CPO Rising 2019 Highlights: Three CPO Mantras to Generate Impact
The CPO Rising 2019 Summit was almost a month ago, and we at Ardent Partners have offered recaps of the overall event, as well as closer looks at a couple of the breakout sessions that you might have missed (click here and here). Today we’re offering a different perspective of Scout RFP – event sponsor and roundtable host. Scout was among the fortunate few to file into the Harvard Club of Boston on October 29th & 30th for this year’s CPO Rising Summit. It was a jam-packed day-and-a-half of presentations, breakout sessions, and discussions all dedicated to our favorite topic: sourcing! We loved hearing from industry experts like Heidi Landry , CPO of Johnson & Johnson, David Kern, Head of Global Procurement at TripAdvisor, and Dan Warn, CPO of athenahealth, about their perspectives and visions for procurement’s future.
On Day Two of the conference, we had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Tennyson of VSP Global – and CPO Honors Award winner – and dive deeper into the role of sourcing in modern business. As part of the largest not-for-profit vision benefits provider in the United States, VSP Global’s sourcing organization must work closely with the business to ensure optimum cost savings and risk management. To do this, VSP uses technology including Scout RFP to demystify sourcing for the rest of the business and encourage enterprise-wide engagement.
With simplified processes, the VSP sourcing organization has become a strategic partner to the business, leading to increased engagement and savings across the enterprise.
How do they do this? Here are Greg’s top tips:
- Sourcing requires 2020 vision.
Complete visibility into the sourcing process is imperative to smooth operations. With new technologies, procurement professionals can now manage all of their projects in one place and keep their stakeholders constantly in the loop and up to date.
- Automation is your friend.
With increasingly complex projects, the sourcing organization must nurture its internal and external relationships more than ever before. Procurement professionals need solutions to help streamline and automate their workflows, and ultimately give them more time to focus on people, not paperwork.
- If you’re not early, you’re late.
Being proactive is imperative to sourcing success. Greg urges procurement professionals to engage with the business early and often in order to establish strong relationships and achieve better outcomes.
We sincerely appreciated our roundtable discussions with Greg and loved hearing how VSP Global is leveraging technology to maximize sourcing’s impact on the business. CPO Rising 2019 reinforced that sourcing and procurement are more important than ever in managing risk and driving cost savings. As business challenges become increasingly complex, sourcing organizations must be equipped with the proper tools in order to keep up and get ahead. We can’t wait to attend next year’s summit and continue learning from procurement industry leaders.
