Post summer event season is now well under way with a hugely well-received new entry onto our calendars last week with DPW (Digital Procurement World). The event location in Amsterdam has already been booked for September 2020, and I highly recommend it to vendors, investors, consulting firms and those interested in the Procurement tech space. We’ll bring you more about that in the coming months.
An event I’m looking forward to on home turf for me (UK) is Sap Ariba’s ValueX event on October 30th in London. Regular readers, and attendees of the equivalent event over the past years, will recognise this as Sap Ariba’s Procurement Summit, which traditionally has been a very strongly attended and successful event. This year’s shiny new model looks to be of equal quality; not only does its name sound fresh and full of intrigue, but the agenda backs this up with a really interesting mix of topics on the mainstage, including Driving Enterprise in the Circular Economy, The Supply Chain of the Next Industrial Revolution and Breaking the Customer Trust Challenge.
A really big pull, we suspect, will be the keynote from Member of Parliament, John Penrose, the Prime Minister’s anti-corruption and bribery champion. He will be talking about the role of organisations and their strategic suppliers to invest in sustainability and ethics to help support rebooting capitalism. This sits nicely with Sap Ariba’s running theme of Procurement with Purpose, which amplifies the sustainability agenda through the wider conference. Penrose is a campaigner for making Britain’s economy work for the many, not the few. His recent campaigns include the Energy Price Cap; making housing cheaper to own or rent; making Britain’s economy more generationally-just and socially-just by creating a UK Sovereign Wealth Fund and a legally-binding Fiscal Rule; and reforming formerly-nationalised utilities (e.g. energy, telecoms, water, rail) to put customers in charge, rather than politicians, bureaucrats or regulators. He was also a successful businessman before he entered politics; with commercial roles at J P Morgan and McKinsey to name but two.
There are also discussion breakouts on various perspectives that look like they’ll have something for everyone, for example, applications for Bots and procurement assistants in procurement, being IR35-ready, bridging the talent gap through integrated workforce management, and how to get the most value from the Ariba network, where experts will share how others have designed and executed winning strategies, including leveraging B2B marketplaces for unmanaged spend categories. There are also hands-on interactive showcases and demonstrations of real innovation experiences. As our man on the ground, Peter Smith, said after the last event “It gave me more insight into what is really likely to happen around digitisation in our sector than pretty much any other event over the past couple of years that I attended.” Speaking of Peter, he will be there and you may well catch him performing!
Needless to say the Spend Matters team will in attendance, do come and say hello if you are coming along. It’s a free event for practitioners, so for any procurement function it’s well worth someone attending, it’s not just for Sap Ariba clients. However, if you are a client, it’s really not to be missed.
Check out the agenda and speakers. And we hope to see you there, on October 30th at the stunning BMA House, Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 9JP
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