Monthly Archives: November 2008

The Sourcing Maniacs 2008 Vendor Tour Part X: Iasta

In our last installment of the 2008 Sourcing Maniacs Vendor Road Tour, the maniacs had just finished talking with a somewhat contemplative looking gentleman from GDM somewhere near Denver, Colorado. We rejoin them shortly after their conversation with the somewhat contemplative looking gentleman from GDM.

Today’s post is a little lengthy, so it’s broken up into Interlude and Inquiry, which contains the vendor content.

Interlude

Yakko, Wakko, & Dot We dig dig dig dig dig dig dig
  through our data the whole day through
To dig dig dig dig dig dig dig
  is what we really like to do
It ain’t no trick to get rich quick
If you dig dig dig with a shovel or a pick
In a large data mine! In a large data mine!
Where a million diamonds shine!
Dot Where Next?
Wakko I think it’s called e-Sourcing Place now.
Dot sneering
Wakko!
Wakko Sorry!
Dot Any more G’s?
Yakko Lots of services companies! Global Procurement Group. Global Sourcing Specialists. Greybeard Advisors.
Dot Can you think of any technology companies?
Yakko Besides Google, not today.
Dot So on to the H’s then.
Yakko Hiperos?
Dot SRM. Hmmm … let’s file them under services for now.
Wakko Hyperion?
Dot Oracle, remember?
Yakko I guess we’re skipping the H’s too this time around. Where do we start in the I’s?
Dot I seem to remember this punky little upstart by the name of Iasta from our Ariba days.
Yakko I heard they were just 4-guys in a garage with a simple e-RFX tool.
Dot Well, that’s what we used to say they were. But when was the last time we actually paid any attention to them …
Yakko Uhm … err … I can’t remember.
Dot Neither do I! Should we check them out?
Wakko Well, I seem to recall the doctor mentioning them quite a few times on SI … there must be something to them.
Dot Might as well go for it. And with our e-Sourcing background, maybe we’ll even understand what they do!
Wakko So where are they?
Yakko Indianapolis, I believe!
Wakko Race car city! Cool!
Yakko Super Overdrive!
Wakko Wakko breaks out his best rendition of Super Overdrive by Billy Idol.

Inquiry

  The maniacs head off towards Indianapolis, on the scenic route. We catch up with them again a few days later.
Dot This is it. I hope they talk to us!
Yakko Their CEO is a blogger, and they sponsor the e-Sourcing Wiki, which hosts some of the best wiki-papers in supply management that you’ll find anywhere. I’m sure they’ll talk to us.
Wakko Wakko breaks out his mini-mallet.
Let’s find out!
Wakko taps on the door.
A minute later, a smiling man with a moustache steps out.
Wakko Who are you?
Smiling Man I’m the CEO of Iasta.
Yakko, Wakko, & Dot And we’re …
CEO The Sourcing Maniacs.
Yakko, Wakko, & Dot You know of us?
CEO Yes. I’ve read about your exploits, and Eric Strovink from BIQ warned me that you were making the rounds.
Dot Well, hopefully you’ve only heard good things about l’il old us!
CEO Checking that the door behind him, and more importantly, to the server room, is locked (see Where Pinky and the Brain Devise a Plan to Market Their Strategy for a reason why).

What I’ve heard varies. How can I help you?

