How Digital Technologies will Impact the Procurement Process and Organisation

Abstract

Digitalisation is the word on everyone’s lips today. In a globalised business environment with increased competition, companies need to disrupt their business and processes or get disrupted. This thesis has been conducted in collaboration with SKF, a global market leader in the roller-bearing industry. SKF has, like many other industrial companies, realised that digitalisation potentially could change their entire business model and transform their organisation. Therefore, SKF Group Purchasing is interested in how this will affect procurement. Hence, the purpose of the study has been to analyse how digitalisation will influence the procurement process and organisation at SKF. During the study, current working processes and IT-systems have been disregarded and the focus has been to describe a major step change rather than continuous improvements.