 From London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering KUPA Inspire 19, EMEA, brought to you by KUPA. Hi, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin on the ground in London, KUPA Inspire 19. Pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time. Mads, think Jensen, partner advisory from KPMG. Mads, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here. It's great to have you. So we have all this excitement around us. Lots of folks here in London for KUPA Inspire. Talk to me about the state of procurement. KUPA talks about PIPE, procurement, invoicing, payments, expenses, but procurement has been changing a lot recently. You have a lot of experience in procurement. Talk to me about what the state of procurement is like today and what some of those waves of disruption are. Yeah, so you could say traditionally, procurement has been very much about making agreements with suppliers. The business has had a need and asked or requested procurement to fulfill that need. Typically, it has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort from the procurement departments. In many cases, delaying projects and things like that. Businesses are much more agile now. They expect from different back office functions, including procurement, they expect a much more agile approach to delivering services. So if you are running a project in the business and you go to procurement asking for a specific service or product, and procurement says, ah, this will take four to six months, that is absolutely not acceptable. So the businesses in general are now, you could say, transforming the way that they are requesting procurement services, which means procurement are now being disrupted quite a lot. They have to think very differently. They have to be more proactive instead of being a reactive business partner, you could say. So being proactive in the sense that they embrace the business and actually deliver the needs before they are asked by the business. So that's a way where procurement organizations, they need to be much more predictive and understand what's going on, both in the business, but also in the market. And then you could say, on the other hand, procurement traditionally, they do a contract and then they finalize the contract and then they kind of keep their hands off. So the future is that procurement, they do a contract of course, that's a key part of being a procurement department, but they also need to operationalize the contracts. So in terms of making sure that the users in the business that they can actually use the contract and buy under that specific contract. So a lot of things are changing in procurement and which also means that you will see now different operating models, you will see different interaction with businesses and you will see quite a lot of different expectations coming from the business to the procurement departments. I can imagine that will be, those are challenges for say an incumbent chief procurement officer or financial decision maker who's used to certain processes with certain boundaries. How in your advisory role do you work with clients to help them even just embrace the cultural change that's required of this function to be much more strategic and much more impactful to a business? Absolutely. I mean, we use Kuba as a platform to help clients transforming the way that they are doing procurement and actually we don't see a Kuba implementation as an IT implementation project, we see it as a business transformation project. And the thing is that one thing is that you start changing the way that you're doing things but it's also a mindset change. And the challenge here for CPO, so for procurement officers is actually to make sure that the procurement organization have the necessary challenges to make that transformation. And a lot of the stuff that we are doing when we're implementing solutions like Kuba is of course taking away all the transactional work that's automated and we are also providing insights. So insight into spend, into transaction, to transaction processes, to turnaround times, to delivery, to all these kind of things. And the challenge for the CPO is to make sure that the part of the organization that are currently doing very transactional processes, how can they transform to becoming more strategic thinking and proactive people? And tell me how, from KPMG's perspective, how is Kuba helping to drive that transformation for its customers? Yeah, it's a good question actually because I mean, Kuba is a technology but it's also much more than a technology because as Kuba also emphasizes, it's also about a community. So the thing is that with a platform like Kuba, you get technology support for your processes but you also get a lot more insight. So you get a lot of possibilities to act in a very different way. So for instance, you can see spend patterns. So in that way, you can predict how businesses actually on an annual basis, what their need will be. So in that way, you can also prepare for some of the stuff that are happening in the business. And also you could say, as a procurement person, as a sourcing manager, or category innovators, as Kuba is calling it, you now have the insight to actually think more strategic on your supplier base, on the marketing, on the market tendencies. You can see how other companies are procuring stuff. Are they going from one type of vendors to another type of vendors? And how is that going? So you could say, Kuba is a tool, not only to structure processes and do transformations but it's also a platform and a technology that changes the way that you think and you act. You mentioned the word predictive a second ago and one of the things that, well the P at Kuba stands for prescriptive, Rob talked about, I think the number was over 22,000 prescriptions that were delivered through the community just in the last, I think you said 12 months. Very short period of time, a lot of innovation there. Going, helping a business in whatever industry it's in, go from being reactive to proactive to predictive. Is that a game changer or is that something that you think every business has to become predictive to be relevant? Yeah, so you could say, of course it differs a little bit from industry to industry. There are many different ways of looking at procurement but a general thing across industries that doesn't really change whether it's manufacturing or fast moving consumer goods or pharmaceutical or whatever is that the procurement needs to understand the business that they are serving because traditionally procurement, they are a little bit isolated, like IT was 10, 15 years ago, didn't really understand what's going on in the business in many cases, in many cases it's not like that, but in many cases it is, they are very transactional, they are establishing contracts and things like that but the thing is that if you don't understand your business and if you don't understand the way that your business operates, you can have annual cycles, you can have innovation cycles, you can have different demands in the market depending on the time of year and things like that. So in general procurement organizations really need to change their mindset