Wakko What do you do?
CEO e-RFX …
Yakko yawn
CEO e-Auction …
Dot looking very bored
CEO Smart Optimization
Wakko Com-bin-a-tore-e-ul Op-ti-my-za-shun?
CEO Yes Wakko, we do strategic sourcing decision optimization … and we think it’s one of the best solutions out there. And we do Contract Management …
Dot perking up
CEO and we’re in the process of preparing our first Supplier Relationship Management release, better known as SRM.
Yakko Really?
CEO Really. And when you add in our built in project management and our Smart Analytics solution, based on BIQ‘s leading spend analysis product, you see that we have one of the most complete end-to-end e-Sourcing suites on the market.
Dot So you go head to head with Ariba and Emptoris?
CEO All the time!
Yakko And win?
CEO More often than you’d be led to believe!
Dot How often?
CEO Let’s just say that we have well over 100 global customers, many in the Fortune 500, and that both our annual North American User Conference and our annual European User Conference are very well attended by happy customers who enjoy learning how they can do even more with the platform they have already bought, and at a very attractive price point I might add.
Wakko How attractive?
CEO We’re a True SaaS provider, so we are very competitive with our basic solution prices.
Dot Under a Million?
CEO We start at under one hundred thousand a year for our entry-level solution.
Dot shocked
Under One Hundred Thousand?
CEO Yes Dot, under one hundred thousand for our basic Smart Source solution. You don’t have to buy everything to start, and even if you do, unless you also buy a considerable amount of services support for your organization, it’s still under the seven figure mark that you liked to charge.
Dot still shocked
How do you make money?
CEO Economies of scale enabled by SaaS, and smart spending. We eat our own dog-food and follow our own advice. We keep our costs reasonable, which allows us to give our customers good service at a great price, and in return we keep them. We believe we have one of the highest customer retention rates in the sourcing space. But I’m sure you’re not here to discuss our success stories. What would you like to know?
Yakko How you’re different.
CEO Well, we think our product is better than our competition, but if you limit yourself to a “check-the-box” comparison, as so many analysts are prone to do, you’d see that our major solution differences when we are compared against your average sourcing vendor are our strategic sourcing decision optimization and supplier relationship management capabilities. These go well beyond your standard bid-negotiate-award-track capabilities found in your average e-RFX, e-Auction, and Contract Management applications and allow you to focus on identifying the best value for your money and then ensuring that the savings you negotiated, and contracted for, are realized.
Wakko But don’t a number of companies claim to have Op-ti-my-za-shun?
CEO Very few have true optimization, Wakko. Most just use heuristic decision support algorithms that they try to pass off as optimization. We use true Mixed Integer Linear Programming and best-of-breed industry solvers, like ILog CPlex, underneath a true strategic sourcing decision optimization model that meets ALL of the requirements outlined by the doctor in the wiki-paper.
Wakko And that’s important because?
CEO Because you need all four types of constraints — capacity, allocation, risk mitigation, and qualitiave — and costs — unit, usage, and freight — to accurately model your average real world sourcing scenario. Otherwise, the scenario you end up with is only approximate, which means the solution is only approximate, and, if you missed key constraints, not realistic. Without all of the constraints, and some “competitors” only provide a subset, you either get a result that’s too good to be true, and is, because you can’t implement it, or the result isn’t as good as you can get, because you couldn’t specify all of the constraints and discounts.
Wakko And it works?
CEO Remarkably. As covered in recent posts by the doctor on Sourcing Innovation and our own e-Sourcing Forum, we’ve had two events where we’ve saved over 20M on two projects of roughly 80 Million and 110 Million, respectively. We also find that we do hit the industry average of 12%+ above and beyond e-Auction savings alone when we apply the technology.
Yakko It must be hard to use. You need a team of PhDs to drive it, right?
CEO Not at all! It’s quite easy … your average intermediate buyer can drive it very successfully after just a few hours of training. You create the constraints using wizards and english sentence fragments. You can import the cost data from Excel or from your e-RFX. You can create a new what-if scenario by copying an existing scenario and changing only what you want. Your power-users will teach themselves to be experts in the tool in a matter of hours. I bet even you could use it Wakko.
Wakko But I don’t know how to do Com-bin-a-tore-e-ul Op-ti-my-za-shun!
CEO You don’t have to. Our tool does all the heavy lifting. If you can fill in a spreadsheet, use drop downs, and enter numbers in web-based text-boxes, you can use it. It’s really that easy.
Wakko Wow!
Yakko And what about SRM. Is that easy too?
CEO As you would say, yassuredly.
Dot So what’s it do?
CEO It’s still in development, and we’re aiming for a late 2008 / early 2009 release, but what it’s going to do is streamline data capture and sourcing processes for the buyer and supplier alike. The first addition to our suite is a new supplier self-registration portal, backed up by a workflow-driven custom survey development tool. This pair of tools, the first for the supplier and the second for the buyer, is going to allow a buyer to define what information they need from every supplier, and then what information they need from suppliers in certain verticals and / or what information they need from suppliers who wish to supply certain types of products or services to the buyers. Then, when a supplier logs in and enters their basic information, as well as specifying the products or services they offer, they only have to fill out the surveys specific to them.

