Twitter Poll #2: What is your biggest Procurement challenge?

you may have seen in our first Twitter Poll blog recap last week, the Zylo team consulted Twitter to pose some general questions of IT Procurement leaders. We targeted individuals with an interest in SaaS and software to gain the most accurate results. We used Twitter Polls to ask 3 questions over the course of one week. Each Twitter Poll was live for 24 hours before the results were finalized.

In this post, we’ll examine the second question asked, the poll results, and Zylo’s take on the responses. Check back later this week for more Twitter Poll results.

Question #2: What is your biggest Procurement challenge?

Results: 104 votes

• Spend/Usage Visibility – 23%
• Stakeholder Relationships – 24%
• Defining/Delivering value – 16%
• Lack of Spend Control – 37%

In our second Twitter Poll, we asked what Procurement’s biggest challenge is today. While all of the choices rendered similar results, the biggest challenge indicated was “Lack of Spend Control” with 37% responding this as their top challenge. Following closely behind were the responses “Spend/Usage Visibility” and “Stakeholder Relationships” at 24% and 23% respectively.

As you can see, the first two Twitter Poll answers seem to go hand in hand. Lack of spend control paired with lack of visibility makes it virtually impossible for IT Procurement to gain true insight into what cloud and SaaS applications an organization is actually purchasing and using.

With the new way of decentralized decision making, IT Procurement can easily lose sight of top line expenses, especially when subscription-based purchases are often made with a credit card or fall under certain dollar amount that bypasses standard procedures. One department may have 100 SaaS products in use, for example, but IT Procurement may only be aware of a fraction of those.

While the benefits of SaaS are endless, the new shift also presents several challenges that have become top of mind for IT Procurement teams, with visibility and control chief among them, as the respondents also indicated. Without proper visibility and control over an organization’s cloud-based systems, these teams aren’t able to act as the strategic glue that their roles require of them. However, if given unparalleled visibility into all SaaS spend, utilization, and employee sentiment, IT Procurement is truly the only team that can act as strategic advisors in the software purchasing cycle.

For too long, solutions utilized by Procurement have been process-focused (P2P) and created to solve Finance (ERP) or IT (SAM) needs, which left IT Procurement without any tools to strategically work with the business to drive value and become true trusted advisors. At Zylo, we believe cloud licensing can make IT Procurement strategic.

Interested in learning more about how to be innovative with cloud software in your organization? Download Zylo’s latest resource, “How The Cloud Shift Can Drive IT Procurement Strategy” for insight on how to be proactive and drive strategy.

Also, check out these blog posts for more resources on SaaS:

The SaaS Landscape Is Changing Procurement Forever. Here’s Why:

“Buyers” Move Over. Why The Subscription Economy Is The Future.