Addressing Procurement’s Data Crisis By Stephany Lapierre, CEO & Founder, tealbook Businesses of all sizes, maturity levels, and industries are facing a data crisis. While this may sound dramatic, I suggest that data quality is at the root of nearly every problem in procurement today. Companies rely on their procurement organizations to work with suppliers and foster the relationships required to advance the business, while elevating working conditions in the supply chain as a whole. This need has paved the way for a flurry of procurement software implementations, each automating one or more aspects of the procurement process. With equal speed, technology has expanded the ways in which suppliers market themselves and connect with their current and prospective customers. These factors have left procurement with the monumental task of managing a variety of systems, fragmented data, and ever-growing business expectations. The transactional network of relationships between the business and its suppliers ultimately produces an endless stream of resource-rich data. This volume of data is so large, and is growing so quickly, that only technology can properly mine and manage it. Data is the foundation that a business relies on and that procurement acts on. For these reasons, data must be accurate and trustworthy. All sourcing, spend analysis, contract and supplier management activity is dependent upon the quality of enterprise data. And yet, the current state of our data is of an alarmingly poor quality. It is stored in separate systems, and duplication, omissions, and errors are widespread. Data changes at an alarming rate and is often generated in disparate systems. This only compounds the complexity of the crisis.
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