The survey construction tool, which will look similar to those who have tried our relatively new contract management tool, is based on the same underlying concept that the user should be able to define what fields, and meta-data fields, are of interest and allow the buyer to define what information they want, and how they want it. In addition, our survey construction tool, which builds on our RFX creation abilities, allows a user to define survey pages, and then makes uses of wizards to guide the buyer through survey construction. And, of course, all of this data is indexed, searchable, and easily managed. Furthermore, as with contract management, the buyer can define triggers on certain events (survey completion, changes to key data fields, etc.) and certain values (expiry dates, renewal dates, etc.) which will send off alerts or e-mails when certain events happen or certain actions need to be taken.

Dot Well, that sounds pretty common sense. A few companies have that already. How’s it different?
CEO What’s different is where we’re going with it and, most importantly, the approach we’re taking. We realize that the “R” in SRM stands for “relationship” and that is something that can not be accomplished with software-based tools alone. You can only have a relationship if there is interaction between the buyer and supplier on a regular basis. This means that there are only two ways a tool can help: enable communication or disable the roadblocks that prevent it. The most common roadblocks are the various tactical tasks that keep getting in the way, specifically, the tasks around collecting, organizing, tracking, and reporting on data.

Thus, in our view, a good SRM tool enables communication — and that’s why we’re building a new supplier portal, starting with our registration site — and centralizes all of the tactical data collection, organizing, tracking, and reporting in one location for the buyer — and that’s why we’re building a new supplier administration module, starting with surveys and scorecards, that is integrated with the rest of our suite, including contract management and meta-bid enabled optimization, which will allow the buyer to track agreements, expirations, certifications, insurance, and performance data in one place. Sometime next year, the tool will also allow senior buyers to define workflows around supplier contracts and interactions, which will guide the buying team through the organization’s best-practice supplier interaction processes. And we’re also building in new commodity-based classification hierarchies that will allow buyers to better segment their supply base and define hierarchical scorecards by commodity category and location to help them get a better view of total operational performance and how a supplier is impacting that.

Dot And it’s all going to be integrated in one platform?
CEO Seamlessly. Unlike our competitors, who have been on acquisition binges for the last decade, we built everything from the ground up on one platform, in one core language. That allows us to seamlessly integrate all of our products into one application in a way that most companies would envy. That’s why we think our SRM will succeed where many have failed before. It may not have all of the bells-and-whistles of some of the best-of-breed stand-alone products, but we believe it will have the core functionality that everyone needs, plus provide the advantage that you only have to deploy one platform. It’s the classic 80/20 rule — 80% of the functionality, for 20% of the cost, and effort, for our customers. When the full platform is released next year, we believe that the majority of customers will find that it does more than what they need. And that’s what we feel the market needs.
Yakko That’s a very interesting take.
CEO And a practical one. Most of the mid-market just needs basic functionality in sourcing and procurement to get through the day. There’s only a few Fortune 500 / Global 2000 companies that are advanced enough to productively use every bell and whistle you can imagine. We’d rather serve the 90% of the Fortune 500 / Global 2000, and, more importantly, the mid-market at large, who have been underserved for years due to the big-platform price tags that have traditionally put the traditional e-Sourcing platform solutions out of their reach.
Wakko I think I get it. 20% of the Fortune 500 would give you 100 companies, and it’s hard to get 20% of the Fortune 500. But if you got 10% of the Global 10,000, that’s 1,000 companies, and there are still 9,000 other companies who need a solution, and a lot fewer companies serving them.
CEO That’s right, Wakko. It’s about building a great company with a great tool that brings great value to, and enables, the mass market. That’s what we’re shooting for. And we think we’ll get there. And with that, I must get back to work. Have a good day.

The Road Tour will continue on Thursday.

e-Procurement is All about Content

e-Procurement, the counterpart to e-Sourcing that starts where e-Sourcing ends and ends where e-Sourcing begins (as outlined in It’s Sourcing AND Procurement), is the “e” implementation of the procurement cycle that is concerned with the requisitioning, receiving, and reconciliation of received goods, as opposed to the analysis, auction, and strategic award that takes place in a sourcing cycle (as defined in the e-Sourcing Wiki).

The basic cycle, which consists of up to 9-steps depending on the complexity of the buy and organizational policies, always consists of an order, an invoice, and payment. The order is made based upon organizational needs, the invoice is reviewed based upon the order that was made and the goods that were received, and payment is made based upon terms and conditions … and all three phases rely heavily on content. Before you can place an order, you need to know what the organization needs, what potential suppliers have to offer, what demand-supply matches are acceptable, and what the total cost of ownership of each option is. This is all content. Before you pay an invoice, you need to match it to the original order (were the goods ordered), to the goods received (which goods were actually received), and to the agreed upon prices and rates (in the contract or purchase order). This is all content. And before you can make a payment, you need to know who you’re paying, the payment methods they accept, their unique identifying information for the payment method chosen, the amount of time you have to pay, any discounts or penalties for paying early or late, and, if relevant, when the currency exchange might be in your favor. This is all content.

