Businesses today face growing pressure to meet strict compliance standards from SOC 1 and SOC 2 to SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) requirements. These policies require clear accountability over financial reporting, data privacy, and sustainability. Procurement plays a key role in meeting these standards by ensuring supplier and contract data supports internal controls, transparency, and responsible business practices.
To meet these challenges, procurement teams must augment and define data fields with the context necessary to define the real purpose or business value of a good or service. Custom fields help teams categorize purchases by function, geography, business unit, or strategic relevance. This clarity improves spend analysis, supplier selection, and sourcing decisions across the enterprise.
Finally, strong governance over procurement data is essential. Without strong governance, organizations face mounting technical debt from duplicate records, typos, inconsistent naming, and unclear relationships. By enforcing clear definitions and data standards, procurement teams can streamline operations, reduce risk, and build a system that supports both business agility and long-term compliance.