Publish Date : 06-Nov-2018
JAGGAER, the worlds largest independent spend management company, has collected important industry insights on the most significant trends moving the global spend management and supply chain spaces, in a series of on-demand webinars, available on JAGGAERs website. Industry analysts from Ardent Partners and the Hackett Group, address disrupting technologies and their impact on the supply chain. The information presented in these webinars is critical to any company struggling to understand emerging technologies.
Andrew Bartolini, a globally recognized expert in sourcing and procurement, and the Founder and Chief Research Officer of research advisory firm Ardent Partners, cautions that some the buzzwords thrown around the marketplace are not fully understood. For example, Artificial Intelligence is not Machine Learning, not natural language processing or RPA. AI functions like the human mind, without human intervention. It independently mimics and augments human-driven business processes, he says.
Technology has played a big part in driving procurement forward for the past 20 years, in turn generating a phenomenal amount of data. Blockchain has captured the attention of the investment and IT worlds and should capture the attention of the Procurement world. It ultimately operates as a system of record for capturing a chain of interactions; marrying the physical with the digital supply chain, explains Bartolini.
Bartolini discusses how to prioritize and assess these innovations in terms of applying them to an organization, and reviews a hierarchical analysis of the opportunities created by each one. I think the greatest opportunity lies in Advanced Analytics and Big Data, and the large amount of information being captured by systems today. Its a big challenge, and Id liken it to raw crude oil in the ground. To turn it into value you need to understand where to look and how to think about the data, extract it and turn it into something of value.
The biggest trends are with disrupting technologies: Blockchain, IoT, real-time payments, Zelle and tokenization, observes Jimmy LeFever, Senior Research Director of the Hackett Group and former Research Director at PayStream Advisors. Several of these technologies are being rapidly deployed within the consumer space, and will become increasingly important within the procurement industry over the next several years, as they cross the chasm into the business space.
LeFever addresses the current and future implications for many of the buzzworthy technologies around the P2P space: BlockChain, IoT, Machine Learning, Zelle and Tokenization. He argues that some of these technologies have been around for years, in different guises, while others may take up to five years to move from the consumer into the business space.
One of the critical enablers of any technology is the workforce utilizing these innovations. LeFever feels that the Millennial generation, having grown up with technology, is attuned to the look and feel of solutions, adding that, technologies like JAGGAER have very a intuitive interface. Its this type of interface that customers will come to expect from their software solutions.
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