Good e-Procurement technology captures all of this data, makes it easily accessible and searchable, and organizes the data into information that knowledgeable individuals can use. But great e-Procurement technology, like that built using B2B 3.0 technology, goes even further! While good e-Procurement technology will capture the information it needs to do its job, great e-Procurement technology will make it easy to share that information between related applications through unified content exchange technologies. While good e-Procurment technologies will allow you to connect to different external catalogs through punch-out, great e-Procurement technologies will pull all of the relevant information into a single unified view that allows you to compare your different options side-by-side in an apples-to-apples comparison. And while good e-Procurement technologies are GUI-based, great e-Procurement technologies are feature rich and integrate all of the different user friendly technologies — including graphics, sound, and video — into a single application.

To read more about how modern e-Procurement is enabled by next-generation content-management technologies, check out the latest Sourcing Innovation Illumination on How Content-Enablement Enables e-Procurement 3.0.

A Good Supply Chain is Agile … and Powered by B2B 3.0!

Perfect Financial Storm Shutters Suppliers
Communistic Leader Closes Borders
Hurricane Hades Shutters East Coast Port
Toothpaste Terrorizes Teeth … Millions Tainted
Melamine Mauls Mutts … Thousands Dead
Spinach Salmonella Kills Hundreds

How many times have we seen these headlines in recent years? Too Many. How many times in the past year has a crises like this affected your average organization to some degree? At least once … if not twice! Supply chain risks are mounting at an alarming pace, and the average organization now experiences at least once significant supply disruption a year, if not two! And it looks like things are about to get worse. That’s why you need an Agile supply chain, powered by B2B 3.0, if you want to survive the next few years.

What is an Agile supply chain?

Agile has typically been used to refer to agile software development, which is a set of methodologies that promote a hands-on project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaption, a leadership philosophy that encourages close team work, self organization and accountability, engineering best practices that allow for rapid delivery of high quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and goals. (Wikipedia) But the core principles are not restricted to software development … they are equally applicable to supply chain.

An agile supply chain is also:

  • hands-on
    No one in the organization is afraid to get down and dirty and participate in the tactical day-to-day execution to make sure the big-picture strategic plan is realized.
  • driven by cross-functional teamwork
    One person is not a supply chain — and neither is one department. A leading supply management department works closely with logistics, inventory management, operations, engineering, and legal, at a minimum.
  • self-organizing
    A good supply management department is capable of selecting the best strategy and process for each supply chain project.
  • results-driven and accountable
    Supply Management is more then just purchasing … it’s about getting results. The right part at the right price at the right place at the right time, in line with the goals, and contracts, of the department. A good supply management department follows an award from the time of allocation through the final shipment to insure that any identified cost savings and cost avoidance are realized and reported.
  • best-practice focussed
    A good supply management department employs best practices to get the best results it can.
  • quality-centric
    A good supply management department is focussed on quality … and avoiding safety risks that can bring down the company.
  • customer focussed
    A great supply management department is focussed on the perfect order.

Furthermore, an Agile supply chain is powered on B2B 3.0. Why?

  • It Gives You Visibility.
    B2B 3.0 gives you up to date status on every order and let’s you know where it is in the pipeline … allowing you to be hands on.
  • It is Collaborative.
    It allows you to come together with your colleagues in other departments and work as a team.
  • It organizes organizational knowledge.
    Helping your supply management organization to be self-organizing.
  • It tracks all of the relevant information.
    This helps you be results driven and accountable.
  • It’s built on best practices.
    All of your suppliers’ products and services in one easily-accessible and always up-to-date catalogue. Meta-search across your catalog, contracts, and project repository. Industry leading spend analysis for opportunity identification.
  • It’s about quality.
    Not about forcing a square process into a circular whole.
  • It’s about commerce.
    It enables suppliers and buyers, and that’s fundamentally what supply management is all about.

