Your ProcureTech Roadmap One-Pager

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📰 In this week’s edition:

• Next-gen supplier data management ebook (sponsored)

• 5 procurement jobs that caught my eye

• Do you have a ‘One-Page ProcureTech Roadmap’?

  • Downloadable template

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🌙 Sunday Night Note

The "ProcureTech Roadmap One-Pager"

Once you’ve taken the time to craft the procurement technology roadmap you need to support a high performing procurement organization, the challenge becomes bringing everyone else along with you: communication.

Other stakeholders need to understand where you’re going and why to buy in…

Given the complexities of modern ProcureTech, this can be a challenge…

This week I’m sharing a tool to help!

This one-page “ProcureTech implementation roadmap is your new best friend. Familiarize yourself with it, make it your own and use it as “calling card” every time you get an opening to talk about your digital procurement roadmap.

Let’s break down how it works so you can get the most out of it.

1/ Everything is mapped against YOUR end-to-end procurement process

The first row is your high level procurement process. Everything starts here.

The breakdown I’ve provided is great if you don’t have your own procurement process definitions/breakdown as it maps well to the procurement application market.

If you have your own internal naming conventions for the sub-processes in procurement that differ from mine, adjust the arrows accordingly.

2/ The categories in the left hand side represent the different ProcureTech solution categories on the market.

In a nutshell:

• Business Network / Supplier Portals. Tools to collaborate with suppliers

• Best of Breed / Dedicated Solutions. Tools that focus on a specific subset of the procurement process. I’ve included Intake Management / Process Orchestration tools in the “best of breed” category but you can separate this out if it makes things clearer in your context.

• Source-to-Pay Suites. Suites that cater to the end-to-end procurement process (GEP, Ariba, Coupa, Ivalua, etc.)

• ERP. Enterprise Resource Planning Systems used for transactional integration with other business functions.

If you need a deep dive on these solution categories, you can check out this Pure Procurement Premium article:

3/ Insert your existing ProcureTech solutions

Once you’ve got your grid laid out, insert your existing procurement applications in the right spots. I’ve also added colors to highlight the possible states of each application (see legend):

• Removed

• To Remove/Sunset

• Deployed; continuous improvement in progress

• Deployment in progress (project ongoing)

4/ Highlight important embedded functionality

If you need to highlight certain key functionalities in a given application, I’ve added boxes to use under applicable solutions.

In my example, I could use my blocks to draw attention to the fact that MRP, material master record and inventory management functionality are all housed in the ERP system.

5/ Insert all confirmed/potential future applications from your roadmap

Add future ProcureTech solutions (confirmed or to explore) you need to help reach an objective or solve a problem:

• To Explore

6/ Number applications according to your roadmap/priorities

This is the piece that ties everything together. When you present the slide, you can tell the story based on the numbers assigned to various applications.

• What are you working on now?

• What are you working on next?

• Why?

  • How will these different solutions/pieces help you get to the next level of maturity and unlock business value?

  • Why are the dependencies sequenced the way they are?

7/ Keep this slide updated as you progress.

As you finalize projects, finish exploration phases and proofs of concept, update the slide to reflect the evolving roadmap. This should not be not a static slide… You should bring it out in your governance meetings every time there’s a significant change…

You’ll feel like you’re always saying the same thing but… That’s exactly what you should be doing. Repetition (and keeping things simple), especially with people outside procurement, is the only way you’ll eventually get your key messages through.

8/ Adjust it according to your audience

You may also need different variants of this slide based on:

• Your audience. For example, with IT, you may have additional applications such as middleware or connectors that are needed to plug everything together. If this detail is missing, they will get hung up on this instead of getting to the topic at hand.

  With management, the opposite is true… Take that detail out. It is not useful for most conversations and will deter from what you actually want to talk about.

• The complexity of your landscape. You may need multiple versions of these slides if you are a global process owner and have dozens of different configurations/landscapes based on Lines of Business (LoB) or geographies.

As you populate this slide, play with the format and make it your own to serve your needs. However, after more than a decade in this field, I can tell you this is the best way I’ve found to distill what is an increasingly complex set of conversations you need to have to advance your procurement technology agenda.

Get the template!

Click the button below to get a free copy of the template with code 100OFFPTOP at checkout.

💭 Quote of the Week

That’s it for today…

When you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help:

1. Pure Procurement Premium. Get access to Deep Dive guides and templates that help you get digital procurement right.

2. Work with me. I’ve been helping global procurement teams digitalize their processes and practices for 12+ years.

3. Reach 8000+ Pure Procurement readers. You have something to share with digitally-minded procurement professionals? Get in touch.

Till next time,

— Joël Collin-Demers

P.S. I’d love your feedback. Rate today’s newsletter or reply to this email. Reading your responses is the highlight of my week.