3 Things to Know About Arkestro’s Exclusive Advisory Council Events
It’s no secret that anyone working in procurement — from CPOs to procurement managers — has their work cut out for them in 2024. According to the Hackett Group’s 2024 Global CPO Survey, procurement teams’ workloads are expected to increase an average of 8% this year.
With more work than ever on their plates, CPOs are renewing their focus on cutting costs and doubling down on savings, the survey found. In this climate, vigilantly guarding expenses, investing in key supplier relationships, and working out logistics problems have never been more important. Yet, with procurement budgets only expected to increase 1.6%, these challenges have also never been more daunting.
One way procurement leaders are trying to fill the gap? Technology like Predictive Procurement Orchestration (PPO) and platforms like Arkestro. To help procurement overcome these challenges, Arkestro hosts quarterly Advisory Council events, exclusive to our partners and customers, to bring together the brightest minds in the PPO space to help elevate procurement from a cog in the machine to a strategic partner. In this blog, we’ll break down more about what the Advisory Council is, what we cover in our meetings, and information on upcoming events.
What Sets Arkestro Advisory Council Events Apart
Successfully implementing technology across procurement has more potential than just improving efficiency and reducing day-to-day workload. While those are important goals, when done well, implementing platforms like Arkestro can elevate the procurement function itself from a seemingly back-office, tedious function to one of strategic value to company-wide leadership — an outcome more and more procurement leaders are interested in. Indeed, 55% of organizations say it is critical for procurement to become a “trusted advisor to the business.”
Given the impact of evolving technology such as generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), game theory, and machine learning, transforming the current procurement operating model to incorporate more tech is one of the top five priorities for procurement leaders in 2024. Leaders are willing to put their money where their mouth is too, with technology spend being the one area procurement leaders are investing in rather than cutting (Hackett Group anticipates a 4.6% increase in spend this year).
Our Advisory Council events aim to help our users and any interested parties use technology to do just that — elevate procurement to its full potential (and understand how Arkestro’s PPO platform can help them along the way). Our Advisory Council goals include:
- Foster a community of Arkestro users and advisors.
- Engage with each other to learn more about Predictive Procurement’s potential and capabilities.
- Inspire Arkestro users to use the platform enthusiastically and explore how it can meet their goals.
With so much to gain from using platforms like ours, let’s explore the topics and themes we explore in our Advisory Council events.
Topics We Explore
Our Advisory Council events bring together our team of experts across a variety of topics relevant to both current procurement events and our users’ experiences. From logistics to supplier satisfaction to analytics, we cover each topic in depth so you’ll leave with a clear understanding of what experts are saying, why it’s relevant to procurement now, and how Arkestro can help you overcome current challenges.
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When you attend an Advisory Council event, you’ll experience a community discussion on key topics like:
- Supplier satisfaction with the procurement process: When suppliers are dissatisfied with your procurement processes, relationships can suffer, and it may be a warning sign something needs to change.
- Metrics for assessing supplier-facing technologies: To evaluate technology impact, metrics like NPS (net promoter score), manual data entry reduction, time for feedback on offers, and supplier insights for selection criteria are key to consider.
- Improving supplier satisfaction by segmentation: How can you identify and segment your suppliers into strategic and non-critical groups to identify the most important personas to focus on (e.g. net new suppliers, expansion suppliers, and preferred suppliers)?
- Critical use cases for supplier satisfaction: What use cases have you identified as most important to improve your procurement experience (e.g. request for quotes, spot buys, quoting to refresh price agreements, etc.)?
- Logistics procurement: Are challenges such as buying or sourcing freight becoming more difficult due to increased volatility and higher market tempos? What impact will future procurement trends in logistics and transportation have on procurement
- Cost savings acceleration: The impact of delaying cost savings can be severe. Therefore, aspects of cost reduction such as cost of hours, cycle time, risk, customer experience, scalability, and more are key to experience.
- Stakeholder perspectives: Across internal customers, suppliers, finance, operations, supply chain, and internal team members, who would benefit most from faster procurement cycles?
- Procurement metrics and interests: Lastly, what would it mean for your business and the procurement organization as a whole if you could improve metrics like customer NPS, supplier NPS, and savings acceleration?
Our team discusses the above topics in-depth at each Advisory Council meeting to help procurement leaders explore areas where they have questions and identify areas of improvement.
Check out video clips from our previous Advisory Councils here:
Upcoming Topics and Dates
By leveraging machine learning, game theory, and data science, Arkestro is on the cutting edge of procurement innovation. Our platform learns from your best buying decisions to speed up your processes and drive more time and resource savings.
At Arkestro, our goal is to help procurement professionals make better buying decisions to improve their speed, accuracy, and influence — without increasing headcount. In a climate where budgets are being cut and procurement is being asked to do more with less, technology like Arkestro’s PPO can help make up the difference. To that end, our Advisory Council events can help you level-up both your procurement organization and your career.
Ultimately, though, the biggest driver behind Arkestro’s exclusive Advisory Council events is to help you leave equipped with not only the tools to get the job done but also a community of like-minded procurement professionals to lean on and grow alongside. We’re cultivating a group of procurement innovators at these quarterly events, and we hope you’ll join us.
Upcoming 2024 Advisory Council themes include:
- Cost Savings Acceleration is the Hottest New Procurement KPI
- Unlocking Profit in Manufacturing: Transforming Procurement into a Margin Booster
- Become Your Suppliers’ BFF To Secure Better Value
Register here, or reach out to us directly if you have any questions about future Advisory Councils.