Inside Supply Management Magazine

Global Tech Summit Offers NewWays of Looking at Procurement

March 15, 2016
Attendees at the Global Procurement Tech Summit on March 15, 2016.
Attendees at the Global Procurement Tech Summit on March 15, 2016.

Today’s procurement professionals are faced with continually changing technologies, say speakers at the Global Procurement Technology Summit, presented March 14-16 in Baltimore, by Institute for Supply Management® and Spend Matters.

“Technology is really shaping the way we work,” Mary Lue Peck, senior vice president of ISM, told the 200 attendees present during the opening remarks at the conference Tuesday, March 15.

Jason Busch, founder of Spend Matters, added that the speed of technological change during the last decade has been huge. “We’ve evolved into a world of platforms. We’ve evolved into a world of apps. Technology is changing so much – that’s why we’re doing this conference today.”

Conference sessions address the changes through four learning tracks:

The Innovators: Analytics and (Artificial) Intelligence

The Heavy Lifting: Direct Material Procurement and Risk

The Big Cs of Procurement: Clouds, Cost, Control and Contract Management

The Tech Disruptors.

Session topics range “The Role of Technology and Analytics in Managing Supplier Risk,” “Tapping the Cloud to Enable the New Agility Imperative,” and “How Tomorrow’s Practitioners Will Change the Procurement Technology Landscape.”

Keynote presenters included:

Dan Carrell, vice president, global procurement, IBM, who said that "data is the new natural resource." He spoke about IBM’s Watson cognitive computing system, which is being developed to offer five types of procurement functions such as the Watson Pricing IQ and the Watson Buying Assistant.

Prentis Wilson, vice president of Amazon Business for Amazon, who spoke about Amazon Business and its features for procurement professionals.

Anne Rung, administrator, U.S. Office of Federal Procurement Policy, who talked about category management initiatives.

For more information about the summit and other ISM conferences and summits, visit www.instituteforsupplymanagement.org.