Why Sourcing and Why Automation?
Fairmarkit is the intelligent sourcing platform and they automate sourcing events for enterprise clients so they can work on more interesting things. I caught up with Erin McFarlane, VP of Services at Fairmarkit to talk to her about her reason for being in the Procurement space and what Fairmarkit offers as a service to people like you and me as Procurement and Supply Chain pros.
In this World of Procurement Podcast episode, we discussed:
The need to change policies and procedures when adopting new procurement technology and how to revolutionise the processes.
Why Sourcing and why automation in enterprise.
We talk about what technology does but we don’t define WHY we do the things that we do. We need to do this at a very simple level and we need to think about the meaningful impact that can be made.
Sourcing has been a quiet back-office function pre-covid to one of the most important functions of any business.
We have accepted norms about how we hire people, using a very structured process, going through proposals, business cases, diversity etc and we do the same in Procurement. However, the tech in HR versus Procurement has been vastly superior which has led to Procurement Teams not often getting the support to follow the process. How did we get to this point? We discuss this.
Erin finds that when businesses are sourcing “people” or “employees” they are going by the process 95% of the time and the process is very well understood in Business. Erin believes we should have that approach to goods and services but more of the Fairmarkit customers are only sourcing 20% of what they buy.
When you think about Supplier diversity and sustainability, you need to source goods and services to give people and businesses a chance to come to the table. By choosing to not source and use the same old supplier each time, you’re giving anyone a chance.
The only way you can source almost everything, to speed up the RFP process from months and weeks to days, is technology.
Technology and automation are the way forward to enable sustainability and diversity within the supply chain.
I think sustainability and diversity are best executed in the middle range of your spending (because in the RFP, the odds that a small business is going to win are slim).
Think of what you can do by spending a few hours a week on this.
We cover what Fairmarkit offer as services and how their technology enables worldwide use.
Fairmarkit looks at the preferred suppliers, they look at what you need to buy, they look at the existing supply base for 80-90% of the supply base, and this has enabled them to go worldwide with the technology.
Fairmarkit is also running with some smaller suppliers in Africa on a mobile-only device.
Erin makes a great point that we need to know our Suppliers, we need to know their contact details and we need to make sure we’ve got good data going into procurement technology.
We talk about the leapfrogged clients. The ones who have pure manual processes or even using carbon-based paper to run their sourcing events. We talk about how COVID changed this and pushed forward the need to digitalised.
Everyone gets what sourcing is now and it’s given teams the ability to secure budgets from their business to improve technologies.
Fairmarkit got a grassroots heads up about supply chain shortages and noticed the N95 shortage back in the middle of January 2020.
Fairmarkit can reach hard to find equipment, such as PPE, as there were incredible amounts of data and suppliers in their platform.
Why the boring work that most junior procurement/supply chain pros do is not good for those junior procurement pros. Think back to why you go to work - it’s not to do boring admin work. There is more to it than that and technology is going to remove the boring work and allow you to focus on meaningful work.
Erin suggested the following resources throughout our conversation, check them out:
Book Recommendation - Simon Sinek - Start with Why
Procurement Podcasts such as Art of Procurement
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
The World of Procurement Podcast is one of the most popular Procurement and Supply Chain podcasts in the world with more than 16,000 downloads. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.