Businesses have always relied on third-party services to help them get things done. Today’s business environment makes procuring the right services at the right price from the right provider crucial for success. And yet, many organizations lack a mature approach to sourcing and managing services. This exposes them to greater risk and higher costs, and it leaves them unable to measure project outcomes effectively.

These are among the findings of the newly released Benchmarking Services Procurement: A Global Study, conducted by Art of Procurement and sponsored by SAP. In examining the current state of services procurement, the study seeks to answer two basic questions: Is procurement moving beyond the role of “a pass-through for services contracts”? And how are procurement teams using new approaches and technology to innovate services procurement?

The Challenges of Procuring Services

Whether it’s for IT consulting, marketing services, facilities management, or legal services, procuring services through a third party gives organizations access to personnel with advanced skills and expertise. It can also be cost-effective.

Business leaders have taken note, as highlighted in 2023 research from Ardent Partners. “On average, professional services spending comprises between 45% and 65% of an organization’s total non-employee spending,” Ardent reports.

However, acquiring these services requires a significant level of procurement sophistication. Many services are too complex to fit neatly into a catalog and sourcing them requires organizations to consider key questions, including:

• Are we buying labor or an outcome?
• What is the cost mechanism – daily rates, time and materials, fixed-fee?
• Can we balance risk with agility?
• How do we maintain our service provider relationship?

Procurement teams have the expertise to bring a higher level of maturity to professional services. They provide a strategic approach that streamlines everything from sourcing and contracting to invoicing and vendor management. But are businesses taking full advantage of their expertise?

Three Things the Study Tells Us

The Art of Procurement study reveals a lot about the state of professional services procurement. Here are a few of my thoughts – from a global perspective.

Many organizations aren’t benefiting from technology.

Fifty percent of respondents said they purchase services contracts via e-mail and phone, and 23% buy from the same procurement catalogs they use to buy goods. Only 27% use a technology platform designed for services procurement.

Choosing not to use services procurement technology creates compliance and governance challenges. It also limits buyers’ ability to get the best pricing. Moreover, e-mails and phone calls don’t provide a secure, centralized data trail, which is useful for demand planning and forecasting and for making strategic decisions about insourcing and outsourcing.

Too often, bidders seek fixed pricing. That inhibits innovation.

Seventy-nine percent of respondents said they use some form of fixed pricing to buy services. Although this allows them to know the price up front, it also presents challenges. For example, with fixed pricing, statements of work must be tightly written to detail exact project requirements. Otherwise, businesses could pay for more than they receive.

The Art of Procurement research also notes “a worrisome lack of risk and reward mechanisms in services procurement contracts.” It warns that disregarding these innovative mechanisms can jeopardize supplier relationships and stifle innovation. “Without clear incentives for success and mitigations for failure, procurement could unintentionally foster a transactional, short-term mindset in suppliers, leading to cut corners or a reluctance to invest in long-term innovation.”

Organizations prefer single project bids, which are less efficient.

In the survey, 39% of respondents said they set rates by project. Managing bids one by one forces businesses to go back to the market continuously – requiring more proposals, more negotiation, and more contracts.

But there’s also good news. The remaining 61% of respondents say they use either frameworks or preferred supplier panels to drive efficiency. A framework is a general agreement with pre-qualified suppliers, outlining terms and conditions under which specific goods or services will be procured. Panels are groups of pre-approved suppliers, selected for their ability to deliver specific services. These suppliers meet specific qualification criteria and have undergone a competitive selection process.

Overall, the Art of Procurement study paints a picture where procurement is not putting forth its expertise to help the business acquire and manage professional services. As such, it is conceding its strategic role to stakeholders and suppliers.

How Technology Can Help Turn the Tide

The Art of Procurement study advises procurement teams to “select and implement technology with breadth in mind, aiming to address as much services spend as possible rather than allowing pockets of sourcing activity to flow through non-standard platforms and processes.”

SAP Fieldglass Services Procurement is a broad technology application that can simplify how external services projects are initiated, engaged, managed, and completed. It can enable procurement teams to:

• Initiate service requests with competitive bidding, facilitating collaboration on bid criteria with colleagues, expedited approvals for authorized terms and budgets, and distribution of bids to services providers.
• Engage selected vendors through a negotiation process that follows a side-by-side evaluation of all responses, and then finalize an agreement.
• Manage global services engagements within a single, centralized system – securely onboarding workers, tracking deliverables, validating work, and generating invoices.
• Complete the project with automated offboarding, including terminating system access, retrieving assets, and giving performance feedback.

SAP Fieldglass has been named to the G2 list of Best Software Products for 2024, based on user reviews. It is also one of G2’s Best Mid-Market Products for 2024.

