Welcome back to The Procuretech Podcast!

We're continuing with our mini series where we ask influencers and industry experts for their thoughts and nuggets of advice on everything that's happening in the digital procurement world.

Today we're talking about E-Auctions and E-Sourcing. Depending on how the technology's been deployed, some people might be sceptical about this topic.

But our guest today literally wrote the book on E-Sourcing, and he's here to explain the upsides. Let's welcome to the podcast Jacob Gorm Larson, of Moneyball CPH.

 
Success with E-Auctions - Jacob Gorm Larsen from Moneyball CPH
We're going to talk about current trends in E-sourcing from a platform agnostic viewpoint. We might all have our favourite - or least favourite - platforms, but we won't be going into specifics here.

Instead we'll be sharing all the tips, tactics, and observations Jacob has learned during his long career in this space.

We began our chat with a brief rundown of Jacob's history…

 
Jacob Gorm Larson – A career in E-sourcing
Jacob's been in the procurement space for around 20 years.

He spent most of that time with Maersk, the global shipping company. Maersk used to be a conglomerate, so they would operate in oil, gas, offshore logistics and a couple of other industries.

Jacob introduced E-sourcing across all these different industries, and in doing so, learned that it's not an industry or category specific thing. It can be applied in any industry with the right knowledge.

But E-sourcing can be a divisive topic within procurement, because people don't fully understand the technology.

That's why Jacob wrote his book, so he could share the kind of knowledge he wished he had access to at the start of his journey. The book sparked some interest, and a year later Jacob found himself moving to an advisory role.

He now supports companies in their procurement transformation process.

 
How did the rise of technology impact Jacob's career at Maersk, and how did this improve results at auction?
Jacob says he had a fantastic ride with E-sourcing.

He came into his role at Maersk in 2007/8, so there was a huge degree of uncertainty, being right on the brink of the financial crisis. This had a lot of companies in dire straits and facing a lot of challenges.

There was a desperate need for securing cost savings. In many ways there are a lot of similarities to the situation right now, with record level inflation across the world and a potential recession coming in.

It could well be that within the next six months, we see another huge drive for technologies that can help companies take out costs, and bring down the overall cost base.

And that was exactly what Jacob used E-sourcing for back then, too. It was there when companies needed it the most. And so Jacob got support from all the way up the company to introduce it, to push it. promote it and drive it quite hard across all areas of the company.

He realised during that time that E-sourcing is in the DNA of procurement as a function: There's a constant need to own the cost agenda....