Four digital procurement implementation risks and - most importantly - what to do to manage them!

Last month, we discussed the value of taking a business-led approach to digital procurement transformation implementations. In particular, we touched on end-user adoption being one of the most critical risks to be managed to ensure benefits are truly realized from this type of transformations.  Without thinking through the human experience in the end-to-end Source-to-Pay process for all targeted user groups can result in implementation failures. Simply put, a successful technical go-live that is not adopted by targeted users will not produce the benefits expected.

For this month’s edition, let us take you one level under the hood of the contributing factors to this adoption risk - why don’t people just adopt!?  And more importantly our lessons learned on what to do about them. Let’s check them out!

4 Digital Procurement Implementation Risks and Mitigations:

1. Limited adoption from internal stakeholders such as procurement staff, internal customers / requisitioners leads to leakage of expected benefits realization
2. Limited Adoption from suppliers, such as access and technology maturity
3. Inadequate understanding of system capabilities, for example key decision makers lack understanding due to limited involvement in design phase
4. Insufficient data migration strategy.  Lack of data migration strategy leads to stakeholder resistance arising from a perceived duplication of efforts or inefficient use of systems

So how can we tackle these risks to make sure your project is successful?!

Limited adoption from internal stakeholders  

• Identify common roles (i.e personas) across the targeted user groups based on how they interact with and process procurement requests today   
• Engage representatives of these personas throughout the design process to understand their environment and motivations across the different scenarios
• Identify readiness assessment components (both technical and functional) to measure the preparedness of the business to take on the upcoming change and track it on a regular cadence to ensure communication is consistent, concise and well spread throughout the organization

Limited adoption from suppliers

• Create segmented supplier engagement strategies (e.g. by jurisdiction, supplier size, supplier location / connectivity consideration, etc.) that address the needs and capabilities of the broad range of supplier stakeholders. 
• Align internally on supplier engagement and compliance policies, as well as classification based on risk and business impact to supplier interactions 

Inadequate understanding of system capabilities 

• SaaS (Software as a Service) models and cloud based softwares present the opportunity to utilize test systems to move through multiple demos of the process based on your requirements. This allows for a deeper understanding of your requirements and how they come to live in the new system!
• Iterate the construction of the system to build and validate rather than wait for the big reveal during testing. This allows you to validate your requirements prior to testing and gives you the ability to modify, reconfigure or redesign (if time permits) prior to testing
• Inclusion of the larger user community during early demos will provide an early understanding of the system and its functionalities

Insufficient data migration strategy

• Recognize that data migration is not the only approach required to fully enable a digital and electronic procurement system; more often than not, “data creation” is required to fully take advantage of the full automation potential offered by these systems 
• Identify key data elements (e.g. templates, terms) to be considered in the overall data strategy to allow users to gain efficiency by adopting the tool from Day One of implementation
• Maintain a clear focus on data migration with an emphasis on data clean up will give you an opportunity to consolidate data and remove unnecessary data points for an enhanced user experience along with rationalize data maintenance efforts in the long run

All projects have a certain degree of risk, but if you plan ahead you can make sure your implementation provides value not headaches!  What other risks have you seen in past implementations and how have you managed them? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below! 

Continuing on with this dialog, tune in next month for our Digital Procurement installment as we discuss leveraging Machine Learning for social procurement agenda by team member Anirudh