On the twelfth day of X-Mas
my blogger gave to me
an ounce of cunning,
another vendor hyping,
blog posts worth keeping,
spend vendors lancing,
thoughts for a shilling,
strategies for winning,
tactics for saving,
five golden rings,
four little words,
tri-focal lens,
two boxing gloves,
and a lesson in strategy.
Now use it wisely.
Happy Holiday Season.
P.S. There will be no posts for the next two days.
On the eleventh day of X-Mas
my blogger gave to me
another vendor hyping,
blog posts worth keeping,
spend vendors lancing,
thoughts for a shilling,
strategies for winning,
tactics for saving,
five golden rings,
four little words,
tri-focal lens,
two boxing gloves,
and a lesson in strategy.
Allow me to introduce you to Informance (merged with QlickiT, acquired by Catalyst IT). A provider of Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) solutions, Informance delivers software and advisory services purporting to enable enterprises to achieve a higher level of supply chain performance with real time visibility and valuable insights into manufacturing operations by addressing the following business areas:
These areas are addressed as follows:
The informance platform is designed to support Lean Manufacturing and all that it encompasses, including Total Productive Maintenance, Kaizen, Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED)/Quick Changeover, and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). Now, we all know that Lean (Manufacturing) has been around for a while, and that companies have been selling Lean (Manufacturing) solutions since it has been around, so you’re probably wondering what’s innovative about a company like Informance, especially when lean (manufacturing) is so passé.
Well, even after meeting their CEO earlier in the fall on one of my recent Bay Area trips, I wondered too – but then they simultaneously attracted some of the best marketing and sales talent in the space, including Sudy Bharadwaj, of recent Aberdeen fame, so I took another look – and the answer is simple – usability. Most lean solutions don’t give you enterprise wide visibility, and fewer still are useable. Plus, the new sales, marketing, and business development teams are in the process of revamping Informance’s offerings to make them even more useable and more effective in an average deployment. I know you’re asking what? Why? After all, sales and marketing and business development at most companies exists for the sole purpose of determining how much money can be sucked out of a customer. But you have to understand the caliber and foresightedness of the team that Informance has pulled together. They understand that the best way to make money is to sell a solution that a customer wants – and that’s a solution that solves a problem. Sell them silicon snake oil, and you’ll never sell to them again. Sell them a solution that actually works, and they’ll keep coming back for new and better solutions and services.
So watch out for Informance in the coming year – I think you’ll be hearing a lot more about them.
On the tenth day of X-Mas
my blogger gave to me
blog posts worth keeping,
spend vendors lancing,
thoughts for a shilling,
strategies for winning,
tactics for saving,
five golden rings,
four little words,
tri-focal lens,
two boxing gloves,
and a lesson in strategy.
10 Sourcing Innovation Blog Posts Worth Keeping
10 Spend Matters* [WayBackMachine] Blog Posts Worth Keeping
Optimization Should Drive Complex Direct Materials Decisions
Building Global Sourcing Skills and Talent in Your Organization
The Spend Management Platform
The Top Ten Myths of Analyst Relations
Hitting the Spend Management Wall — and Getting Over It
The Spend Management Talent Game (Part 1)
Integration: The New, New Thing
Sourcing Innovation: Securitizing Direct Materials
Global Sourcing: Does Innovation Matter?
On-Demand: The Next Generation
10 e-Sourcing Forum [WayBackMachine] Blog Posts Worth Keeping
Reverse Auction Selection Criteria 101
Spend Analysis: MacroMap and MicroMap
Build it and they will come
Sustaining and Growing e-Sourcing Success
Most Favored Nations – Part II
“Change” does not equal “Refresh”
The Future of Sourcing?
The Three Deadly Myths of SPM
Dave Stephens on Procurement, Open Source, and Doing What You Love
Aberdeen Responds to E-Sourcing Forum
10 Supply Excellence [WayBackMachine] Blog Posts Worth Keeping
If Opportunity Doesn’t Knock, Build Your Own Door
Your Company is Being Acquired. Now What?
