Art of Procurement

"If you're not thinking about what you inherit through your procurement decisions, then you're not truly serious about managing your climate impacts." - Nicole Darnall, Professor, Arlene R. & Robert P. Kogod Eminent Scholar Chair in Sustainability, American University - Kogod School of Business

Companies have spent years setting sustainability goals, developing policies, and asking suppliers for more i...

"Everybody's trying to simplify. Everybody's trying to make the process better and the end-user experience for buying better." - Jeremy Lappin, Co-founder and CEO, Candex

Are you frustrated by the endless friction and noise around tail spend?

Candex Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Lappin shares how procurement leaders are breaking through the complexity of global tail spend and solving supplier onboardi...

"It has to start with the business outcomes that we want. This becomes an operating model decision. Technology has to support the operating model that we're designing." - Christopher Sawchuk, Principal and Global Procurement Advisory Practice Leader at The Hackett Group

AI adoption is quickly becoming commonplace in procurement, but the biggest performance gap is in how some organizations are using it to r...

Dear Diary…

"I use AI a lot to help scout out things or pose challenges and see where solutions are being marketed along those lines."

Jeffrey Ostrander runs a nearly $5 billion business in one of the most dynamic supply markets on the planet. His team has left the starting block on agentic AI. What they are still deciding is how far into the race they want to run.

That dis...

"Do we have a supply chain that we are building that is going to allow us to navigate and be agile enough, no matter what the world continues to throw at us?" - Frank Mckay, Chief Supply Chain & Procurement Officer, Jabil

Procurement and supply chain have traditionally operated as distinct functions, but growing complexity, new technology, and rising expectations around resilience are making that separ...

"AI makes the answers cheaper, so the good questions and good judgment really become the coin of the realm." - Mason Morgan, Managing Director, Managing Director at CrossCountry Consulting focusing on AI and innovation in S2P

Procurement technology has come a long way, but simply adding new technology to existing processes doesn't guarantee better results. As AI becomes a bigger part of the procurement ope...

"You don't need an advanced platform to begin. You just need consistent definitions, discipline, to look at the data, and a willingness to move beyond the on-time delivery average to make really good decisions going forward."

Traditional supplier scorecards can tell procurement whether a supplier delivered on time, but they may not reveal whether that supplier's commitments are becoming less reliable over ...

Dear Diary…

"I believe we are in the midst of a revolution — and I think in a revolution, we as a vendor also
want to invest a lot in educating the community on what's really changing and how it's
changing."

This episode kicks off a new Art of Procurement podcast series, produced in partnership with
Zycus. I sit down with the person who made the series possible to talk about why it exists and
where agen...

"It's all about building that momentum, creating the value, testing the hypothesis, and then continuing to challenge us to take it to that next level." Darshan Deshmukh, President at ProcureAbility

AI adoption in procurement is accelerating, but experimentation alone does not equal transformation. With organizations launching pilots, testing new platforms, and exploring agentic capabilities, procurement le...

"The earlier you can catch risk, the cheaper it is to solve." - Matthew Spencer, Founder of FlockScore

Procurement teams have access to plenty of information when evaluating a new supplier, from certifications and financials to technical capabilities. What they often lack is visibility into a more practical question: How does this supplier actually perform?

In this episode of Art of Procuremen...

"If you want a seat at the table, you've got to pull up the chair." - Polly DeSouza, APAC Transformation Leader

Procurement teams have spent years talking about the need to move away from tactical and transactional work and create more time for strategic priorities. As AI begins to take on more of that work, the opportunity to finally make the shift is growing. The question is whether procurement teams are...

"It's more the translation of visibility. It's not so much visibility. Visibility is there, but it's what do you do with that?" - Mike Prorock, CEO, Tradeverifyd

Supply chain risk has become both more complex and harder to anticipate. Geopolitical shifts, regulatory changes, multi-tier supplier dependencies, and an overwhelming volume of data are forcing procurement teams to look further into their supply ...

"Don't ask AI to do something that you don't know how to do yourself." - Gretchen Vance, Vice President Procurement at Forest Lawn Parks and Mortuaries

Procurement transformation often comes down to a leader's willingness to push for change, even when the path forward requires taking a risk. For Gretchen Vance, Vice President of Procurement at Forest Lawn Parks and Mortuaries, that once meant putting two p...

"The expectation level of procurement is rising. Today's stuff that was not possible a year ago, that felt like science fiction three years ago, is something that we can create for our customers today." - Sammeli Sammalkorpi, Co-founder & CEO, Sievo

For CPOs and their teams, procurement data has never been more abundant… or more challenging to harness. Demands go far beyond savings: teams are be...

"There's an absolute risk of procurement's role and scope being diminished by AI, unless we embrace new ways of working." - Nick Heinzmann, Head of Research, Zip

According to new research from Zip, only 17 percent of organizations can demonstrate clear ROI from AI today. The difference between those seeing results and those still struggling offers some timely and important lessons for procurement.

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