As we bid farewell to 2023, the threats and challenges faced by enterprise organisations showed no signs of slowing down. From mounting geo-political tensions, economic turbulence, high interest rates, and changing consumer demands, to a pandemic, global supply chain crises, and rampant scope 3 emissions, recent years have seen the challenges to enterprise businesses multiply exponentially.
In the face of these obstacles, the procurement leaders we work with find their roles central to the survival of the business. It has never been more important to balance cost, quality, efficiency, ensure supply chain continuity, and attract external innovation to promote business continuity and growth. What’s more, businesses are increasingly tasked with balancing this growth against the pressing sustainability agenda, with an urgent imperative to decarbonise our value chains, end-to-end.
Organisations cannot fulfil these new demands and retain competitive advantage without strengthening their ties to their supply chain, and forging deep collaborative relationships with key suppliers and partners.
Compounding these pressures, we see buying organisations are fighting to be front and centre to a relatively small group of key strategic suppliers that serve similar businesses across the globe. Every single buying organisation is now competing for the attention of each of these suppliers, and to access the supplier’s best people, innovations and resources, each supplier in turn needs to fundamentally believe that the buying organisation is an attractive client, worth their investment, and worth prioritising over others.
As a result, we saw significant increases in investments in supplier engagement programmes across the later half of 2023, with no expectation of this slowing down as we head into 2024.
My advice to procurement leaders as we head into 2024, is to double down on those mission critical relationships, remembering constantly that your business can neither be sustainable, resilient, nor competitive, without those very suppliers.
Across the course of 2024, our experienced team here at Vizibl HQ are will deliver a library of case studies, tips, tools and resources, that will help you ensure you and your team are best placed to capitalise on your meaningful supplier relationships.
Here are a few of the highlights you can look forward to across the year:
“Simply, SRM is very important to us. The outdated 'one-way' interaction, where customers simply conveyed their demands for suppliers to execute, has proved insufficient for industry leaders seeking to excel in today’s dynamic, fast-paced, highly competitive environment."
This 4 piece toolkit includes guidance on the key elements that go into building a robust business case, a sample business case for investing in supplier relationships, a financial ROI calculator, and a presentation template to gain buy in with your senior execs.
Now entering its third edition, this guide has been updated to include the SBTi suppler engagement framework, helping you move from ambition, to action, in managing and reducing your value chain emissions.
Look out for more information coming shortly on how to accelerate your supplier innovation efforts, with a quick start bundle designed to quickly capture, digitise and scale your supplier innovation efforts.
These are just a few of the highlights you can enjoy from our team in 2024, to find out more, head on over to our website, and finally, on behalf of the Vizibl team, we'd like to wish you an exciting and successful start to 2024.
