The 30 most important trends in procurement

Careers are made these days in procurement. Tim Cook, formerly CPO, is now the CEO at Apple today. And he is not alone. Because procurement includes everything that creates success: understanding numbers, end-to-end grasp of the business as well as awareness of the need for security of supply and dependencies on global networks.

With low real net output ratios of 50 percent or less, procurement also increasingly drives and shapes technical development, product development and innovation. Meanwhile, every sustainably successful procurement organisation has long since identified the decisive factor for a rosy future for their own department and the company as a whole: trends and opportunities are the future.

This is why we have brought together 30 trends and evaluated them for you. Procurement trends that every decision-maker needs to know. These include topics that you are likely starting to handle in new projects, like chatbots for internal communication, AI support for risk management and the data-driven organisation. But how might neuro-coaching, AI-led forecasts, virtual representatives and real-time CO2 tracking affect your business? Or virtual procurement in the metaverse, marketplaces in outer space and the quantum revolution?

In this study, we help you to “trend spot” those developments that are most likely to have a massive impact. We have therefore ranked procurement trends by likely readiness for market: What is likely to impact procurement by 2026? By 2033? And what will take ten years or longer? In addition, we have assigned all the trends to one of four main topic areas:

• Process innovations in procurement
• Sustainability in procurement
• The analytics revolution in procurement
• Resilient procurement organisations

These four areas will reshape the future of procurement over the next few years.

What you see here is obviously a glimpse into the future today. New trends will appear as soon as the next few months. The real benefit of a trend radar comes from having its “radar image” updated regularly by a designated radar team. As those decision-makers who know how to handle the future are aware: opportunities are there to be seized. Those that you miss will be seized by others.

All the trends can be found in this study, presented in an easy-to-grasp and condensed form of trend briefings. We also rate each of them clearly for their level of impact and innovation.

For those whose first reaction to certain opportunities is that they are too good to be true, we recommend reading the section added for each trend called “Drivers and momentum”. Here you will find out about developments, prototypes and precursors that already exist and support the viability of that particular trend.

What is especially interesting here are the cross-industry opportunities, things that come from totally different sectors and application - because they usually get overlooked because so few people look any further than their own sector.

Be a winner with “Quantum revolution in procurement: The 30 most important opportunities and trends”, a glimpse of the future.

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