Digital Procurement Survey: 4th Edition
We are delighted to present the results of the 2022 PwC Digital Procurement Survey, which is the 4th edition. This year, this barometer of digital transformation reaches an international dimension, with over 800 companies from more than 60 countries participating. Navigating through supply chain disruptions, new remote working methods, soaring prices for many raw materials, Procurement has been repositioned more than ever at the heart of companies' activities following the COVID-19 crisis.
The emergence of these new risks has changed the perception of digital transformation by Procurement departments. While digitalisation continues to progress among companies in all sectors, it is now becoming a necessity to overcome the challenges of cost control, supply chain traceability and supplier relation securisation.
Digital roadmaps are also embracing innovative use cases, such as CO2 emissions tracking, indicating that purchasing departments are preparing for the shift to sustainable development.
Current state of Digital Procurement
- Digital Transformation is progressing on CPOs’ roadmap (+6 points), of which Cost reduction and Strategic Sourcing are still the spearhead (61%).
- Digital transformation is now also motivated by Risk management and Compliance, in addition to traditional objectives of process optimization and cost reduction.
- Source-to-Pay digitalisation has become the “New normal” for Procurement departments as 90% of respondents use either S2C nor P2P solutions and 77% use both of them.
- 80% of companies with a high level of process digitalisation succeed with value creation thanks to data availability. However, 55% of companies still struggle leveraging their data.
Future state of Digital Procurement
Procurement departments set very ambitious digitalisation objectives for 2025, with an average target of 72% of digitalisation. However, perception of actual digitalisation rates of Procurement processes ran into COVID-19 reality, with a 6% decrease to reach an average 41% digitalisation rate.
Middle market companies plan to strongly increase their investments in Procurement digital transformation (+50% between 2020 and 2022), while large and very large companies will maintain their budgets.
CPOs are focusing their roadmap on Source-to-Pay digitalisation as well as on innovative use cases of ESG and Supply chain traceability. The trends tend to a shift of digital roadmaps: focusing on proven added-value use cases while shelving exploratory digital use cases.
The tracking of suppliers’ CO2 emissions is at a starting point to be a “Game-changer” for Procurement departments: already 27% of companies use or experiment this emerging use case within their organization.
- The applicability of Blockchain in Procurement processes still needs to be clarified for 59% of Procurement departments. However, they see it as a vector of valuable improvements for the entire Supply chain processes.
