Category, commodity, and risk intelligence solutions can have a transformative impact on your procurement function’s performance, and the daily workflows of your team. But the scale and value of that transformation depends on which solutions you choose to implement.
With so any options on the market, it can be tough to identify which procurement intelligence tools, capabilities, and platforms are right for you. Here are some practical tips to aid your search and decision-making process.
Category, commodity, and risk intelligence demand deep procurement expertise. So, prioritize providers with a strong reputation in procurement.
The value of category, commodity, and risk intelligence has always rested on how deeply contextualized your insights are. Are they created and presented in a way that’s tightly aligned with exactly what procurement professionals will use them for? And, crucially, do they support procurement teams’ daily tasks and workflows?
There are plenty of tools and platforms available today from generic business intelligence providers, and procurement-centric addons and extensions for platforms with a far wider remit. The integration across functions these platforms offer can make them an appealing option. But there’s a crucial element missing from most of them: deep procurement expertise.
If your teams are going to rely on insights and intelligence from a platform, they need total confidence that that platform is built, populated, and maintained by true procurement experts. So, carefully consider your shortlisted providers’ pedigree in the procurement field specifically.
Seek out capabilities that align with your own attitudes toward AI
Every procurement leader wants to make the most of AI to accelerate and augment procurement decision-making. But not all AI-powered procurement intelligence platforms and capabilities are built equal.
Some tools are AI-based, relying exclusively on LLMs and generative models to deliver insights as quickly as possible. The pure speed offered by these tools in unmatched, but that speed comes at a very significant cost — governance and reliability.
The vast majority of CPOs now recognize that the speed and power of AI must still be carefully balanced with human oversight, governance, and validation. The best results often come when AI and human teams are aligned to amplify one another’s effectiveness. So, it’s important to seek out solutions from providers that understand the need for that balance.
If human validation is built into your procurement intelligence solutions at the platform and capability level, it will be far easier to uphold governance and maintain a high level of trust in your procurement and risk intelligence for years to come.
Start with a clear view of your procurement priorities and goals
One of the biggest reasons why procurement teams end up with intelligence technology that doesn’t support their goals is that those goals weren’t clearly defined during the decision-making process. Don’t rely on providers to tell you what they can help you achieve, tell them what you need to achieve.
One upside to the high number of tools and platforms available today is that if you have a clear idea of what you want your technology to do, you should be able to find capabilities that align with it quite closely.
As a minimum, consider how you’d prioritize factors such as:
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Agility and responsiveness to market and supply chain change
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Proactivity and ability to anticipate shifts
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Accuracy of forecasting and planning
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Actionability of intelligence and insights
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Convenient intelligence delivery
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Organization-level insight contextualization
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Breadth of supplier intelligence
Make sure the technology you select has a future
Category, commodity, and risk intelligence solutions are a significant investment for your team. If your supplier stops supporting or maintaining them, you’ll have to start the process over again, and accept the loss on your misplaced investment.
But continuity of your solutions is just the beginning. Procurement’s demands are constantly changing. Every day we face new challenges from new sources. So, you need to know that the platforms you choose are going to evolve alongside — or ideally, ahead of — those shifts.
Challenge providers to show you their roadmaps for the capabilities and platforms you’re interested in. Don’t just assess suites based on what they can provide today. But look ahead and consider how well the future of these tools aligns with the future of your procurement function.
Consider your data demands, and how data quality and accessibility may impact what your chosen tech can deliver
Even the best platforms are only as good as the data that forms their foundation. When it comes to solution selection, you must consider that from two angles.
Firstly, look critically at your own procurement, market, supply chain, and category data. If your chosen solutions rely on your own data as a primary source for insight generation, you’ll be limited by the quality and accessibility of your existing data. In that case, you may want to prioritize partners that can help you unlock, cleanse, and prepare as much of that data as possible.
Second, where suppliers provide their own intelligence and pull in external sources to generate market and commodity intelligence, it’s important to scrutinize the quality and reliability of that data. At best, it will be sourced from proven data aggregators and other reliable partners. At worst, you may find it’s largely synthesized from small data pools, which could impact how confident you are acting on the insights generated from it.
Prioritize relevant success stories and proof points
When you do finally invest in new procurement intelligence tools and platforms, you don’t want to feel like a test subject. Ideally, you want to know that these tools are already delivering major value and impact for organizations just like yours, with similar goals and priorities.
Spend some time looking at case studies and proof points from across your chosen provider’s website. Often, a lot of these stories can’t be publicly shared, so use discussions with sales teams as an opportunity to dig a little deeper and get some anonymized insight into other clients that are similar to your organization, and discover what they’ve really achieved.
Start your journey toward the perfect category, commodity, and risk intelligence solutions today
WNS Procurement’s category, commodity and risk intelligence solutions are built on decades of deep procurement experience and expertise. We understand what evolving procurement functions like yours need. So, if you’re evaluating your insight options, speak to us, and we’ll help you find the right tools for your team today, and long into the future.