Speaker 1: 0:16

Hello and welcome to let's Talk Procurement, the only show you need to master the art of procurement. Let's go to master the art of procurement. Let's go. Hello and welcome back to let's Talk Procurement. I am Luke One, the host, and usually with me is Luke Ten, but he is currently in Turkey getting a nice little Turkish bath, so he's left me on my own today. Anyway, I hope you are well. Thank you for tuning in to another episode and look forward to hearing some of your listener messages when you do get in touch with us. So, um, luke 10's bit is normally to to announce our, our contact information, but he's not here to do it. So if you do want to reach out to us, it's two lukes, one sip at gmailcom that's's 2lucs1cip at gmailcom or you can drop us a text using the text us feature on the platform of your choice. So, without further ado, let's dive in to today's topic and help you on your way to becoming a better procurement professional.

Speaker 1: 1:21

As we like to say Now, 2025 is going to be an interesting year for all of us, whether you're new on your procurement journey, whether you are deciding to get a career in procurement, or whether you're a seasoned veteran. Now, why is it going to be an exciting year? Well, here, for your ears only, we are going to discuss the top five trends that are happening right here, right now in the procurement world. Trend number one, of course, it's everyone's favourite topic AI and automatic integration. Seen in all aspects of your life, the use of AI is becoming more and more frequent. You know tools, software, add-ons, things that are just making life that little bit more convenient. Now, how can we use that in a procurement perspective, you may be wondering. Well, it could help us streamline some. Streamline some of our tasks, such as, you know, order processing, inventory management, some supply relationship management, perhaps even analysing our spend. So there's quite a lot of avenues where AI can be built in and considered. I think we're always doing our due diligence on suppliers and we're probably going to be a bit sceptical when we start reviewing these AI suppliers and their kind of backgrounds and where this information is going. But hopefully, overall, ai should be really positive and it should help us procurement teams making better kind of data backed decisions and minimizing the human error that we're all prone to.

Speaker 1: 2:56

Number two sustainability and green procurement. This is one of those topics that just doesn't seem to go away and it seems to be getting more and more prevalent every year. There's, obviously, the environmental regulations, there's corporate social responsibility or whatever that's now known, as I'm sure it's probably changed name again and and what we're seeing as well is a big, big shift in demand from from the customers. So customers are increasingly acknowledging the supply chain when they are going to market. So they might they might ask for you know how eco-friendly you are as a supplier or you are as a vendor and how eco-friendly your supply chain is. So you might be using tools that kind of support your or demonstrate your eco-friendliness and how successful you've been in it so far. But I think now more than ever, there is definitely a preference for suppliers that are being considerate for the materials they are using, and this is definitely a shift, because the kind of old old mentality was that if you are eco, then you are burning costs, so eco equals expensive. But that's not necessarily the case anymore. Number three of course, it's slightly technological and it is the use of blockchain. So blockchain is definitely on my radar for 2025. And I think what we're noticing is that blockchain has the potential to improve transparency, traceability and security across transactions within supply chains. It could potentially enhance the visibility of the goods as they are moving through the supply chain and potentially reduce fraud. Now, I'm still fairly sceptical on this, but I think it's being brought into the industry, it's being brought into the economy and it's definitely something we need to read up on and kind of get equipped with.

Speaker 1: 5:08

Number four supplier collaboration. Now, supplier collaboration has always been around, but for 2025, I think it's going to be a very hot topic, a nice little buzzword. You see CEOs, directors constantly asking for strategic relationships within the supply chain, because those are the ones that are building those collaborative relationships, with kind of a strong competitive advantage coming out of them and shifting away from transactional relationships with a lot of suppliers where possible. And is this a good thing? I think so. I think it helps steer win-win negotiations. It really helps foster positive working environments and us as procurement professionals benefit from it because we don't necessarily have to go and beat the supplier down for a discount. We can have more of a think session and work jointly.

Speaker 1: 6:05

And the fifth and final topic trend for 2025 is the growth of data-driven procurement decisions. So a lot of systems and tools that we have access to are still heavily reliant on manual input, on spreadsheets, on kind of data that might have missing bits of information and not really giving us everything that we need. With the involvement of AI, as mentioned in point one, but also the concepts of big data and the available tools that help us filter through big data, we're in a position now where we're starting to get stronger data sets, smarter, more informed outcomes from that data and ultimately, that's helping us with our procurement decisions. So, the better and stronger our data, the better and stronger our decisions, and we might actually find that the data can be used to help forecast our demand a little bit better, help us optimize our inventory and potentially identify savings, which is what we all want to do. Right, kind of also mindful to say that the better data we have, the more access to data we have, the more reliable our data is. Potentially, the better our supplier selection is as well, because we can use these tools to find out a lot more than perhaps just one person kind of doing a little Google search will produce, and I think that will help us get a little bit of leverage over our suppliers, improve our negotiations where possible, and overall I think it's a positive thing. So, yeah, I think 2025 is going to be a very, very interesting year in the procurement and supply chain world and just to recap, the five procurement trends to watch out for for 2025 from Luke 10 are AI and automation, sustainability, blockchain and its ability to improve supply chain transparency, supplier collaboration and data-driven procurement decisions.

Speaker 1: 8:22

So just a short episode. Obviously, I've been left on my own so I can't really insult Luke 10. But yeah, I wanted to give you some content because you deserve it. So many thanks, as always, for tuning in. I hope you have a fantastic day and I look forward to giving you some ear pleasure in the next episode. See you later.