Daily Archives: October 30, 2012

Federalist No. 27

In Federalist No. 27, Hamilton continues his consideration of the idea of restraining the legislative authority in regard to the common defense. In this particular essay, there is no substitute for his words.

Unless we presume at the same time that the powers of the general
government will be worse administered than those of the State government, there seems to be no room for the presumption of
ill-will, disaffection, or opposition in the people. I believe it may be laid down as a general rule that their confidence in and
obedience to a government will commonly be proportioned to the goodness or badness of its administration.


It will be sufficient here to remark,
that until satisfactory reasons can be assigned to justify an opinion, that the federal government is likely to be administered in
such a manner as to render it odious or contemptible to the people, there can be no reasonable foundation for the supposition
that the laws of the Union will meet with any greater obstruction from them, or will stand in need of any other methods to
enforce their execution, than the laws of the particular members.


The plan reported by the convention, by extending the authority of the federal head to the individual citizens of the several
States, will enable the government to employ the ordinary magistracy of each, in the execution of its laws


Any
man who will pursue, by his own reflections, the consequences of this situation, will perceive that there is good ground to
calculate upon a regular and peaceable execution of the laws of the Union, if its powers are administered with a common
share of prudence.

Technology Trials 2012 – Part III

In our last post, we assumed that you need to find a new solution, either partial or full, for one or more of your supply management functions (procurement, sourcing, logistics, inventory management, etc.) and discussed the second (set) of question(s) you need to ask when initiating the process to find a new solution. Today, after determining that you need a new solution and have time to find (and implement/integrate) one, and that you know what the critical functionality of that solution needs to be, we are going to discuss the next (set) of question(s), which is:

(03) Do you go with an end-to-end solution (suite) or best-of-breed point solution(s)?

In order to make this determination, you need to answer:

  (03.1) What are the relative costs?
  (03.2) What are the relative benefits?
  (03.3) What is the ROI?

and look at the answers over multiple time-frames, with 3 years, 5 years, and 7 years being common (especially if there are solutions with significant up-front license, implementation, integration, and/or training costs or long term benefits, such as support for upcoming regulations or standards).

When looking at the costs, you need to do a detailed cost analysis (such as the one outlined in SI’s post on How Much Does That Enterprise Supply Management Solution Really Cost) and take into account every cost.

When looking at the benefits, you need to look at the ability to reduce hard costs (by freeing up resources for other activities or by providing you the ability to strategically source more and get more costs under control), reduce soft costs (by facilitating SRM, minimizing support or third party system costs, etc.), and generate value (through better support for New Product Development, an open system that can be used by the entire enterprise for Contract Management [for example], or significant analytic capabilities).

When calculating the ROI, you need to assign each benefit an associated dollar value for the time period in question, and then calculate the expected ROI of an end-to-end solution for the target timeframe(s) and the expected ROI of (a) best-of-breed solution(s) for the target timeframe(s). If one is clearly greater than the other, then that is the path you should take. If they are about equal, you generally sway towards the solution with the quicker implementation timeline. After all, given the choice between generating an ROI in 3 months or an ROI in 12 months, which is going to make your CFO and CEO happier (and allow you to get more of the technology and talent you need to succeed)?

And now the real trial begins! (More to come …)