PROCON Online Forum 2021 - first global procurement event by OptiBuy

PROCON Online Forum 2021 (March 16-17) has been two days of fantastic presentations. Different approaches, diverse mindsets, and cultures, balancing the current situation's good and bad sides and possible outcomes. All united under one idea - the Brave New Procurement World.

PROCON Online Forum 2021 hosted by an international consulting group specializing in procurement management, spending optimization & digital transformation – OptiBuy, marked its place in the history as the first PROCON event with global reach.

Nearly 250 procurement professionals, experts, and academics joined the conference stream via a designated platform, visited partners’ booths, sent over 300 messages, and expanded their connections during ten networking sessions with engaging activities.

The main transmission originating in Warsaw’s Digital Knowledge Village (Poland) was accompanied by presentation of invited speakers: Christopher Sawchuk (CPO, The Hackett Group), dr Jan Vašek (Procurement Expert & Assistant Professor, MIAS SB at CVUT Prague), Mateusz Borowiecki (Managing Director, OptiBuy), Krishan K. Batra (President & CEO, ISM India), Tim S. Tabrizi (Inspired Leader, former CPO of WSA), Michael Stietz (Senior Vice President & Chief Procurement Officer, Körber), Sam Achampong (Regional Director, CIPS MENA), prof. dr hab. Elisabeth Fröhlich (President & Professor, Strategic Procurement Management, CBS), Nita Nair (AVP Strategic Sourcing & SRM, Emirates NBD), R V Srinivas Rao (Head of Group Logistics, Qatar Airways), Peter Smith (former Managing Editor (2010-18) of the Spend Matters Europe), Radosław Kucharczyk (Global Head of  Procurement Shared Services, Mars) and a Special Guest, the amazing Grand Chessmaster – Judit Polgar.

The key findings of the conference combining various approaches, cultural differences & similarities, guests’ vast experience, and broad expertise unified under the event’s main theme – Brave New Procurement World highlight the importance of relations (internal & external) in the supply chain and the need to build a balance between tools, processes, and people appropriate for a given organization.

• A joint-defined Procurement & SCM strategy is a starting point.
• Procurement must shift the focus to the suppliers - early and deep collaboration to influence costs and discover innovations to foster stability and sustainable growth.
• Improve employee experience and drive efficiencies by standardizing and automating operational activities and reinforcing teams with new insights and capabilities.
• Release human resources from operational activities to spend more time partnering internally and externally, focus on more strategic and value-driven goals.
• Embrace the "… as a service" model, including Supply Chain as a Service (SCaaS) - reduce OPEX by Supply Chain Management while outsourcing the non-core SCM competencies to a SCaaS partner
• Upskill yourself,
• Procurement has to fight/work/earn to be invited as a Partner to every major venture within the organization right from the beginning.
• Procurement gained a lot in the eyes of stakeholders. Now is the time to maintain the credit and the place at THE table we received.
• People always come first – Digital Transformations calls for a proper alignment between People, Process, and Systems supplemented with correct deployment, implementation, and developing goals.
• Don't use technology and methods as a crutch; be critical, remember about factors and phenomena not highlighted in promo-articles, and use (and improve your) Absorptive capacity to understand better and maintain the all-star solutions and approaches.
• However – do trust. And build trust. Choose suppliers that are worth your relationship-building efforts. There are no shortcuts to building effective relationships and managing suppliers – look at this as a long-term strategy and make sure both parties gain from the relationship.
• Procurement is the missing link in a sustainable supply chain, and we should pursue implementing long-term strategies and measures incorporating the SSRM – Sustainable Supplier Relationship Management.

Extract from the PROCON Online Forum 2021 guests' presentations and speeches - credit belongs to respective authors.

OptiBuy wanted to thank the Speakers, Partners, and every Participant of the conference for support the maiden sail into the diverse, challenging but yet - rewarding - Brave New Procurement World.

About OptiBuy

OptiBuy is an international consultancy specialized in procurement management. We provide a broad range of outstanding procurement solutions, using a global network of our own offices (Poland, Czechia, Germany, China, and UAE), extensive market knowledge, and advanced IT tools. We are one of the leading procurement consulting companies in Central-Eastern Europe. Our specialties are optimizing operational costs (cost-cutting projects), global sourcing projects, and implementing specialized procurement software solutions (Ivalua, NextBuy).

We successfully organized procurement conferences that became a networking platform and inspiration hubs for the Polish procurement community, including PROCON/POLZAK – the largest procurement conference in Poland and one of CEE's most meaningful events.

More about OptiBuy: here - https://optibuy.com/en/
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