The advisory firm, Deloiitte, has published a white paper on the prospects of Robotic Process Automation. They apply their thinking to the financial services sector but much of what they conclude seems to me to be applicable to the procurement function.
Much of what we tend to do in procurement involves the same types of activities anyone would undertake when buying a new car or planning a big holiday: establish a budget, find out what’s on the market, narrow down to some candidate suppliers, get some opinions, confirm it’s affordable to own and run (in the case for the car), get pricing on some insurance, haggle, pay.
Once upon a time, getting the information you needed to do the background research on these sorts of activities for said car or holiday required a physical trip to the car yard or travel agent on a Saturday morning. Now we all tend to do our research and comparison shopping using online tools like Ricardo, AutoScout24, Expedia, or Booking dot com. Procurement, by contrast, still seems to be taking a lot of Saturday morning trips…
The data we need is out there. Somewhere. What suppliers exist, do they fit, where are they, what price should we be paying, etc. But we still tend to manually have to build the answer book bespoke for each new procurement project.
If Deloitte is right, RPA will, within a few years, give routine processes, assisted by humans, the boot. They say: “intelligent automation systems detect and produce vast amounts of information and can automate entire processes or workflows, learning and adapting as they go.”
I cannot wait for that day to arrive so that we can all be freed up to spend more time on the things humans are good at rather than spending it reading price index guides or learning how to build better Boolean queries in Google.