‘Cloud computing’ is a phrase that arouses tremendous interest among Procurement professional these days, Paul Morel, General Manager at MyMarket.com recently told SmartProcurement.
“But as technologies evolve we must never lose sight of the fact that the top priority of Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) remains finding savings and reducing costs.”
But how does cloud computing meet those primary purchasing drivers?
Cloud computing is the use of computing resources delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet).
In a nutshell, it enables many users to share resources to achieve economies of scale over a network. At the heart of this IT innovation lies the key concepts of ‘converged infrastructure’ and ‘shared services’.
MyMarket, an e-procurement business solutions provider in the BidVest Group, sees cloud computing as an extension of the outsourced e-services it has been offering to the procurement community over the past number of years, says Morel.
“MyMarket makes useful business solutions available to their customers without them having to reinvent the wheel.”
It is quite pertinent to note that since the heady dotcom days few of the early e-Procurement platforms have survived to deliver continuous and sustainable services to procurement departments at competitive prices.
The beauty of modern advances in technology is that e-Procurement is now available to all businesses, big and small, at highly reduced transaction costs which are achieved (and returned to the customer) through those economies of scale mentioned earlier.
Practically speaking, reliable service providers are now able to offer online contract management and e-ordering across a wide spectrum of procurement categories from MRO (usually high-volume, low-cost transactions), to more specialised online travel procurement (a one-stop shop that takes care of accommodation, car rental, flights, shuttles, etc.).
In the process the users can achieve those significant savings and process efficiencies which are the CPO’s key performance areas.
For more information contact Paul Morel of MyMarket on paulm@mymarket.com
Mymarket, along with many other top-tier procurement services and suppliers, will participate as PARTNERS OF SMARTPROCUREMENT WORLD at Gallagher Convention Centre, Midrand, Gauteng, South Africa from 13 – 15 November 2012.
For details visit www.smartprocurementworld.com
