I was scanning through a report, recently, from Gartner, on sequencing the procurement technology investments.  As it highlighted various variables, internal as well as external, affecting the technology implementation decisions; I couldn’t help notice some of the obvious positive shifts in the expectations that clients have today, from their technology revamp projects.  Let’s look at a few of those:

• The Independence in SaaS : Increasingly, with SaaS based providers on the market, the implementation and delivery cycles have drastically reduced.  A simultaneous upliftment in the state of user interfaces has additionally made it possible for the customers to depend less on the technology provider for basic configurations and system settings.

• Happy Change Management: The rise of world class user-interfaces is now giving way to a world where extensive week long trainings becomes redundant.  Think of MS Office as a software that you install a new version of; and you definitely don’t need to be trained on it, you have online resources, self-explanatory feature sets and intuitive layout that helps you figure things out on your own.  That’s pretty much the case with the new-age software technology in the market.  Username and passwords are armors enough for you.
• Bye-Bye Integration Pains: With the trend of a single provider (like Zycus) offering all the modules on its own, the pain of integration goes out of the window.  The procurement teams can focus on what’s really the day to day priorities for them, instead of worrying about getting the technology pieces to talk to each other.

Undoubtedly, the mantra seems to be: QUICKER – EASIER – SIMPLER. What this is leading towards, more and more, is the ‘Have-it-all Full Suite trend‘.  When it comes to the total number of modules implemented, 2:1 is the ratio most of the time, where you may see four modules  for strategic sourcing (Spends, RFPs, Contracts and Suppliers), and one or two modules implemented for operational procurement (eProcurement and eInvoicing). Seems like the procurement software is going the MS Office way, and fortunately so, for the user community.