The Future of Sourcing

Sourcing executives expected to harness digitization and new business models to improve predictability, efficiency, decision making, and accuracy-not just in sourcing, but across the business.

Major changes in the role and setup of the  sourcing office of the future, driven by end-to-end digitization. Digitally enabled collaboration and partnerships will enable more direct interactions between designers, buyers and suppliers. The approach to digitize procurement in apparel will need to be focused heavily on improving speed and flexibility.

To unlock the full potential of digitization there are five foundations that can be started.

Talent and mindset: Companies need to acquire and develop savvy talent internally and externally to drive the digital transformation.

Extermal collaboration and engagement models: Conlecting and partnering with strategic suppliers, technology companies and customers as well as experimenting with new collaboration models that include start-ups. Developing these ecosystems with each partner bringing its distinctive core competence, will enable much faster innovation and adoption of new technologies.

Digital infrastructure: Companies need to invest early in the best available solutions and link them in the back end. They will ned to draw on both internal talent and external communities to build, acquire and experiment with new digital tools.

Advanced analytics: companies can use tools such as dashboards, interactive apps, and live data streams to enhance their overall analytics posture

Process redesign and end-to-end digitization: Optimizing end-to-end process efficiency and supply chain flexibility, companies can identify high -value cases for digitization and then develop a road map that identifies available solutions and partners to drive further digitization in priority areas.