As the Chief Procurement Officer, you have the challenging task of making decisions today that will impact the long-term future of your procurement organization. As you look 12, 24, and 48 months into the future, your team needs to have the skills, data, and technologies to work towards the vision and goals you create.
While the $20B procurement software market continues to grow, procurement teams are still facing friction, overrun budgets, and e-procurement implementation failures. In addition, compliance of these systems remains at an all-time low and when an event as disruptive as COVID-19 occurs, procurement teams are unable to respond fast enough to market changes and the demands of the business.
Procurement teams are moving towards more agile technologies to digitize their functions, but the increased number of systems in the tech stack makes it nearly impossible to synchronize information and increases the disparity of the data. In fact, a recent survey by Wakefield Research highlighted that 93% of procurement and supply chain executives experience negative impact due to misinformation and poor supplier data quality on a regular basis. These issues include financial loss (67%), delayed projects, unhappy internal and external customers, and more.
TealBook was founded to solve these problems. We bring a market solution that easily enhances and synchronizes supplier data across systems to provide procurement teams and their constituents the quality and visibility of data required to optimize procurement strategies and their technology investments.
On October 9th, 2020, Dr. Elouise Epstein, Vice President at Kearny published her 2020 Spider Graph depicting the future of the digital procurement ecosystem. For the first time ever, she placed a company logo in the center of the graph and named TealBook as the data foundation required to power a fully integrated and flexible digital ecosystem.
I want to take this opportunity to share some thoughts in the video below about what this industry recognition means not only for TealBook – but for you, your team, and the future of procurement.
The e-Procurement Ecosystem
As you can see, TealBook sits in the middle as the data foundation. We power and boost the functionality of legacy systems and digital solutions.
“The need to achieve digital procurement success has been a challenge for nearly every enterprise,” says Dr. Epstein in a recent interview. Her original spider chart aims to illustrate the new way of thinking about digital procurement.
The reason TealBook is able to power other technologies is because of our unique integration capability. This sets us apart from other solutions on the market. We aim to create a seamless user experience, regardless of what your unique technology stack looks like. TealBook is a flexible tool that empowers the other solutions you’ve invested in.
What is the Organizing Principle of Your Data?
In the past, spend data was prioritized as the most important factor for organizing data. Spend data is more readily available and dollars are tracked more frequently than other items.
However, spend data is only a fraction of the data needed to make empowered procurement decisions. Prioritizing spend data is a missed opportunity to create a value-added procurement strategy. If the organizing principle of your data foundation is spend data, then your strategy revolves around spend control, as opposed to value creation and risk management.
“This new ecosystem acknowledges that third party supplier data is the organizing construct for value creation,” says Dr. Epstein. “Unfortunately, due to the constantly changing nature of this data, solving it with yesterday’s approaches and ideologies is wholly inadequate. Organizations have collectively spent hundreds of millions of dollars—and have failed.”
How to Prioritize a Foundation of Quality Supplier Data
By prioritizing supplier records, you can create a future-proof procurement strategy. Your data will provide you with a deep understanding of who your suppliers are, what your relationships are with them and where the opportunities for innovation and expansion can take your business forward.
To achieve this, you have to ensure that your data is dynamic, agile, and automatically updated. In the past, this was considered an impossible feat. However, enriched and updated supplier data is easier to achieve than you might think and is necessary to creating an empowered procurement strategy.
“Enterprises need a network-based approach that streamlines and automates the collection and—more importantly—the ongoing upkeep of third party data while seamlessly syndicating to all upstream and downstream systems,” says Dr. Epstein.
By having a data foundation like TealBook, you’ll see key points of improvement within your procurement processes, such as:
- Having a single source of truth for supplier data, as opposed to data being siloed in incompatible systems.
- Being able to confidently say that your data is enriched, accurate, and always updated, and avoiding the costly repercussions of stagnant data.
- Creating a culture of data-driven decision making within your organization.
We would love the opportunity to show you how TealBook can help your team. In just a quick discussion, we can show you how to unleash procurement possibilities with the power of dynamic supplier data. Reach out to our team and request a demo today!
Stephany Lapierre is the Founder and CEO of Tealbook. A lifelong entrepreneur, Stephany is one of SCMA's 100 Influential Women in Canadian Supply Chain and has won many awards for her innovative approach to supplier intelligence. Prior to tealbook, Stephany built a successful procurement consulting firm focused on helping Fortune 500 companies improve strategic sourcing efficiencies. For more than a decade, Stephany was exposed to the costly and inefficient gap between enterprise buyers and suppliers. In 2014, she launched Tealbook to disrupt the business-to-business directory model by building the largest, most robust and trusted B2B network. Her innovative vision is for Tealbook to enable all companies to connect and find one another with more trust in order to drive their business forward.