Procurement Must Lead the Way

Based on the findings of the Art of Procurement study, it’s clear that organizations need to adopt a more mature approach to services procurement. Procurement teams have the expertise to lead this transformation, although they must do more to assert themselves within the business. Technology can help accelerate this by enabling procurement to establish consistent, end-to-end processes for initiating, engaging, and managing external service projects.

Read the Art of Procurement report here.

Gordon Donovan is global vice president of Research, SAP Procurement, and External Workforce at SAP.

The connection between net-zero emissions and the circular economy is backed by research. When it comes to cutting greenhouse gases, the main focus is on improving energy efficiency and transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewables, but that only accounts for 55% of greenhouse gas emissions. The remaining 45% is tied up in products, materials, and food.

Key administrations are aware of this and are starting to act accordingly. Accelerating innovation in industrial products and fuels for a net-zero, circular economy is one of five priorities in U.S. President Joe Biden’s Net-Zero Game Changers Initiative. Meanwhile, the new Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP) is a main element of the European Green Deal.

In parallel, the UN is collaborating multilaterally to create policy to regulate plastics. The UN Plastics Treaty is a consensus by 175 nations to deliver a legally binding agreement to tackle plastic pollution by the end of 2024. This is significant because plastic has become fundamental to the products we create and the packaging we use to contain and ship them. Plastic has an enormous impact on the environment due to the emissions involved in its creation and mismanaged plastic waste polluting the air, the oceans, our food, and even our blood.

Currently, the linear economy dominates, as only 7.2% of the world’s resources are reused or recycled. In the case of plastic, we take oil from the ground, turn it into products and packaging, use them, and throw them out when we’re finished. Continuing like this isn’t an option because we will run out of resources, worsen global warming, and cause further damage to our ecosystem. The circular economy is about running the resources around in loops, so materials retain their value and can be reused.

It sounds logical, so why aren’t we doing it already? The first reason is financial. In the long term, the circular economy will create jobs, cut costs, improve profitability, and secure supply lines. Achieving this, however, requires massive capital investment in the short term. Additionally, more data is required to help us understand the impact of our decisions. And we need a new, more collaborative way of working.

Capital investment-wise, we must invest in designing and manufacturing products with circularity in mind. We need to adapt and build machinery and systems to rescue resources from existing products and turn them into new items. The labor market must evolve to train people in the skills required and to make circular economy jobs attractive, with good remuneration and benefits packages. More wealth must also flow back up the supply chain to ensure the sustainability of raw materials and to enable growth and sustainable manufacturing. To help companies and financial institutions understand the benefits and necessity of the circular economy, more education is required.

Data systems need to evolve to give companies insights on material flow and traceability, help them avoid waste, extend periods of use, recover and regenerate materials, and make informed decisions about products and packaging. This is where SAP comes in, with 80% of the world’s businesses using our software.

Take plastic again: the SAP Green Token solution can help businesses trace plastics back to their source polymer to understand what type of material is used in every plastic element in a product. This can help companies prove the environmental credentials of a given plastic. SAP Responsible Design and Production can be used to understand how recycled and recyclable a component is and can help a company understand the true end-to-end cost of a material. This can be useful in regulating certain materials for comparison and decision-making purposes as well as in helping businesses anticipate taxes and fees associated with their products.

We can interrogate upstream supply chain data, which relates to what a product is made from, but we don’t yet have a complete downstream picture of what happens to a product at its end of life. Recyclability varies wildly between countries, so to understand how recyclable materials are in certain countries or jurisdictions, a partnership approach with national governments, local authorities, NGOs, and others is required to build a database that can inform companies which types of plastic to use or avoid for certain markets to achieve circularity. SAP can add value by collecting this data and pulling it into solutions.

At the same time, to embrace the circular economy, our way of working must evolve. Instead of working in silos within our individual businesses and in vertical supply chains, we need to work collaboratively to share the data and bring the skill sets and processes together. For example, SAP works with groups of companies, such as with the WBCSD, to establish frameworks for exchanging data. SAP Sustainability Data Exchange started with embedded carbon in products, but the application can be extended to track other important material information for the circular economy like recycled content or water content.

Collaborations between businesses and non-corporate bodies accelerate progress. A clear example of this is how, by working with the WBCSD and the Ocean Plastics Leadership Network, SAP works towards updating solutions to help customers respond to new requirements that arise from the negotiations.

The ambition is to replicate this approach to plastic for other products, such as steel, batteries, electronics, textiles, and even food. With a circular economy across these industries, I’m convinced we can get halfway to net zero and if, in parallel, the energy experts continue to move the needle on energy efficiency and renewable power generation, we’ll get the rest of the way.

Learn more about SAP Sustainability solutions at sap.com/sustainability.

Darren West is a product expert in Circular Economy at SAP.