Daily Archives: July 6, 2006

The On-Demand Supply Management Benchmark Report

Aberdeen Group recently released “The On-Demand Supply Management Benchmark Report: Enterprises Turn to the Web and Find Quicker and Better ROI to Help Achieve Supply Management Goals“. You can obtain a free copy of this report by clicking here, courtesy of Iasta, a report sponsor.   Kudos for Iasta for providing the link on e-Sourcing Forum quickly, this is a report you don’t want to miss!

There are a number of significant findings in this report. Since you can download it for free, I will not attempt to cover the findings in depth here, but simply display the following teasers that should get your mouth watering for more!

  • 57% of survey respondents indicated that on-demand performs better than traditional installed behind-the-firewall legacy applications with a further 33% indicating that on-demand performes about the same; that’s 90% of respondents agreeing that on-demand performs as well or better than traditional legacy applications
  • 57% of survey respondents indicated that on-demand systems are easier to upgrade than traditional installed behind-the-firewall legacy applications with a further 34% indicating upgrades required about the same amount of effort; that’s 90% of respondents agreeing that on-demand systems are at least as easy to upgrade as traditional legacy applications
  • 52% of survey respondents indicated that on-demand systems require less implementation time and effort than traditional installed behind-the-firewall legacy applications with a further 39% indicating installs took about the same amount of time and effort; that’s 91% of respondents agreeing that on-demand is at least as fast to implement as legacy systems, if not faster
  • enterprises deploying on-demand solutions improve spend under management by 28% more than enterprises that deploy installed on-site solutions over the course of a year28% … considering that the savings potential for each dollar of spend under management is between 5% and 20%, even if the actual savings realized is only 30.3% of planned savings (industry average – best in class do much better), then you are looking at a savings of at least 1.2M for every 1B … 1.2M+ … and considering that decent on-demand suites can be obtained for 250K/year (not counting professional services), you could easily save 1M just by using on-demand! ( If you are best-in class and capture 70% of planned savings and efficient and get 15% on each dollar of spend under management, you save roughly 3M more on every 1B going with an on-demand solution! )

And that statistic sums up nicely everything I’ve always believed about the inherent value of on-demand. For more of my views, check out my 3-part series over on e-Sourcing Forum if you haven’t already (The Good, The Not-So-Bad, And the Coming Pretty …) and Sudy Bharadwaj‘s thoughtful commentary, also on e-Sourcing Forum.

Have a great day and enjoy the study!

You might also enjoy A Six Step Framework for On Demand Supply Management, released on the same day as well (login required). Part of Aberdeen Group’s Enterprise Strategies: Insight and Advice for Enterprise Executives, it overviews the Aberdeen PROFIT Framework for Supply Management as a Service (SMaaS). The PROFIT Framework was designed “to aid supply management evaluators in understanding how to deploy an On Demand solution to drive value”. It provides a series of Process, Regulatory, Operational, Financial, Intelligence, and Technology questions whose answers are designed to help you make the right decision.