Digital Adoption: The Key to Successful Digital Procurement

When the Covid-19 crisis struck, procurement teams everywhere were brought into the spotlight, not as cost-cutting entities but as one of the most strategic functions in the business. It was a catalyst for industry-wide transformation at record speed.

Overnight, procurement leaders facilitated remote working, invested in new tools, and trained users and suppliers at a distance. But most organizations were not fully equipped for that journey.

Today, is digital transformation enough for successful procurement? Does it guarantee better processes? And does it prove the added value of your purchasing solutions?

Below, we discuss the key to providing and proving successful digital procurement: digital adoption.

The New World of Digital Procurement

Advancements in technology have brought supply chains into the future. Strategic sourcing is more predictive, transactional procurement more automated, and supplier management more proactive.

(Source: Deloitte)

Digital procurement solutions today offer previously unavailable data, bringing order to large unstructured data sets, driving more complex analysis, improving supplier strategies, and enabling more efficient operations overall. But new solutions and new data are meaningless without the right training to use them.

The case for digital procurement is clear. Organizations have made significant progress: streamlining activities, automating labor-intensive tasks, boosting efficiency, reducing costs, and improving supply chains. Yet investing in new tools is only half the journey.

Can you prove the added value of your solutions? Are you able to provide quantitative and qualitative ROI? You are not alone in finding this difficult.

Definitive ROI in digital procurement is tricky to measure. Much of its value comes from hard-to-quantify factors such as user satisfaction, process efficiency, risk management, and supplier quality. The bottom line, however, is ROI and added value you can demonstrate.

The Consequences of Poor Procurement Adoption

Misused or unused purchasing software can result in a calculated loss of 15m€/year

(Source: Lemon Learning, client survey)

A client in the energy sector experienced long-term, widespread misuse of their procurement software due to challenges related to onboarding and training.

With the Lemon Learning digital adoption platform, our client increased engagement across a significant share of their users, thanks to training delivered directly inside their procurement software. Users received complete, interactive, independent training without ever leaving their tools.

This is one example of the real business impact when procurement processes fail at the adoption stage. Traditional, time-consuming training methods are no longer enough to meet today's evolving procurement landscape.

Drive Digital Procurement with Digital Adoption

Cloud-based, SaaS, or self-hosted? Whether it is Coupa, SAP Ariba, Ivalua, Oracle, Sage, Infor, Synertrade, ServiceNow, Workday, or another procurement system, a digital adoption platform provides step-by-step guidance from the moment users enter their tools. Key benefits include:

• Improved performance on any procurement solution
• Standardized and customizable procurement training
• Qualitative and quantitative analytics to prove ROI

Your purchasing department and suppliers need to reach full digital adoption across all of their procurement solutions. Software adoption directly impacts the quality of each step in the digital purchasing flow and your overall business performance. Here is what that means in practice.

Improve Training and Onboarding with a Digital Adoption Platform

Traditional training methods are fast becoming incompatible with today's working environment. Digital procurement requires more innovative approaches for several reasons.

From product selection and availability to sending purchase orders to vendors, previously time-consuming tasks have been replaced with streamlined digital processes that require equally digital training. So why revert to PDFs, procurement manuals, and paper-based sessions?

Boost employee engagement with the "Learning by Doing" methodology

With a digital adoption platform and a "Learning by Doing" methodology, users onboard, train, and work at exactly the same time. Also referred to as active learning, it helps users engage with the learning process and build knowledge step by step.

Alongside learning by doing, a digital adoption platform also applies a microlearning approach:

• Training broken into bite-sized micro objectives
• Modules ranging from 30 seconds to 3 minutes
• Short, frequent bursts of information activated by the user
• Simple, targeted content for each task

Four Common Procurement Training Challenges

1. Infrequent tool use leads to bad habits. Procurement and purchasing solutions are not always used day to day, which can lead to incorrect use over time. With a digital adoption platform, you can create and distribute interactive guide workflows for each procurement process, ensuring foolproof training every time users carry out a task. Users also benefit from 24/7 autonomous access to guides whenever they need a refresher.
2. App switching kills productivity. Research by Pegasystems found that employees switch between applications more than 1,100 times a day, negatively impacting productivity. Because a digital adoption platform integrates with existing software like a second skin, users can work and train simultaneously with fewer distractions and less digital frustration.
3. Resistance to change slows adoption. Employee resistance affects organizations across every industry. Digital transformation brings uncertainty, new processes, and unfamiliar tools. A digital adoption platform helps you maintain communication with users throughout the transition through in-app messaging and targeted push notifications.
4. Change management must continue after go-live. Implementing new software requires ongoing change management before, during, and after deployment. That means identifying user shortfalls, addressing dysfunctions, refreshing training, maintaining communication, and building a company culture that embraces change.

Lemon Learning analytics: helping you prove the added value of your procurement solutions

With Lemon Learning analytics, you can prove the added value of your procurement solutions through real-time, in-depth, quantitative, and qualitative data on user performance. Leverage analytics to demonstrate ROI and inform your next digital procurement investments:

• Monitor several projects at once
• Intuitive dashboard overview
• Library of interactive guides
• Push notifications with ready-to-use templates
• Tooltips
• Surveys

Interested in seeing digital adoption in action? Visit our case studies page to explore real-world results, or get in touch to learn how Lemon Learning can improve your procurement user experience.