Daily Archives: June 27, 2016

The Direct Procurement Challenge Webinar is TOMORROW!

Hopefully you’ve registered by now. If you haven’t, there is still time to register. It’s free. It gives you one CEH. And, for the first time ever, you can ask questions of both the doctor and the prophet in the same webinar! (Downloading The Direct Procurement Challenge is good, but this is an awesome bonus.)

Remember, the doctor is the expert on Complex Sourcing and Procurement and when he says that you shouldn’t use a Chihuahua to herd sheep and asks why are you trying to use a mouse to herd cats (which is mission improbable anyway), you should know that there is something someone is not telling you. That’s why he’s joining a tag-team to bring you this much needed education for free. But as he doesn’t have time to repeat himself (so much to educate on, so little time), like most webinars, this is a one-shot deal. Show up. Or possibly miss out on that one secret that could help you secure the budget you desperately need. Your call.

As a reminder, in this webinar, the doctor and the prophet will discuss:

  • the direct procurement lifecycle
  • how it is different from the classic indirect procurement lifecycle
    (which was cost-centric perfect for indirect)
  • key requirements to support direct procurement that indirect procurement platforms lack
  • key technological capabilities to truly manage the direct procurement lifecycle
  • 15 ways your platform likely isn’t up to snuff
    (especially if it’s a platform built for indirect)
  • the consequences of using the wrong platform for Procurement platform
    (which can leave a lot of blood on your hands)

Sign up. Join in. And learn the questions you should be asking and not the answers you should be accepting without digging a little deeper.

Remember, what you see on the surface:

Is not always the full picture:

Why Does Tail Spend Take Your Head for a Spin?

In our last post on why you shouldn’t let tail spend take you for a tail spin, we noted that tail spend could be keeping an additional 3% of revenue from hitting the bottom line (and, depending on your industry, and its margins, reducing your profit potential by up to 50%) and severely impacting your organization’s profit potential (and operating budget, which Procurement rarely has enough of).

We told you the answer to that was Sourcing Innovation’s new white paper on An Introduction to Tail Spend — and why you need a technology-based solution (registration required), sponsored by Claritum, because, unlike most papers, it tells you not only what tail spend is, and why not addressing it is costing your organization more than you know, but how to do something about it.

And it’s not just the typical solutions that the paper throws at you, which include:

  • tacking it on to managed spend,
  • using a GPO,
  • e-Catalogs, and
  • optimization-backed sourcing platforms

because:

  • strategic suppliers want to supply high-volume or high-value products, not low-volume or low-value products, and certainly not as a condition for supplying strategic categories
  • GPO pricing is only as strong as their constituents and if the majority of the constituents don’t want the products or services that constitute your organization’s tail spend, their prices won’t be much better
  • tail spend is too unpredictable to be managed through a single catalog, especially since only a portion of tail spend should generally be made as catalog spot-buys
  • as optimization-backed sourcing platforms have the power to source much of tail spend, but don’t provide the guidance, and the strategy is often the most important thing

That’s why the paper provides not a single strategy, but a process for selecting the right strategy for each type of tail spend, as well as guidance on how to choose a platform to support it.

So download Sourcing Innovation’s new white paper on An Introduction to Tail Spend — and why you need a technology-based solution (registration required), sponsored by Claritum, and get your tail spend management on the right track.