Digital-Led Procurement Outsourcing Gaining Traction

Traditionally, enterprises have emphasized outsourcing transactional procurement processes. Of late, they have become more open to outsourcing the end-to-end procurement value chain for a holistic transformational experience. Additionally, adoption of digital technologies is emerging as a key component in procurement outsourcing engagements. This has expanded the role of service providers in procurement platform implementation and allied services, leading to a surge in convergence of IT-BPM deals. These trends, and others, are covered in our new Procurement Business Process Transformation 2021 RadarView™ . The report is a comprehensive study of procurement service providers including the top trends, analysis, recommendations, and a close look at the leaders, innovators, disruptors, and challengers in this market.

We evaluated over 25 service providers across three dimensions: practice maturity, domain ecosystem, and investments and innovation. The result is our recognition of 13 providers that have brought the most value to the market during the past 12 months.

The report recognizes service providers in four categories:

• • Leaders: Accenture, Genpact, IBM, Infosys
  • Innovators: Capgemini, GEP, TCS, Wipro
  • Disruptors: HCL, WNS
  • Challengers: Capita, Exela Technologies, Tech Mahindra

Figure 1 from the full report illustrates these categories:

“As procurement outsourcing engagements become more strategic, the role of service providers is expanding,” said Srinivas Krishna, Partner at Avasant. “The demand for end-to-end, digital procurement transformation is increasingly driving enterprises to enter into long-term strategic partnerships with service providers.”

The full report explores a number of other trends in the procurement outsourcing market, including:

• • Sourcing challenges amidst COVID-19 drove enterprises to leverage service providers’ support for business resilience and continuity, leading to a 14.5% growth in procurement outsourcing engagements between March 2020 and March 2021.
  • Digital transformation continues to be a key component in procurement outsourcing deals, with over 77% of deals involving analytics deployment and over 70% involving process automation and digitization.
  • Increased adoption of technologies is expanding service providers’ role in procurement platform implementation and management. Over 32% of deals include deployment or integration of procurement systems and other digital tools.
  • While North America continues to lead the demand for procurement outsourcing, Europe and APAC are offering emerging opportunities to service providers with a 6% and 8% growth, respectively, between March 2020 and March 2021.
  • Service providers are making notable investments to cater to the evolving trends in this space. They are strengthening their digital capabilities through in-house investments and third-party alliances. Additionally, they are hiring advisory SMEs and category specialists to meet the enterprise demand.

“Enterprises’ reliance on service providers is continuously increasing, especially after the sourcing challenges posed by the pandemic,” said Ritika Nijhawan, Analyst at Avasant. “These emerging opportunities are necessitating service providers to strengthen their domain expertise and digital levers, to gain a competitive edge.”

The full RadarView also features detailed profiles of the 13 service providers, along with their solutions, offerings, and experience in delivering procurement business process transformation services.

This Research Byte is a brief overview of the Procurement Business Process Transformation 2021 RadarView™  report (click for pricing).