Monthly Archives: September 2010

S&DC Executive on The Future of Work

Supply & Demand Chain Executive recently ran an article on “10 Changes in the World of Work in the Next 10 Years” (which is based on trends identified by Gartner) that scares me. According to the article, in the future, we will all work like the Borg. Specifically, we will

  • work in swarms,
  • do so with the collective,
  • while we are hyper-connected.

I don’t know about you, but that scares the daylights and the night lights out of me. That’s not the creative knowledge-driven future we’ve been promised, but a routine, repetitive-task based future reminiscent of the first production lines. If that’s our future, teach me Hindi, pack me up, and ship me off to India because at least they are being creative and entrepreneurial!

Why You Should Use a Consultant

Editor’s Note: This post is from regular contributor Norman Katz, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on supply chain fraud and supply chain risk. Catch up on his column in the archive.

Over the years I’ve come to realize that clients rely on consulting services for two reasons:

  1. Because they don’t have the personnel
  2. Because they don’t have the personnel

The difference between the two reasons is that clients either don’t have enough warm bodies to throw at a problem and they need an extra one in the interim or they don’t have the specialized talents and expertise the consultant brings to the table.

Those are two pretty good reasons for organizations to use a consultant — especially one who is willing to transfer knowledge which enables them to take ownership of the projects that they work on jointly with the consultant. For short-term projects of a few weeks or a few months it usually does not make sense to hire an employee when using a consultant is actually a more effective and efficient answer.

So how do you find the right consultant?A great consultant strides to distinguish herself from other consultants by not offering commodity products and services, even though it can be a double-edged sword at times. Let’s face it: a great consultant’s bag of mixed tricks is somewhat specialized and can be a little difficult to explain. Her best “elevator pitch” is likely reliant on the elevator getting stuck between floors for an hour or so. But then again, if a consultant can provide you with their full value proposition in a minute or two, how much do they really know?

But there’s third reason — and a really good one — to use a consultant. And this aspect is what can even separate specialists from being viewed as valued advisors: a good consultant is professionally “out there”.

Aside from reading a daily newspaper or two and approximately a dozen or so various business publications (supply chain, manufacturing, technology, financial, fraud, security, etc.) each month, a good consultant will attend conferences and informational networking events and be on top of current trends and best practices. She will then relay this information to her clients when she learns something she thinks they should know — and do so in a timely fashion. (And, unlike a lawyer, won’t charge a minimum hourly fee to do it!) And the client stays on the ball without having to fork out tens of thousands of dollars to an analyst firm whose reports are stale as soon as they are published.

So hire a consultant today. It’s the best investment you can make with your money.

Norman Katz, Katzscan

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A Hitchhiker’s Guide to e-Procurement: Summary

Mostly Harmless, Part XXV

Previous Post

EIPP, P2P, e-Purchasing, and e-Procurement. What does it all mean?

This series provided a basic introduction to the world of e-Procurement. Each of the phases was discussed and key requirements were highlighted. In addition, the series also overviewed some of the primary challenges associated with each phase, some best practices to overcome those challenges, and some of the benefits the organization could also expect to see. While it was not intended to be complete, it is a great start for anyone embarking on an e-Procurement journey.

In addition, it also provided some great advice on how to compute the total cost of ownership of a system under consideration, how to analyze the efficacy of a solution relative to the organization’s procurement model, how to determine it’s appeal from both public and private sector viewpoints, and how to differentiate a system from EIPP, P2P, and e-Purchasing imitators.

A true e-Procurement solution is a very rich and powerful solution that will automate the tactical back-office process from start to finish, greatly decreasing the resources that must be assigned to tactical tasks, and associated processing costs. Considering that many studies have found that an e-Procurement solution can reduce the cost of invoice processing by as much as 98%, and that a manually processed invoice costs an average organization between 50 and 120 dollars, the transactional savings alone can be enormous. But these savings can be dwarfed when maverick spend is greatly reduced and new opportunities for savings are identified from the centralized warehouse of organizational purchases. An ROI of 5 or more is not out of the question if the right solution is selected and utilized properly.

So if an organization does not have a good e-Procurement solution, it should get one today. There are over a dozen providers in the space with good solutions (and many have been reviewed in the vendor post archives), and at least one of them should be the right fit. For more information on e-Procurement, there’s also the e-SourcingWiki Paper, which, in addition to a brief overview of the cycle and core capabilities, also overviews some important features of e-Procurement solutions in addition to more challenges, best practices, and benefits. In addition, it also has a brief glossary of standard procurement terms. (And, for even more information, one can always check out the Procurement Innovation archives here on Sourcing Innovation.)

That’s all for now, folks. Feel free to flip back through the series and read it again.

Back to the Beginning

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Is India About to go through Classic Economic Growing Pains?

