New Year Insights for the Procurement Solutions and Services Marketplace

Editor's Note: This article, authored by Brad Hibbert, Prevalent chief operations and strategy officer, was originally published on spendmatters.com.

For several years now, Spend Matters has been collecting and publishing a series of articles about procurement, supply and services trends for the year ahead from expert tech and service providers in the market.

This year we’re highlighting the customer demands, market movements and advances in procurement tech that are exciting the world of solution providers, how they expect them to shape the S2P landscape next year and how they plan to respond to them.

Our series runs from mid-December to mid-January, then our senior analysts will wrap up with their own take on the key themes that emerge.

In no order of preference, other than by the date they arrived in our inbox, today let’s hear from Brad Hibbert, Chief Operations Officer and Chief Strategy Officer of Prevalent.

Procurement will step into the center of risk management

As the risk landscape continues to change at an alarming rate, organizations can no longer afford to look at risk one dimensionally. At one time, this was acceptable; a financial profile or sanctions report was enough for an onboarding risk analysis. But today’s threats move too quickly to be point-in-time focused. Companies must evaluate a growing number of active risk types more thoroughly and frequently than previously in order to gain a real view of the risks a supplier poses to the organization. To date, procurement teams haven’t been equipped to do that. But with technology advancements, including automated supplier risk management, third-party risk intelligence and AI solutions, procurement now has the opportunity to move beyond onboarding checklists and contract renewals to a more prominent and proactive role in the third-party risk management lifecycle.

In 2024, procurement organizations will be more strategic to the business because of the central role they play in managing supplier relationships and, therefore, supplier risks. In addition to their traditional roles of driving efficiency and lowering costs, they will add more value and align to business outcomes by consolidating data sets, including cyber posture, business intelligence, financial records, geopolitical events, certifications and nth-party information — all to improve decision making and be a value center to enterprise risk management.

By expanding the risk lens with additional data sets, procurement teams will be able to better predict threats to the supply chain, reducing overall risk to the organization, simplifying onboarding and supplier lifecycle management, and easing reporting burdens. Additionally, improved and more consistent supplier data analysis will help procurement teams bring on vendors that pose the least amount of risk (or the right level of acceptable risk).