There are many factors that contribute to senior-level buy-in, but if your chosen solution can alleviate the following concerns, adoption will be a reality sooner rather than later:
The risk mitigation factor
Tracking, managing, and eliminating business risk, even in the most unstable of contexts, is perhaps the overarching concern facing CFOs and CEOs.
For your CEO, then, managing disruptions that destabilise your contracts and supply chains is vital. They will want to know that the solution can flag the risk levels of contracts and suppliers ahead of time using in-depth dashboard analytics and automatic deadline alerts, while making associated information highly visible and easy to access.
Your CFO, naturally, will want to know how the solution can help you manage, and take sharp control of, the financials associated with a contract or supplier. Solutions that track the level of spend on a contract-specific basis, highlight the red flags associated with your suppliers (if any), and provide automatic deadline alerts and business-specific workflows for users to follow, will lower costs, heighten value and build confidence – short-term and in the future.
Fostering confidence – among management, employees, and stakeholders alike
A solution that allows your business to effectively manage risk, will by nature also instil confidence in its users – and in turn, the senior-level executives who manage them.
Your CEO must be confident that the solution will deliver long-term gains, by facilitating cost savings promoting accountability, and heightening efficiency among its users. The more the solution facilitates the development of fruitful, long-lasting relationships with stakeholders, the more these relationships will contribute to long-term value generation down the track.
Value is also a key area of concern for your CFO. The solution should enable procurement teams to easily view and disseminate information on contractual roadblocks and successes, so the CFO knows where the contract is currently at, where it should be, and what can be done to get there.
Internal and external collaboration
When the solution facilitates productive collaboration between colleagues and customers, CEOs and CFOs alike will pay attention.
This collaboration should be facilitated through easy, remote access to the solution itself and to the information housed within it, and through the ability to shift this information outwards. Some solutions provide suppliers with access to the environment, so they can upload their own contractual documents and self-disclose important company information. These systems distribute the workload associated with contract management, and allow your staff to focus on managing information rather than sorting through data.
In effect, you should have confidence in the solution’s ability to close the gaps that hinder internal and external collaboration, effective risk management, and stakeholder satisfaction. By underscoring the solution’s ability to fill these gaps, senior-level concerns will be tempered, and confidence in your business’s procurement function will bloom.