Reading Scott Anthony’s “Innovation Notes from India” over on the HBR blogs, I can’t help but noticing that India is about to face the growing pains that North America went through during the information technology revolution of the last few decades. Consider Scott’s points one-by-one:

India is a land of contrasts

Every revolution, from the telephone through television to the PC made North America a land of contrasts between the haves and the have nots. The culture of entire communities, cities, and counties, literally changed overnight. Take silicon valley for example. It was a new gold rush economy.

There are more people than jobs in India

That’s usually the case, and usually what propels a country to try anything to create jobs. And when unemployment hits a high, that’s what drives real innovation energy.

The innovation energy in India is tremendous

This is a key requirement for an innovation boom that is always accompanied by growing pains when a country tries to adapt to rapid change.

Indian companies might have it too easy

First-to-market companies always have it too easy during a new technology boom. As a result, they don’t innovate enough and that’s why the first-to-market companies are rarely the winners over the long term (and why what counts is being best-to-market).

There will be more SKS‘s in the coming years

Giving that developing economies are charging ahead, you can be quite sure there will be multiple micro-finance options in the years ahead as the rich try to take advantage of the boom and seize the opportunity, leading to more growing pains as the micro-financiers reach capacity when the companies they are financing require even more money to sustain their growth.

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FieldGlass is Determined To Take Off In the Tens

FieldGlass, which provides a unified platform for contingent workforce management, service provider management, and direct hires, is determined to tear forward through the tens, which also happen to correspond to its second decade of corporate existence. Founded in Chicago in 1999, it celebrated its tenth birthday with a bang by adding 33 new customers in 2009 before tearing into 2010 and adding over 30 new customers year-to-date to double its customer base in less than two years.

With localized support for sixty-three (63) countries and counting, over one third (33%) of the new customers it has added in the past year were from outside the US — and they expect this number to rise over time as they add more satellite offices in various countries and continue to add localized support for more countries. And like Coupa, which happens to be one of the many enterprise platforms their solution can peacefully exist with, they plan to keep up the fervant pace of customer acquisition for some time to come.

So how are they pulling this off? It’s a combination of

  • persistence like the little engine that could, they just won’t quit,
  • technology they have a solid platform which gets better every year,
  • limited competition Google might return over 100K hits for contingent workforce management, but only a few players (like IQ Navigator and Taleo) have platforms in the same class,
  • a truly global focus their localized support (which includes local laws, regulation, and policy) for 63 countries and counting is a differentiator, and
  • the economy since no one wants to hire direct full time employees anymore.

So what have they done since our last update last April (which followed the incredibly deep coverage brought to us by the Sourcing Maniacs in their 2008 vendor tour)? Two things of note: they finished flushing out their core BI suite and started working on Active Guidance. And while the latter is still in its infancy, it will be very useful when taken to the next level.

Their BI offering consists of three core capabilities:

  • intelligent benchmarkingacross equivalent job categories in equivalent locations,
  • drill down reporting which lets the user drill through the various spend cubes maintained by the application, and
  • visualization which presents the user with innovative graphs, comparative dashboards, and informative trends.

Most of the work has went into improving the benchmarks, to make sure the industry averages presented are for equivalent jobs in equivalent locales, and extending the visualizer, to try and find the best ways to present a lot of information in an easy to understand, but yet impactive, manner. In a few cases, they’ve really hit the mark. The first case is the country-based graphs which allow a user to see relative spending by state on a geographically correct map. These graphs take the concept of Shneiderman diagrams (or visual crosstabs) to a whole new level. The second case is the integrated trend graphs that allow you to simultaneously see the trends across contingent worker, service worker, and direct hire for any job position or category. This is important because whenever spending drops sharply in one category, it tends to increase significantly in another. (Can’t hire any new workers? Service workers. Can’t sign another long term contract with a service provider? Contingent workers. Contingent workers been here too long? New hires.) The third case is the comparative rate-range graphs which simultaneously present the average rate, the range, and the market average for a set of related positions — it makes it really to easy to see where the company is likely spending too much for its contingent and service labor.

However, what is really interesting is their new focus on “active guidance”. Having deep insight from meaningful benchmarks and comprehensive spend reports is one thing, but knowing what to do — and when to do it — is another. For an organization with thousands of contingent and service workers, this can be a challenge. To this end FieldGlass has launched new capabilities that is has bundled under the heading of “active guidance” with more in development. The three capabilities it has launched to date are:

  • Rate Guidanceusing the benchmark data and spending history, the platform will advise the user on the recommended rate range to associate with a contingent or service position,
  • FieldGlass Advisorbuilt on top of their alert functionality, the advisor will let a user know when a certain action should be taken (such as initiating a request for additional funds or to extend a current position), and
  • The Project Management Office Dashboarda quick summary into the past due, current, and forthcoming tasks that require the users attention with respect to payment and procurement, the dashboard is built on top of dozens of user configurable thresholds relating to processes, documents, and spend tracked by the system.

As FieldGlass continues its quest to automatically identify trends and associate them with suggested behaviors,this role-based feature should get quite interesting. The holy grail of performance analysis lies in the ability to take tactical data and derive meaningful strategy.

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