As chief executive of procurement technology company Emptoris, Patrick Quirk has had a manic time since joining the organisation on 1 October this year. Central to his vision is to put his customers at the centre of its growth and development plan, so true to his word, Quirk has been out on the road meeting his customers and discussing their needs.

120 of them. In 85 days.

I caught up with Quirk for a brief overview of developments and to quiz him about wider developments in the procurement profession. 

One of the issues that raised its head was that of adoption levels and how procurement departments continue to struggle with getting casual users to use e-sourcing platforms with any kind of regularity. Of course, training plays a big role in this. But so does simplifying systems - or, as others have said before me, "google-ising" user interfaces to make the buying process much more intuitive. 

It’s something that Quirk is taking seriously and while he points out that organisational issues can be partly to blame for low adoption levels (such as cultural differences driven by acquisition or region) Emptoris is also working very hard to simplify user interfaces. (As an aside, it was a theme running through a recent IBX event I attended, so Emptoris isn’t the only one addressing this issue).

Quirk also flagged up transportation as a particularly lucrative current area of spend, with potential for additional savings. A major recent sourcing event, for example, which managed €50m of spend with multiple vendors all over Europe achieved an extra 2.5% savings on top of what the company in question had hoped for.

But, despite stories like this, there’s clearly work to be done. When Quirk asked one company how much services spend it had, he was told, ‘in the region of $500m’.

The real figure was closer to $3.5bn…