Let's imagine that you are a procurement manager responsible to procure high value critical items which are classified as Class-A materials in your organisation. Typically ~20% of these items amount to ~80% of the costs associated with material inventory. Hence, your role is very important to the organisation as the leadership wants you to cut material costs and yet ensure that the quality of this component is absolutely high so that the quality of the finished goods your organisation makes maintains the market share leadership.
Now you are in early 2000's doing this role. You have a set of approved vendors and you negotiate hard with all conventional business rules you and your organisation have developed over years of experience. Your span of control is across the globe in terms of procurement which makes it more challenging in your role after taking into account taxes and duties, currency fluctuations and so on. Yet, you have been successfully delivering the results which makes you the role model within your teams - and rightfully, you are immensely proud of that achievement, year on year.
Now, think you are doing this work today, in 2020. You are doing the same role, but equipped with more intelligent workflows which provides much more detailed insights not just within your organisation, but also from the external world. Suppose, with a cool and sleek dashboard available on a real time basis on your laptop as well as your mobile device, for that high value item you are getting the following information:
Dynamic vendor rating of the approved vendors for a material - dynamic based on various parameters like a) quality of goods at time of last 20 goods receipt done by your organisation from each of the vendors, b) supply timeliness, c) supplying exactly as per order with proper quality certificates, d) providing details on fair trade, etc
Analytical trend on the performance of the vendor based on the dynamic vendor rating - showing upward trends or downward trends
Providing two more alternate vendors with past records of procurement lead times, lot sizes, etc as well as the above information
Providing information on days payable outstanding of the above vendors
Providing information on the vendor's financial conditions (cash flow, etc etc)
Information at one end of the screen on global supply trends for that material in terms of source of supply, change of taxes from governments, etc
Indication of major geo-political events like Brexit, occurrence of some disruptions on certain parts of the world - all within the dashboard (with data inputs from publicly available data)
I am sure then you in 2020 will be able to make more intelligent decisions which may change your static business rules (say, you normally procure in a lot size of 5 pieces. However, taking advantage of upcoming tax changes coming in say China, you may decide to procure in a lot size of 12 pieces as you have enough demand to consume the materials)
You understand that your "normal, efficient" business knowledge and business rules can undergo a dynamic change in order to pounce upon the opportunity that you are getting and yet you are not piling up your inventory position that much. The system dashboard also shows a quick cost-benefit analysis if you change the "conventional" business rule !
The boundaries are not there - rather the boundaries are expanding like anything for you to make the correct decisions.
Well, these kind of intelligent workflows are just the call of the future ! The scenarios I mentioned are just a few, you can add on more such scenarios that will help do your job much more efficiently
And as they say, every company has to be a technology company - because technology no longer is a "supporting function" to the business, but now it is "creating" new business models.
Now, whether you stick to your ways of working in the 2000's or rather adapt the intelligent workflows in 2020 - the choice is yours !