mjunction services limited, India’s largest B2B e-commerce company, organised its third one-day Global Procurement Conference on December 16 in Swissotel, Kolkata. The theme of the conference was “Driving up Procurement Excellence through Digitization”, which focuses on digitisation tools and methods that bring about efficiency and excellence to procurement processes. The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) was the knowledge partner of the conference.

The conference provided a platform to procurement professionals across industries to come together to share and exchange learnings, ideas and developments in digital technology for improved efficiency and greater agility.

Delivering the welcome address, mjunction MD and CEO Vinaya Varma said, “The procurement function today is faced with the challenge of apparently having exhausted all avenues of savings. Though, digitisation holds infinite opportunities, many of them are at an experimental stage. Today, our panel of carefully selected procurement experts will deliberate upon how to digitise effectively in the procurement space.”

The conference was attended by industry experts, policy makers and other stakeholders in the area of procurement. Dedicated sessions on technological developments provided insights on how digital technology can be leveraged in procurement processes for greater efficiency.

Speaking at the conference, Rahul Singh, MD of Bihar State Electronics Development Corp Ltd stated, “After liberalisation, public procurement has gone through an interesting trajectory. The very fact that today we are talking about efficiency of public procurement at a conference, is itself an indicator of possibility of margins being squeezed in this area. A digitisation platform should be able to assist in verifying the details and the verification process needs to be free from manual interpretation.”

Vijayanand Chowdhury, Global Procurement Head of Tata Technologies, said, “Our future will be based on Artificial Intelligence where machines will take decisions for us, and that includes procurement as well.”

More than 200 delegates including Chief Procurement Officers and Heads of Procurement attended the conference.

Some of the other key speakers at the conference were RK Singh, Chief Procurement Bulk, Procurement division, Tata Steel Ltd; Kumaralingam MC, Director, Services and General Procurement, Asia Pacific, IBM India; Binny Mathews, Vice President and Business Head, Infosys BPM; Amit Khurana , CPO, Tata Steel BSL, Krishnan Batra, CEO, Institute for Supply Management (ISM), Mahesh Salunke, Head Procurement,Essar Steel Ltd; Dr Bharat Bhushan, Chief Digital Officer and GM, IT and projects, Tata Metaliks Ltd and Gautam Saha, Divisional Manager, Contract and Purchase, Central Purchase organisation,ITC Ltd, among others.