Some of the serious challenges enterprises face today includes poor information quality, time-consuming and costly manual sourcing and procurement processes, weak process control and difficulty obtaining interest and support from internal spend stakeholders for procurement-led business performance improvement initiatives.

As part of a larger initiative to understand procurement landscape across the globe, Zycus commissioned the “Pulse of Procurement” research. The Europe research report offers some exciting insights for procurement organizations.

Some of the key findings are;

• A very prominent trend amongst European organizations was the mandate by its management to have a greater strategic procurement control and also, control over corporate spending. This was supported by 81% of the research respondents.
• Another trend quickly catching up in Europe is the inclination of the organizations to deploy procurement solutions in combination or integrated solution suites. This was answered positively by 70% of the respondents. This highlights that the procurement enablement technology plans are aggressive in Europe.
• On average, European procurement teams are looking to bank cost savings equaling an estimated 10% of total enterprise spending (on par with the global average) while one in four European companies (26%) will pursue even higher cost-savings goals.

However there are areas where European procurement organizations need to improve. In-spite of aggressive technology plans, the current procurement processes are still labor intensive. This hampers the real automation benefits that organizations can enjoy. Another area that’s lacking is the information quality of spend, contract and supplier.