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I was going to just pretend that Purchasing never published its guide to spend analysis, but then my fellow blogger decided to praise it and now I just can’t keep my pen down (or, in my case, MacBook Pro off).

Now, don’t get me wrong. While I don’t read it very much, I do like Purchasing Magazine. They’ve been doing a fine job lately of covering the basics, and if you don’t know the basics, there’s no way you can tackle the more advanced and in-depth topics covered in the Supply Chain Management Review (which is personally my favorite traditional supply chain publication and home of one of my favorite supply chain bloggers, Robert Rudzki).

But this “guide”, which amounts to not much more than a screen scraping of 16 different vendor web-sites is pathetic. It doesn’t do an in depth review of any product. It doesn’t offer any meaningful apples-to-apples comparisons. It isn’t even “comprehensive”!

It only lists 16 vendors. Namely:

What about?

And that’s just off the top of my head!

And what about advice on how to evaluate, compare, and make a decision? And what about some background? Like the fact that the Emptoris product is still largely based on the defunct Zeborg offering? That the Ariba solution is still not a unified best-of-both worlds solutions (as they are still working on their “9S5” suite that takes the best of the Procuri offering, which was based on TrueSource). That Ketera is based on MicroStrategy. Or that four (4) of the above solutions are based on BIQ. And so on.

Basically, I think it would have been more useful if they’d just posted a complete list of vendors. Because you can’t trust what you rip off the website. Many of the solutions are good solutions … but the marketing spin they cut-and-pasted won’t tell you which solution is right for you!