Top Supply Strategy #5: Getting Organized
Top Supply Strategy #4: Grabbing the Supplier Performance Ring
Top Supply Strategy #3: Sourcing Grows Up
Top Supply Strategy #2: A Compliance Tale
Top Supply Strategy #1: A Spend Intelligence Short Story
The Perfect Pitch In Action
Predicting the Future of Strategic Sourcing: Part II
Sourcing Innovation: Prediction for Future of Strategic Sourcing
10 Procurement Central [WayBackMachine] Blog Posts Worth Keeping
Use “Use Cases” to Evaluate Procurement Software
Performance Based Pay – Thoughts from a Silicon Valley guy
The Future of Sourcing
So Your Supplier Has Been Acquired, What Next?
The Problem with Procuring Open Source
Hiring the Best
Software Patent Pirates
The Other Side Of On-Demand & SaaS
Indirect Procurement Risk Factors
Supplier Onboarding Costs
10 Purchase Realm [WayBackMachine] Blog Posts Worth Keeping
Top 7 Things I Learned About Buying Software
4 Sites for Creative and Quirky Purchasing
Supply Chain Vulnerability
Procurement Succession Planning
When Should Suppliers Get Involved
Managing Global Sourcing
How To Become A Buyer
Purchasing Case Studies
Smarter Purchasing Equals More Profit
Top 7 Signs Your New Co-Worker is a Purchasing Dud
10 Vendor Management (renamed Contract Capital Management) [WayBackMachine] Blog Posts Worth Keeping
Measuring the performance of a procurement department
Rogers and Hammerstein: The Future of Sourcing
Your most valuable asset
Blue Ocean Strategy and The Tawny Scrawny Lion
Are your vendors the Spice Girls or Arcadia?
Quick and dirty financial model: Efficient RFT processes v. contract management: Part 1
Outsourcing contracts: Not all fairness is equal
Trust, service delivery and contract management
Are we focusing too much on procurement?
Cult Contract Management
10 Purchasing Certification (now the NLPA blog as Next Level Purchasing, acquired by Certitrek, was renamed the NLPA) Blog Posts Worth Keeping
CPO’s & The Talent Search
Purchasing Education & Being Open-Minded
Skills For Purchasing Positions
Qualities of a Successful Buyer
Procurement Benchmarking
Talent Management
Sourcing Innovation For Enterprise-Wide Contracts
Sourcing Innovation for Single-Customer Contracts
Government Procurement Ethics & The Slammer
A Common Buyer Training Omission
10 European Leaders Network [WayBackMachine] Blog Posts Worth Keeping
The Future of Work
Spend Analysis: One Company’s Story
What’s Your Problem? Top Hurdles to Supply Management Success
Success Factors for Professional Purchasing
Procurement Benchmarking – Where do you start?
Taking Advantage of the Global Service Delivery Model
Procurement Outsourcing – Where Next?
Strategic Purchasing – Overused and Undervalued
Why e-Sourcing is Good for Suppliers
Low-cost countries sourcing trends
10 CombineNotes Blog [WayBackMachine] Posts Worth Keeping
Optimization Enabled Performance Management
Finance’s Contribution to Sourcing Optimization
Remove Uncertainty from Spend Management
Configuration vs Customization
Media Planning – Optimized
The Make vs. Buy Dilemma
Perspectives in Puzzling
Project Zander and Comprehensive Network Design
Analytics Support Negotiations
Expressive Commerce and The Long Tail
* All posts prior to 2012 were removed in the Spend Matters site refresh in June, 2023.
On the ninth day of X-Mas
my blogger gave to me
spend vendors lancing,
thoughts for a shilling,
strategies for winning,
tactics for saving,
five golden rings,
four little words,
tri-focal lens,
two boxing gloves,
and a lesson in strategy.
In this corner, hailing from Burlington, at a whopping 800 lbs, the heavyweight champion of the space, Emptoris (acquired by IBM, sunset in 2017) and in this corner, hailing from Southborough, at a lean and mean 200 lbs, the lightweight contender, BIQ (acquired by Opera Solutions, rebranded ElectrifAI).