of getting out there, speaking with the business, understanding the business, understanding the strategies, aligning the procurement strategies into the general business strategy and then embrace innovation because, I mean, even though Kuba as a platform is at a really, really nice place right now with a lot of transformational possibilities, I mean, who knows what comes tomorrow. There will be a number of different things changing over the course of two, six months a year, two years, things like that. So I think in general procurement organizations need to think in a much more agile way, adapting, sorry, what the company in general is adapting. So tell me a little bit, dig a little bit deeper into what KPNG and Kuba are doing together to drive the future of procurement. Absolutely, so KPNG have developed a framework we call Powered Procurement, which is a framework that gives, you could say, clients a very, very structured way of doing a transformation. And that framework is actually built on top of the Kuba platform. So we have developed a model which is, you could say, technology agnostic, but we have specifically developed a model that is placed on top of the Kuba platform where we utilize the possibilities the platform have. And one core thing is that the mantra of Kuba is measurable business value. And the transformation that we want to do together with our clients is exactly open their eyes in terms of how do you get that measurable business value? Because how do you measure it? What is it that you want to measure? Is it savings only? Not necessarily, it can be a lot of different things. And the Kuba platform, you could say, enable that transformation process in a really, really good way because you actually don't really think about technology. You think about business transformation. And that's why I think the way that we utilize as Kuba as a platform is quite unique. So thinking back to your long history in procurement advisory, your background as a supplier on the industry side, when you look at that compared to, your day-to-day life where you're a consumer and you're buying things very easily through Amazon and different marketplaces, how is Kuba helping to bring in some of that consumerization and help meet the demands of people that want things to meet to your point? I don't want to be looking at a UI or a technology. I want this to be simpler like it is when I'm going to buy groceries online. Are they helping to really bridge that gap? Yeah, so it's a really good question actually because you could say in reality, the value comes from a meaningful experience. And you could say traditionally when you have, I was part of the mask organization, the Danish shipping company, and we did a lot of stuff on behalf of the business to make sure that they could do the, execute their role and get the products and services they needed. It was typically a very cumbersome process where people had to think in very complex processes and how do I actually get this thing I need now? And what's happening now with a platform like Kuba is that you actually adopt the way of thinking coming from your private life as well. So it's kind of merging a little bit the way that you think when you do procurement because it's not a complex process. Of course, it takes longer in a business environment you could say also because you need to do different sourcing exercises, there are regulations in the public sector and so forth. But in the way that you are thinking of how you procure and get access to the goods and services that you need for executing your role, it's a very different mindset. And that's where technologies like Kuba comes in as a you could say straightforward way of getting access to these things. So KPMG clearly has choice in who it chooses to partner with. Tell me a little bit more about what Kuba and the partnership means to KPMG and the competitive differentiation it might deliver. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are a number of different platforms in the market, of course. And it's actually quite interesting these years because there's a lot of development. I actually started out a new company in 2001 where we developed an e-procurement platform. And I can tell that both the suppliers and the market and the suppliers in general have changed quite a lot since then. I can imagine. And a lot of more actors are coming into the market. And the interesting thing is that the traditional actors, they have quite some difficulties in following up with a company like Kuba. And you could say Kuba as a platform is really interesting because it first of all, it adopts the cloud technology, which means that companies doesn't have to think about maintenance, operations, all these things that typically come with on-premise solutions. And it has this ability to create this community because the technology platform is developed and designed and architected in the way it is, which means you have a suite of components that all feeds into a common community, which create, you could say, a much, much better platform to innovate than what we see in the competing landscape. So in essence, when Rob today talked about the community, that's where we see a huge differentiator, the way that Kuba works with the community and takes intelligence from the community. And based on that, can actually come up with really, really impressive, innovative ideas. Last question for you, Mads. The category of business spend management, that Kuba is working hard to define. What does that mean from KPMG's perspective? Yeah, so you could say, for me, it's actually quite relieving that there is an actor in the market that starts to talk about business spend management. It's a new term that Kuba have introduced. I mean, there have been variations on that subject, but it's the first time that you have a very clear pronunciation of what this is all about. Because business spend management is much more than just the, you could say, the narrow procurement bits. Procurement is, of course, a huge part of it. But I mean, there are expense management, as an example. You have all the procurement stuff. You have spent in a lot of different areas like salary. That's not kind of the part of the platform yet, but which would make a lot of sense, you could say. So this is the first time where you actually have a suite that in all the different components and areas embrace business spend management. And in essence, you could say, I think Rob also mentioned it in a very good way. This is actually, it's the procurement department that manages a huge part of the value of the company in terms of managing the spend. So it's an extremely important task that procurement organizations have. And the good thing is that we see increasingly see that procurement gets closer and closer to the strategic area of businesses. So Mads, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE and describing the procurement history that you have, what KPMG and KUPA are doing together. We appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa. It was a pleasure to be here. Likewise. For Mads, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from KUPA Inspire London, 19. Thanks for watching.