Companies across the globe are grappling with economic uncertainty, continued supply chain disruptions and in many cases, sharp top-line declines.

These converging factors are compounding pressure on companies to dramatically improve their value chain’s resilience—to better respond to future disruptions so they can boost revenue while eliminating cost that doesn’t deliver value.

As the gatekeepers of a company’s third-party relationships, procurement organizations are in a unique position to influence a wide range of value levers, while helping the company grow and improve resilience and responsibility. Consider, for instance, a company’s multi-tier supply base, which influences a supply chain’s ability to follow shifts in demand and react to disruptions. The supply base is also key to corporate responsibility. A company may succeed in containing CO2 emissions or ensuring inclusion and diversity, but what about its suppliers? Procurement can use its position of influence to ensure responsibility and sustainability across the supply base.

But as its scope expands, procurement still needs to excel in its primary role: managing spend. And as many companies have discovered, effective spend management can’t be done solely through traditional cost-cutting measures, which often overlook opportunities and rarely generate sustainable, long-term savings.

What’s the solution? Closed Loop Spend Management (CLSM), a more proactive approach to managing third-party spend. CLSM provides visibility and analysis and puts in place the infrastructure to help sustain savings and build resilience and responsibility over the long term.

CLSM is designed to help drive end-to-end transformation to achieve and sustain breakthrough value. This approach accelerates cost takeout with a zero-based mindset, unlocks new value with data-driven insights, makes responsibility and sustainability part of a company’s DNA, positions companies for enduring growth and prepares them for what’s next.

Accenture has developed a robust, agile and iterative model to help companies implement a CLSM approach so they can begin generating value in just a few weeks and sustain that value over time. This model includes two core elements: spend transformation and new ways of working.

How a company manages direct and indirect spend has historically been the procurement organization’s primary focus—and in some companies, procurement still focuses on driving “committed value” from third-party spend. In other words, procurement negotiates the best possible terms from suppliers, puts in place the relevant contracts and buying channels and trusts the business to use those appropriately.

Some forward-looking procurement organizations have moved beyond “commitment to value” and are working closely with the finance organization to proactively manage the company’s spend. But this approach still leaves value on the table, because procurement remains focused primarily on price, which is just one of many levers that affect value.

To take the next step in its evolution, procurement needs to identify the full range of opportunities to remove costs that aren’t creating value by applying a zero-based perspective (ZBx) to all of the company’s third-party expenses.

With ZBx, a company forgets about the past and reimagines its cost base not from what it was or is, but what it should be if the company were to start from scratch—and then uses the resulting savings to fund investments in innovation, distinctive capabilities and specific activities that drive growth.

This transformation depends upon bringing together procurement, finance and the business to collaborate, communicate and make insight-based decisions about the full range of savings opportunities. Doing so “closes the loop” with planning and budgeting activities and ensures that procurement is an integral part of all purchasing decisions.

New digital tools and the skills to employ them are critical to the success of this change: Analytics, intelligent automation, AI and other frontline technologies offer a wide range of new capabilities. Many procurement roles will need to evolve to include analysis and data interpretation, while most compliance and data entry-related tasks may disappear. Building new skills, and possibly recruiting new capabilities, will be essential in sustaining the new ways of working.

This transformation will also require strong advocacy from the top. Senior executives need to reinforce the message that CLSM is a durable and repeatable process that becomes ingrained in the company’s culture and is a true decision-making and management tool that provides the visibility necessary to help align an organization around the priorities in which it will invest.

New realities call for new ideas, new ways of working and new responses. In this time of disruption, companies need to be more agile, more resilient and more responsible.

By bringing together procurement, finance and the business—with full visibility into spend and the supply base—CLSM can help companies accelerate innovation and grow in uncertain times, while answering the call for more agile and sustainable operations and supply chains.

There’s no going back—only moving forward to embrace change with a transformative approach.