Future Proofing Procurement with Elouise Epstein, Partner at Kearney

In this episode of Procurement Reimagined, Elouise Epstein, Partner at Kearney,  joins us to share her future vision of all things procurement, including Data platforms, contract management tools and AI, and risk management. She shares her insights on how businesses can future-proof their operations to align with what lies beyond the horizon. 

Elouise has over twenty-two years of experience in digital procurement. She is an advocate for the advancement of procurement practices and, in her own words, is a digital futurist focused on supply chains. She specialises in how to apply digital to solve actual business problems.

Key highlights:

• 04:00 - 06:22 - Legacy Systems Must Go - The first step is to move away from the source-to-pay construct, closely followed by a shift away from the  ERP construct itself. Elouise feels strongly about this issue and believes that one can’t have a future vision while being handcuffed to legacy systems. We need to replace the legacy systems and processes with intelligence ranging from supplier, risk, and ESG intelligence. 
• 15:22 - 16:53 - Clean up Your Data Before Looking at AI -  All your tech stacks, AI, and tools like Chat GPT are only as good as the quality of data you feed them. As the old saying goes, junk in, junk out. And at a granular level, data quality could be better at most companies. So, before you invest in shiny new software, spend on improving the quality and reliability of your big data. 
• 19:20 - 20:10 - Dirty Data Impacts Your ESG Compliance  - A large part of supplier management pivots around ESG compliance. Again, you’re dependent on external data that cannot be verified. Elouise’s solution is to build a framework and work bottom up, starting with the accuracy and validity of data. 
• 21:16 - 26:45 - Risk Management and Resilience- Elouise shares details about one of her clients. They wanted a review of supplier risk management, and the records showed that they were managing 30,000 contracts. Upon digging deeper, only about 1,000 were active. The active ones were then segmented into the top 100 and the remaining 900. The top 100 accounts were thoroughly reviewed, while the other 900 were put on limited network access to manage risk. Clean up, segment and simplify to manage risk.

Quotes:

• “If we do not get rid of the ERP, we will never get to any future. We are already living in a post-ERP world; we just haven’t accepted it yet”.
•  “You’re not going to lose your job to Chat GPT, you’ll lose it to the person who figures out how to use it better than you”.
• “There are no magic buttons in technology; everything is run by algorithms fed by data. Junk in, junk out”.
• “The best procurement framework will come to nought if you get tripped up on the basics”.