62% of businesses have technology in place for supply-side contract management 4% rate the technology supporting SRM as strong 63% of respondents rely on Excel tomanage supplier reporting
TECHNOLOGY
SUMMARY
Accessing spreadsheets on a shared drive, emailing data and basic document management tools – yes, inmany respects, technology support for SRM is in the Dark Ages, relying on tools and techniques that aremore than 15 years old. Technology has moved on dramatically in that time and evidence is starting to emerge that there is growing interest in technologies able to drive the necessary business change tomake SRM a success. Currently there are signs that organisations see it as a ‘nice to have’ rather than an essential, but our research points to growing recognition in the business world of the need to invest in the latest technology.
Management of suppliers is impossible without information and because large businesses can have thousands of suppliers and hundreds of touch points with each, they need powerful tools to manage information about their supplier relationships at scale. Sadly, most do not have these tools at their disposal. Six out of 10 organisations say support for SRM from information systems is either poor or worse. Given the proliferation of applications available on cloud platforms, the ability to link them to internal and external enterprise applications, and the low cost of data storage and analytics, managers responsible for supplier relationships have justifiable cause for making the case for investment in this business-critical area.
BENEFITSOFTECHNOLOGY The benefits of improved information technology with regard to SRM falls into seven groups. Modern applications can: → Drive structure and consistency across the company, departmentally and geographically → Change people's behaviour with consumer-style data-interfaces accessible acrossmultiple devices, whether desktops, tablets or smartphones → Create rigour inmanaging relationships and provide an audit trail → Support supplier meetings with instant access to data describing performance and other interactions → Analysemassive volumes of data both structured, in the formof traditional business information, as well as unstructured in the formof video, photographs, free text in social media and location data. → Enable collaboration through seamless sharing of information within and across organisational boundaries → Engage stakeholders via surveys and feedback channels
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