By Praveen Rao
Managing Director, Supply Chain Solutions and Partnerships
IBM Industry Platforms

Today’s businesses are operating in an increasingly complex world in which risk and volatility are putting new pressure on day-to-day business operations. A study by IBM indicates businesses are spending more than 50 percent of their revenues on procuring goods and services from their supplier base. Leading procurement organizations must excel in the fundamentals of reducing cost, ensuring compliance, driving performance and ensuring innovations in the supply base.  

In today’s procurement world, a keystone in the sourcing strategy is to have vendor management methods that foster engaging with the right suppliers at minimal cost. This involves managing all aspects of supplier lifecycle from discovery and qualification to onboarding and monitoring.  

Continuous monitoring of the supplier performance in today’s fast-paced and global environment, along with supplier rationalization as a key piece of strategy, must be considered by procurement organizations to innovate in driving better supplier management. In our conversations with large procurement organizations, these are some of the top procurement challenges for 2021 and beyond: 

• Reduce spend cost
• Lack of resiliency in supply chains
• Lack of risk mitigation around onboarding unfavorable suppliers
• Outdated procurement systems
• Lack of analytics for insights around supplier performance
• Not enough focus on sustainability and diversity of supplier base
• Dark purchasing that happens outside the approved procurement processes 

So how do procurement organizations drive change to face these challenges? Trust Your Supplier (TYS) works with a network of enterprise buyer organizations to bring digital transformation to their industries. As an integral part of their strategy, the TYS blockchain platform is bringing transparency and supplier visibility at every touchpoint. The supplier owned profile, with information needed for onboarding and qualification, can be cross referenced against industry recognized validators to reduce your organization’s overall procurement cost and to support compliance activities such as diversity, sustainability, cyber security, and anti-corruption. 

TYS boasts a rich marketplace of business partners that cater to evolving risks such as:  supplier Identity, firmographics, financial, sustainability, cybersecurity, governmental sanctions, compliance and screening for undesirable entities.  

Furthermore, TYS has partners into your supply chain resiliency and potential disruptions that could arise from unplanned events such as a pandemic or natural calamities. Marketplace providers offers continuous monitoring capabilities to ensure that your risk data is kept up to date with evolving market conditions. These solutions are offered through free basic data sets, bring your own license, and commercial license purchasing options. 

To learn more about how Trust Your Supplier can help with your organization address these top procurement challenges and bring innovation to your supplier management process, please contact us to speak with an expert.   

Praveen Rao
Email:[email protected]
Twitter:https://twitter.com/prao1