You’ve delivered cost savings. You’ve demonstrated value. You’ve earned your place in the C-Suite. What do you do now to advance the procurement function and secure its place for many years to come? This panel will discuss how to stay innovative and reinvent yourself, including:
• Strengthening the value of indirect procurement
• Creating a procurement “brand” to increase awareness of your accomplishments and capabilities throughout the organization
• Moving beyond the “X-step process” to generate more business improvements, not just cost improvements
• How procurement can contribute to revenue growth
• Implementing the next stage of the business relationship
• What’s beyond price and value?

Inflation creeping up, cost reduction is going to be difficult. Building more collaborative relationships with your key suppliers enables you to identify more improvement and innovation opportunities, encourage investment, and improve execution and success rates. As procurement teams have to do more with less internal resources, they must depend more on their suppliers. This panel will focus on how to extract innovation from your supply base through exclusive commercial and gain-sharing relationships, and what you can do as a customer to keep them wanting your business.
• How to develop a preferred relationship with key suppliers
• How deeply and how early in the development process can you have your suppliers involved?
• Managing supplier engagements in practice
• Offloading and automating tactical processes to suppliers
• Monitoring, measuring and managing supplier performance – what does success look like?

When considering outsourcing a category or part of the procurement function, there are many considerations you must take into account to ensure that you’ll actually receive promised savings. This panel will discuss:
• Determining what is core to your company’s procurement function, and what can be outsourced
• Selecting the right BPO for your organization- it’s not one size fits all
• Achieving value creation and ROI based on what’s outsourced and where
• Have compliance costs and the dollar’s continued weakness begun eating away at outsourcing’s potential savings?
• What is the lifecycle of an outsourcing engagement? How does that evolve over time?
• BPO vs. GPO- benefits and drawbacks