion of Open AI.

It truly woke procurement up to the realms of possibility and showed what was possible.

That has also aided every Procurement Tech company that is scrambling to figure out how to best deploy Gen AI within their products without it being a gimmick.

And it’s far from being a gimmick. The tech stacks coming your way are incredible, and I’d urge all of you to consider, especially those of you who are senior procurement pros, using your internal influence to build a digital procurement capability in 2024.

I’m optimistic about the future of procurement in 2024 from a technology perspective. I believe we will see some significant tech failures in 2024 as procurement tech companies struggle to acquire customers and their funding runs out.

There are so many tech providers to procurement now but many of them aren’t in the minds of people like you. We don’t know that they exist.

I have nothing to share with you like usual on a Wednesday. I’ve taken a couple of weeks out of everything to decompress and relax. It was needed.

But here is what I’ll be focused on for the next few months with World of Procurement:

From a personal point of view, in January, I’ve got two critical tasks I need to get on with.

Task one is my Annual Review.

This is where I take stock of 2023 and create my 2024 list of things I do not want to be involved in.

Then, I have goal setting from 2024.

Most of that comes from World of Procurement, Running, Health, and Family.

As always, a big thank you to everyone who subscribed throughout 2023 and before that.

An even bigger thank you to our paid members who keep the lights on.

If you’re not a paid subscriber and want to be, subscribe below, expense it to your business, and be prepared to get a lot of informative content throughout 2024.

See you on Friday.

Daniel