Amidst a flurry of Much-Ado-About-Something, all started by a few innocuous postings over on Spend Matters in the month of Shimo tsuki, the spend visibility debate has been kicked into sixth speed maximum overdrive as the result of an all-out-melee sure to satisfy even the most staunch of Stephen King fans. Even my declarative proclamation that Spend Matters Not!, as a rebuttal to my inquiry as to whether or not Spend Matters Most? has been lost in the virtual mortar fire between Emptoris and BIQ’s legal quests to prove that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.
Emptoris, the apparent Victor Von Doom of the Spend-Analysis-Driven-Intelligent-Savings-Targets mindset, or S.A.D.I.S.T, has the most extensive offering of any contender on the playing field, with its various spend data manager, real time classifier, spend analyzer, data enrichment, and reporting engines which combined appear to provide more raw power than the Human Torch, the Thing, the Invisible Woman, and Mr. Fantastic put together. In comparison, BIQ, your friendly neighborhood Spiderman, is clinging to the field with its single Veg-O-Matic offering (It Slices! It Dices!) and its unique Meta-aggregation-Shifting-of-Classification-Hierarchies-in-Subsecond-Time capability, or M.a.S.o.C.H.i.S.T., which has me singing the praises of Mr. Popeil.
Both have their virtues. Emptoris is probably the only solution that can allow you to analyze not only your relative spend internally, but relative spend against the rest of the market – and maybe help you break through the curse of those rose colored glasses normally worn by your executives. In comparison, BIQ is probably the only solution that can allow a buyer to look at her data any way she wants to, at any time, allowing her to find and exploit hidden relationships with its transmutative engine, helping her break out of The Metamorphosis she will someday awake to find herself in without it.
Both have their failings. The S.A.D.I.S.T. view of the world is a single view from within the walls of a single, but complete, cube, boxing you in to one vision of the world. In comparison, the M.a.S.o.C.H.i.S.T. view, borrowing a piece of technology from The Guide, Mark II permits you an infinite number of views of the world, with the caveat that they are all potentially incomplete. In short, if you asked mirror-mirror-on-the-wall, who’s the fairest of them all, I would be tempted to say that even he would not be able to answer you. The fact of the matter is, for all you techies out there, (and maybe even a few of you Trekkies), that while Emptoris wins on breadth of solution, BIQ wins on depth, and the best single solution for you depends on your view of the world and the best solution overall is probably the adoption of both types of solution. The single world view to please your executives who like to stare into space with their rose coloured glass intact and the changing world view for your sourcerers to gain the insight they need to make better buys.
But all I can say, is when it comes to legal sparring between two obviously different solutions, even though they both exist on the same coin, is the offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky. For if the fight continues, only Wolfram and Hart will win in the end.
For those of you who want to review the debate-to-date, here is a brief history in time:
“Spend Management and M&A”*, Spend Matters [WayBackMachine], (Nov 3, 2006)
“It’s Only the Beginning for Spend Visibility and Analytics Growth”*, Spend Matters (Nov 17, 2006)
“Emptoris: Readying the Spend Visibility Armaments for Battle”*, Spend Matters (Nov 28, 2006)
“A Spend Visibility Smack-Down”*, Spend Matters (Nov 30, 2006)
“Ariba: Not Sitting Still in the Spend Visibility Arms Race”*, Spend Matters (Dec 1, 2006)
“Spend Visibility Gets Legal: Emptoris vs. BIQ”*, Spend Matters (Dec 5, 2006)
“BIQ Respond to Emptoris’ Lawsuit”*, Spend Matters (Dec 6, 2006)
“Sourcing Innovation Adds to the Spend Visibility Controversy”*, Spend Matters (Dec 11, 2006)
“Emptoris: Blurring the Legal and Marketing Line”*, Spend Matters (Dec 12, 2006)
“What is the ROI of Spend Visibility and Analysis Solutions?”*, Spend Matters (Dec 13, 2006)
Merry Christmas Spend Fool!
* All posts prior to 2012 were removed in the Spend Matters site refresh in June, 2023.
On the eighth day of X-Mas
my blogger gave to me
thoughts for a shilling,
strategies for winning,
tactics for saving,
five golden rings,
four little words,
tri-focal lens,
two boxing gloves,
and a lesson in strategy.