Broaden Your PLM Footprint for Kick-Ass ROI

A recent Industry Week article, that noted that adoption of product lifecycle management (PLM) technology is reaching record levels and that the PLM market experienced a stronger-than-expected 13.5% growth rate to reach an estimated 24.3 Billion in 2007, also reported that implementations can quickly develop returns on investment of 100% to 300%. Considering the needs for manufacturers to find every savings opportunity possible with record-high commodity costs and a global economic down-turn on the horizon, this is one opportunity your manufacturing organization should not miss.

As I noted last year in my post on PLM for trends based industries, a PLM systems, which enables the process of managing the entire life-cycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal, will provide:

  • complete process visibility compared to the limited process visibility that is the norm without a PLM solution
  • a centralized, usually web-based, point of control compared to a lack of control point without a solution
  • one version of the product status and truth
  • workflow management
  • unparalleled control over the product life-cycle
  • an integration point for the various systems used in the various stages of product design, development, and merchandising

In addition, as per the Industry Week article, the broader scope of today’s PLM solutions enables manufacturing managers to collaboratively reach upstream into the early stages of portfolio management as well as downstream into the integration with manufacturing. In other words, enhanced productivity of existing resources is the result of PLM’s ability to integrate the various value chains. This is because, with PLM, multiple views of the product can be quickly and easily shared among different people of the organization in real time and the collaboration features allow people to communicate, share ideas and interact dynamically around a particular product.

Furthermore, PLM is not just for manufacturers — it’s for any organization that buys a lot of manufactured parts, especially if a good percentage of those parts are custom. The best results often come from innovation that arises as a result of collaboration between the buying organization that has the expertise in new product design and the custom manufacturer that has the expertise in product manufacturing. So where should you look for these solutions? I’d start with some of the companies I covered here on this blog in the past, which include Akoya, Apriori, Arena, Co-exprise, and MFG.com. Each of their solutions can help you identify and realize cost-savings opportunities when properly applied in your product life-cycle. And a couple of them can even help you manage your product life-cycle – so check them out, move forward, and see if you can’t get yourself some of that 100% to 300% ROI!

How Dumb is Your Company?

Although it is likely that the majority of my regular readers — who strive to improve their knowledge, capabilities, and skill-sets by the day — work for above average companies who are reasonably intelligent at their core, it’s a recession out there, and your average company is getting dumber by the day. Moreover, many companies don’t even seem to realize how dumb they’re getting or the bad precedents they’re setting for good companies who will be pressured by investors and Wall Street to follow their lead. Thus, in my quest to keep your company on the straight and narrow, I bring you CIRCUIT: the “Corporate Intelligence Rating Calibration Under Inflationary Times”. I hope you don’t need it, but if you do, I hope it persuades your managers, and investors, from doing dumb things.

In recessionary times, companies have a tendency to execute one or more of the following 10 dumb mistakes. To determine your corporate intelligence, start with a score of 10 and subtract 1 for each act of corporate omission.

