Tarun Bhatia leads the Global Procurement Practice at Evalueserve. He responded to a series of questions surrounding Evalueserve’s role in the procurement industry and how they solve their client’s biggest struggles within procurement and supply chain.

Prior to Evalueserve, Tarun worked for a large public sector energy company, where he was responsible for sourcing, contracts, and engineering across the fuel value chain.  By education, he is an electrical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), BHU Varanasi, India and has done an Executive MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta, India. He is a certified Energy Risk Professional (ERP) by the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP); and has worked with the University of Trento, Italy, for a short-duration assignment on Natural Language Processing.

Could you tell us more about Evalueserve – what is the mission of the company & your role in the procurement industry?

Evalueserve is a 5000+ employee company, powered by a unique combination of human expertise and best-in-class technologies enabling us to design and support the execution of smart processes for our clients. Our mission is to be the world’s leading and most innovative provider offering research, analytics, and data management solutions.

I lead the Global Procurement Practice at Evalueserve. Our Global Procurement Practice is 500+ strong practice with Cost modelling experts, Procurement Practitioners, and senior sourcing and supply chain specialists who are based in key delivery hubs of the company (the US, Chile, Romania, India, China). 

My team and I work with the procurement and supply chain functions of Fortune 1000 companies across several industry verticals, such as energy, consumer goods, manufacturing and life science and health care. We are responsible for the design and delivery of insights to help these functions become future-ready. Our solutions enable the Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs), Supply Chain Heads, Category Managers and Procurement Specialists to accelerate their objectives, achieve and reflect higher value to their business and organization.

The most exciting thing about my role is to understand and solve the unique problem statements from our customers. While every procurement and supply chain functions have similar objectives, the challenges across their supply chain ecosystems and sourcing regions are different and require a custom approach.

What obstacles are hindering the implementation of digital procurement solutions and how can businesses overcome them?

Almost all large and global procurement and supply chain functions have implemented a leading ERP (Enterprise Resource Personnel) system, e-sourcing tool and have access to several other data and information tools. Often procurement leaders see the following obstacles in implementing digital procurement solutions:

• New tools or systems for team
• Successful execution in change management for groups
• Digital integration across all suppliers, businesses, and customers
• Additional processes for stakeholders
• Modernized processes that align with digital procurement solutions
• Ability to measure the Return on Investment

Businesses can overcome all these obstacles simply by leveraging an experienced partner. A technology-enabled partner, such as Evalueserve, will be able to co-develop the roadmap for its implementation and help address those challenges in a structured and seamless manner, by applying best practices from other successful implementations. Often, we need to reflect quick wins which enable our immediate customers to reflect the medium-term gains and get a buy-in from CPOs. 

How has COVID-19 changed business procurement?

Covid-19 and its multiple waves have disrupted supply chain production and logistics.

Supply chain leaders have realized the need for and importance of smarter, user intuitive, dynamic, and digitally integrated systems.

Leading consulting companies and watchdogs have projected that supply chain limitations will continue to impact the business and economic growth in several industry verticals in 2022.

The focus has shifted and will remain so for the next few years, on the following themes:

• Localized and alternative supply chains
• Broader supplier base
• Proactive and Preventative strategies and not reactive strategies
• Refine cost saving targets
• Partnerships and co-innovations leading to decreased TAT (Turn-around time) for applying innovation from supplier ecosystems to my business”

How can Evalueserve’s technology help enterprises bring efficiency to the supply chain?

1. We execute customized problem solving by leveraging templatized platforms. The key is to design a simple and effective solution that is fit for purpose and solves the problem statement. No pre-packaged square pegs in round holes, no paying for things you don’t need.

 We provide a turn-key technology called Insightsfirst, which we populate with a custom dataset for each client including public domain data, bespoke primary & secondary research, 3rd party subscriptions, and client internal datasets.

2. We apply a combination of domain-specific AI and human intelligence for each solution implementation. The data and information collection for solutions such as negotiation toolkits, supplier risk, sustainability, spend intelligence -- is enabled by state-of-the-art technologies, such as, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and Platform APIs (Application Program Interface).

The insights generated are led by procurement and supply chain practitioners who bring their expertise from a variety of categories. Most of our competitors have generalists who analyze information gathered by their AI tools.

3. We have a uniquely crafted STEM (Scan, Transform, Ecosource and Manage) framework that is aimed to bring higher efficiency to supply chain and category teams. The framework includes various solutions such as:

• Spend Intelligence integrated to category insights
• 360-degree supplier assessment and enablement
• Risk monitoring and mitigation system
• Supply chain sustainability improvement

Numerous customers have reflected the gains in efficiency and effectiveness in supply chains after executing on our solutions, a few testimonials:

• A Fortune 100 company reflected that they attained a cost savings of USD 15 million just from the sourcing strategy/plans for Angola operations.
• Another Fortune 500 company said that the negotiation strategy and toolkit saved USD 1.1 million per annum and helped negotiate a flat rate for the next three years against 5% inflation demanded by the supplier
• A large energy supermajor was able to mitigate risk through a systematic risk monitoring system.
• A large Technology giant was able to craft its category strategy by leveraging our in-depth category and supplier intelligence on ‘data centers construction’

What are you excited about as we look ahead to the next stages of procurement?

We look forward to creating higher value and generating RoI for our customers. As I said earlier, every client situation has its own set of challenges and its associated nuances. We apply our lens of problem-solving using our enormous experience and technologies while keeping in mind the client’s short-term and medium-term goals.