Why user experience is crucial for procurement

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Abstract: Procurement touches every part of a company and the critical role that suppliers play in a company’s operations only increases its importance. For direct materials, the purchases are managed by dedicated experts whose focus allows them to develop expertise in using specialised, and sometimes complex, systems. On the other hand, indirect purchases can be made by anyone in the organisation, most of whom will be infrequent users who struggle to adapt to any system that is difficult to use. At the same time, procurement departments are looking for ways to increase the amount of spend under management to reduce costs and minimise the risks, such as information security, associated with uncontrolled buying. Solving this challenge requires that we expand our perspective of procurement systems to include the overall user experience (UX). This paper is a summary of our collective learnings on why UX is critical to any procurement and supply chain organisation, and the proven framework and techniques we deploy to help companies achieve their transformation and operations goals.

Keywords: user experience (UX); customer experience (CX); end customer; procurement transformation; journey mapping; Amazon effect; self-service technology; spend management technologies; enterprise resource planning (ERP); indirect procurement; spend compliance; behavioural science; human computer interaction; shadow procurement organisation

Stephen Simko is the Global Procurement Practice Leader at Genpact. A global professional services company born out of General Electric in 2005, Genpact provides to global clients a range of business and technology services with focused areas that include procurement, finance and accounting and supply chain. Genpact has over 18,000 people in the source-to-pay line doing end-to-end work, from category management all the way to payables, for more than 100 clients globally. He was a founding executive at Procurian and has held several leadership positions in private equity at Kearney and DuPont Medical Products. He has an MBA from NYU Stern and a BSc in engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
 

Brandon Rozelle is the Senior Vice President of Strategy at Rightpoint, specialising in helping clients create programme roadmaps to deliver technology-enabled experiences to deepen the relationships brands have with their customers. Rightpoint is a Genpact company working with clients to embed employee experience and customer experience through apps and other digital solutions. Brandon’s background is in helping companies adopt customer-focused growth strategies, and he has held consulting roles at Deloitte and Gartner. He has a BA in English literature and political science from Wake Forest University.