VISA
Creating a Digital roadmap for Sourcing success Mannikam says that Visa has a road map for digital transformation that is part of their continuous improvement to benchmark themselves against the industry and where they should be heading .
The pandemic came along and , in an unexpected way , actually supported Visa ’ s transformation , as it did with many companies that were prepared for the move towards digitalisation of their operations . Manikkam says the pandemic “ almost enhanced the necessity of why we should be transforming digitally ”.
Most communities transformed digitally in the last two years , certainly when it came to making payments . Visa already had multiple payment flows and the shift to more focus on digital and contactless
was already part of the digitalisation of the payments industry . The pandemic actually encouraged Visa to drive its third-party supplier partnerships to enhance growth in digitalisation and digital payments . But what about when it comes to procurement ? How is that impacted by this digital roadmap ?
“ We are looking at it right from the ground up – from the baseline P2P platform that will allow us to build on other modules beyond that ,” says Manikkam .
“ We ' re not just stopping with the initial requirements coming from the business but also handling category management activities on that platform , contractual authoring , and also review – all the way up to payments and settlement . That will be the foundation and eventually , it will grow to look at Supplier Risk review , Supplier Relationship Management , and Supplier Performance Management and possibly Supplier diversity too .
“ We ' ve tried to look at it from an end-toend process improvement standpoint , as an opportunity to bring it all together .”
Importance of partnerships We discuss the topic that refuses to go away – the pandemic – and the inevitable digital transformation that it obviously accelerated . Manikkam , like so many forward-thinking global executives , acknowledges that the terrible virus has also delivered some positive change . Not least , it has galvanised relationships with key partners .
“ We work with a lot of key partners within our digital transformation initiatives ,” he says . “ The partners we work with are absolutely key because they provide us with a lot of knowledge , intelligence and more industry-standard ways of working and benchmarking ourselves to delivery our transformation goals successfully .
“ Digital transformation is not just a onetime initiative – it is a long-term investment and it should be a way to build and grow the operations forward rather than a plug-the-gap kind of solution .
132 February 2022