Do You Have a Championship Procurement Team?

Michael Jordan once said, “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” It’s pretty easy to see what it meant when it comes to sports. On the talent side, how many games have been won by the contributions of a few key players? On the flip side, how many losses have been attributed to one injured key player?

While a regular season can endure the constant fluctuation of a player’s game from one night to the next, championships are a different beast entirely. It’s not enough to be talented. There is no next game. If that player you were depending on had a bad outing, there is nothing to improve upon for the next game. That’s it. You’re done. You have to build a team that depends on more than talent. Do you need great players? Definitely. But more importantly, you need those players to work together . You need a team. One that doesn’t make you hold your breath each and every game. One that is dependable, adaptable, and intelligent.

So, where does that leave procurement teams?

Your procurement team is full of people. But more and more, it’s also becoming your technology stack. Every company is different, but you probably have some combination of eSourcing, eProcurement, eInvoicing, spend analytics, contract management other supplier management technology – or you’re planning to incorporate it in the future.

So, let’s do a thought experiment. Do you want the best procurement technology out there? Yes. Do you want it to all work together? Of course you do. Here’s the kicker, though. Unless you can get all of the best technology on a single platform, it’s incredibly hard to achieve both. Why? When you’re working with systems from multiple vendors, data types may not match, integrating two systems can easily become a nightmare, and you can end up with sub-par results in the form of slower implementation, lower adoptions rates, and hard dollar losses. Like watching two great players fail to connect because one threw the ball just a little too hard , it’s not a good situation.

What’s the alternative? With our last two releases, we can proudly say that we offer the full suite of ePurchasing tools on one platform– Combining the benefits of best-of-breed functionality and state-of-the-art technology at every step of the ePurchasing process. In fact, we’re the only company on the market that can say this (see Forrester’s latest report – Vendor Landscape: ePurchasing Software, 2015 to 2016).

I fully admit to tooting our own horn here, but I’m pretty excited by what we have accomplished. Unlike multi-vendor procurement solutions cobbled together, you do not only get talent, but the foundation necessary to build a championship team.

Winning games is great. Having talent is great. But having talent that consistently wins games – and ultimately championships – is the greatest.

See how JAGGAER’s customers review our P2P solution suite with Gartner’s Peer Insights!