Aatish Dedhia is a quiet man. But beneath that reservoir of calm – lies deep experience and insight in all things Spend Management. The ExperienceBlog caught up the CEO of Zycus – for a quick chat about the Experience Tour and on why Procurement Professionals around the world deserve a fresh experience in Spend Management. Here is an excerpt:
ExperienceBlog: What in your words, is the key idea behind the Zycus Experience Tour?
Aatish: The key word here is Experience – and just that word has various aspects. Zycus has been a pioneer in Spend Management, and having worked with some of the best-performing organizations in the world, we have a lot of experience – which has gone into our solutions design. We want to share that experience with the Procurement leadership of today. We also believe that thought-leadership based on theoretical research is fine, but what we really wanted to provide was a platform where Practioners with real life experience share their stories and their passion for creating best-in-class procurement organizations. Finally it is my belief that fresh perspectives can only be brought out when people talk and share experiences with each other. This really is the crux of what the Zycus Experience Tour is all about.
ExperienceBlog: Why do you think that Procurement Leaders today need a fresh perspective on Spend Management?
Aatish: Adoption of Spend Management has reached sky-high levels today – especially when I compare the state of the market to what it was a decade ago, when we started providing Spend Management solutions. Today we see companies of all sizes working hard at savings enabled through technology. Zycus Spend Management solutions – as with other solutions – are full of features which can help People be more productive and make more informed and intelligent decisions. Can you tell me which is the pivotal term in the sentence I just spoke?
ExperienceBlog: Solutions? Features?
Aatish: (Shaking his head calmly) It is People. Humans – just like you and me. I believe that people and evolution in the way they think and act is the most critical aspect in technology adoption. We have seen time and time again that complex and promising technology fails to deliver because the users have not evolved enough to derive maximum out of the technology. The same is the case with Procurement technology – just putting complex feature-laden software in place, does not guarantee the promised benefits in terms of savings and higher productivity. That is a function of people and how they use the software. This is where experience sharing comes into play. And this is what we are trying to do with the Experience tour. Having people interact with each other, share success stories and best practices, helps bring about a larger evolution in people behavior and mindset. In the end implementing any kind of Process Automation brings about a big change – and what better way to bring about change management than sharing experiences and learning?
ExperienceBlog: Could you give us a sneak peek into the Future of Spend Management…
Aatish: You will have to visit the Experience Tour for that… (giving a chuckle). Ok… Think about the true beneficiary of Spend Management. It is the CFO. Imagine if he/she has complete visibility into the spend across the various departments – Marketing, Sales, R&D – and he can track the entire lifecycle of savings, from projection to actual realization, in one dashboard. This will give him the ammunition to re-allocate department budgets and manage company cash flow better. All this will lead to better financial performance – and we are talking about beyond just bottomline savings here. Is this being done today? Not that we know of. But is this possible? Yes. And is this relevant? Very. After all, this is how Procurement becomes truly strategic.
ExperienceBlog: What according to you are the two main reasons why Procurement Leaders should attend the Zycus Experience Tour?
Aatish: There are many reasons – quite a few that I have touched upon already. But if I were to talk about two extremely powerful ones they would be:
1) Participants will get to hear from real practitioners of Spend Management. There is no greater insight than that which is gained through experience… whether it is your own or the experience of others.
2) Finally, we are at the dawn of a new future for what is possible through Spend Management. The Zycus Experience Tour is a platform where Procurement professionals can contribute to the evolution of Procurement Technology with their unique ideas and learning.
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