Doing Away With the Perks
Usually the first thing to go when money gets tight are the employee perks. If perks at your company happen to be box seats at the game, and a box costs your company 100K a year, then it’s a justifiable call. However, at most companies, “perks” are usually limited to refreshments in the break room, the odd meal out, and the odd office party which, when combined, account for a total cost that is a negligible rounding error on the balance sheet. The pennies you save is not worth the loss of morale, and productivity, that will result from taking away your employee’s 25 cent coffee or soda. 		-1
Delaying that Technology Purchase
Companies that win do more with less. They do that by deploying technology that increases the productivity, and capability, of their staff. Look at the Hackett numbers. Leaders spend more — way more — on technology.
I’m not saying that you should go out and spend millions on a new ERP, since some traditional enterprise solutions on the marketplace are way overpriced, but if you’ve identified a need for a system, do your homework, find a low-cost (SaaS) solution that meets your needs, and license it on a pay-as-you-go basis. 		-1
Postponing New Product Development
Recessions do two things. They break (and sometimes bankrupt) losers and they make leaders. In strong markets, the leading companies are always — ALWAYS — those companies that emerge, lean (which means cost-conscious and not cost-focussed) and mean, from a recession with new products and services to meet the needs of the market. This also means that leading companies continue to innovate new products during a recession (as well as new ways to produce or deliver them more cost effectively). 		-1
Freezing the Marketing Budget
Companies that succeed in recessionary times are companies that conduct business-as-usual. Although this doesn’t mean spending millions on a Super Bowl ad, it does mean a continued advertising presence on the web and at intelligently selected trade shows. Companies that conduct business-as-usual show their (potential) customers that they run their business responsibly, in good times and bad, and are more than capable of riding out some rough waters here and there. (And there’s a difference between responsibly getting a booth at a trade-show and irresponsibly hiring expensive magicians, professional athletes, and bikini-clad super-models to staff it when you have real-world budgets.) 		-1
Strangling the Travel Budget
Global business requires global travel — plain and simple. It’s true that you can do a lot by tele-conference and video-conference, and also true that you should be doing as much as you can with these new technologies, but this will never replace the connection formed by being there in-person, as any good sales person will tell you. Sometimes you need to visit customers, sometimes your remote teams need to come together to form a bond, and sometimes you need to go to trade shows. If you were managing your travel budget responsibly, and only traveling when you needed to, you can’t cut a single penny without negatively impacting your business. 		-1
Cutting 10% Across the Board
A responsible business doesn’t have more employees than it needs to get its work done, and doesn’t retain employees who are not capable of adequately performing the job they were hired to do. This means that every single employee is needed and productively contributing to the business and that, logically, cutting employees must seriously cut into productivity and threaten a business’ ability to continue business-as-usual.
Furthermore, in reality, cutting 10% of your employees is equivalent to cutting 30% to 50% of your operating capability. The first thing that happens is that morale and drive, which greatly impacts an employee’s productivity, tanks across the board. Then your employees get scared and start looking for new jobs — but since most companies aren’t hiring, only your best employees get new jobs. End result: cutting 10% across the board ensures that your top 10% take their leave as well, and the 80% who are left are operating at maybe 2/3rds capacity as they spend a lot of their time worrying about what they’ll do if they lose their job and looking for a new job. Net effect, you lose up to 50% productivity for what you thought was a 10% cost savings. 		-1
Killing the Training Budget
Not only do top companies spend more on technology than their peers, they spend more on training. Why? This allows them to do more work with fewer employees. This allows them to keep their salary expense lean-and-mean relative to their peers, and to earn more per employee, for a total cost that is usually a small fraction of the lean-and-mean salary expense. 		-1
Shifting Focus from Growth-Planning to Cost-Cutting
The leaders, innovative to the core, always find a way to grow slowly in a recession. Always. Always. Always. Maybe it’s only a few percentage points compared to the tens of percentage points they grow when the recession ends, but they grow. The losers switch to cost-cutting and, more often than not, cut themselves out of existence. 		-1
Stifling Innovation to Reduce Risk
Three words: INNOVATE OR DIE! Your choice.		 -1
Retreating into your Moated Castle
This has become my new personal favorite! Often the first thing to go these days after the employee perks is the consulting budget — and it’s often by far the dumbest thing your average company can do. Often the only way of introducing significant, meaningful, cost-saving revenue-generating improvements into your average company is to bring in an outside consultant who specializes in one or more types of business innovation. A consultant who can tell you what technology is right for you. A consultant who can help you define the right new product development roadmap that will result in products customers want to buy, even during a recession. A consultant who can help you maximize your marketing budget. A consultant who can help you save money and avoid unnecessary costs in an intelligent, non-destructive, fashion. And a consultant who can keep you on the innovation path and out of the cost-cutting abyss that ultimately spells a cruel demise to what could have been a very successful business model with just a few tweaks. 		-1

What’s your Corporate Intelligence Rating? If your score is:

  Rating Comments
10 Genius Congratulations! You are a true market leader.
9 Intelligent Quite Good! You’re best-in-class.
8 Smart Not Bad. You’re above average and on the road to stardom.
7 Average You’ve got some work to do, but if you set your mind to it, a bright future awaits.
6 Dull You’ve got your work cut out for you.
5 Deficient You’re handicapped, but if you’re handi-capable, with hard-work, perseverance, and a devout focus on change, you can be average in no-time!
4 Feeble You’re seriously lacking in corporate know-how, but if you open your heart to innovation, and bring in some expert consultants, you can get back on the right track.
3 Dumb You’re going to need a corporate make-over to survive.
2 Moron Find a Leprechaun! You’re betting on Lady Luck at this point!
1 Imbecile Start writing your corporate obituary. It’s just a matter of time.
0 Complete Idiot Congratulations! The Sourcing Maniacs lay their bells at your feet. It should be impossible to be this idiotic and still be alive, but you’ve proven that nothing’s imposible. Have some bubbly before the money runs out.