Apparently this Monday was Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year, as determined by the following non-sensical calculation:

where d, D, M, N_a, and T^Q are a bunch of random variables arbitrarily considered to be correlated to mood.

But if you really want to be depressed, consider the following stats:

• 64% of companies do not have a person responsible for managing supply chain risk, down a whopping 1% from 2008, but 80% of companies are vulnerable to a major supply chain disruption!
• companies without e-Sourcing and e-Procurement solutions are over spending by 170 Million on every 1.17 Billion of spend (a rate of 14.5%), and when you consider that less than half of companies out there have either solution, less than 25% have both!
• and up to 17 Million of this overspend is due to over payments, duplicate payments, missed rebates, missed dicounts, lost credits, and fraud because they don’t even have a decent e-Payment / Recovery solution in place!

In short, chances are that your organizaton is grossly overspending, paying your richest suppliers twice (while bankrupting your poorest suppliers with your 200 day payment terms), and at risk of a major supply disruption that will financially ruin you because you won’t see it coming! That’s a real reason to be blue.

Let’s hope this is the year you stop sitting on that cash reserve and:

• implement integrated end-to-end e-Sourcing and e-Procurement
• put a solid monitoring and recovery solution in place to make sure every negotiated cent of savings is captured
• hire a risk manager and get a grip on risk so you can identify, and if needed, source around it before a disruption costs you every dime of savings you negotiated over the past three years and
• actually get some training on modern processes and technologies so you implement and utilize the new systems properly.