Let’s Get Ready To Rumble!

While these words may have suited Michael Buffer well in his role as the exclusive ring announcer for WCW main events in the WCW heyday, these are not the words you should be uttering as you begin your quest for a new Supply Management Technology Solution. However, when one considers the way that many organizations go about their new technology acquisition process, it’s the words that ring loud and true in our ears.

Consider what typically happens:

  1. Teams scour analyst and consultant reports, sometimes constructed almost entirely on impressions based on PowerPoint presentations and customer reference calls, for potentially relevant vendors and build a starting list.
  2. They do a few Google searches, followed by one or two (Bada-)Bing(!) searches just for completeness, and add a couple more names.
  3. They do a few website reviews to narrow down to half a dozen vendors that look good.
  4. They send out RFIs (requests for interest).
  5. The first three respondents are invited to an all out winner-takes-all Battle Royale.

And that’s what it is. The vendors fight it out until there is only one left standing, and then that vendor gets the deal.

Do you know what’s wrong this picture?

Besides the fact that it shouldn’t be a battle but an effort to illustrate who solves your problem best?

First of all, Step 1. Relying on analyst reports that are often based in large part on “expert” interpretation of providers, their products and users, rather than objective and transparent analysis expert of features and data (a Nobel Laureate has some curious things to say on this very topic — i.e., ask an expert his opinion on a topic, and it’s often no more accurate than a non-expert, but ask the same expert to rate a capability against a defined scale and you get a far better result)

Last year one of the big analyst firms literally said “we’re not doing demos anymore, just overviews and customer references“. That’s scary! Get a few customers where the blush has not yet faded from the rose to say “this is the greatest thing since sliced bread” and you can literally shoot decades old tech and vapourware to the top of the rankings!

Second of all, assuming all providers of a certain tech that score equal on an arbitrary ranking scale are equal for your organization needs. Every organization is different and requires different levels of technology, process, service, and focus.

So what’s the answer? Better insight. What’s the form? Spend Matters SolutionMaps.
These are different, and that’s why the doctor has been collaborating on the development, scoring, and delivery of the Strategic Procurement Technology SolutionMaps Suite (designing and co-leading Sourcing, Analytics, and SRM and supporting CLM) for the past six months.

These maps rank vendors not on subjective impressions of an analysts’ predilection to the colour scheme used in the PowerPoint, but on hundreds (and in the case of Sourcing, thousands) of technical requirements, each of which has a hard scoring scale (from 1 to 5) that is rigorously defined (by the doctor in the majority of cases) to at least 3 (if not 5) with hard and fast “must have” requirements that leave no wiggle room.

And then, instead of combining these scores into one-size fits all scores for all vendors, they are combined in different ways (and weightings) into five different scores (and in the case of Sourcing, six) that map to the different persons that are representative of many of the Procurement organizations out there, namely:

Nimble: The need for speed

Dynamic, results-focused, limited IT department involvement, risk-tolerant of new approaches and providers; Often decentralized, rapidly growing, and/or middle market

Deep: A best practice team that demands the broadest and best tools

Highly sophisticated, rigorous, somewhat complex, risk-tolerant, happy to push limits of tech to create more value

Configurator: We are unique

Moderately to highly sophisticated; Unique process requirements from unique, often complex supply/value chains

Turn-Key: We care about results … not software

Outcome-focused; TCO approach to implementations; Often risk-averse and skeptical based on previous experiences

CIO-Friendly: We need to get IT on board

Strong IT backbone, high IT influence and investment for buying decisions; Big focus on security, standardization, control, and risk/compliance

Optimizer: We eat complexity for lunch.

Large, complex, and/or sophisticate organization with truly strategic SCM and Procurement functions which has already achieved all easily attainable improvements.

Plus, instead of assuming we know all, we also get deep feedback scores from customers across a variety of dimensions, which are not only weighted to the persona, but constitute half of the ranking as the final quadrants for each persona are analyst score vs. customer score (which are not co-mingled, and this is a key point).

And the end result you get is entirely different from a typical analyst report where the A(riba), B(ravoSolution), and C(oupa) suites always take all. For example, in Sourcing, EC Sourcing (yes, EC Sourcing) comes out on top as the most Nimble sourcing platform and Keelvar (yes, Keelvar) has almost caught up to the market leader (Coupa Trade Extensions) in the Optimizer persona. And you (more-or-less) get the expected A, B, C results when you go Deep. And rankings aren’t static across the Configurator, Turn-Key, or CIO-Friendly personas either. (And similar ranking shifts exist across Analytics and SRM too.)

In other words, in SolutionMaps, we’ve done the rumbling* for you and identified not only which vendors have which solutions, but which personas they best suit to help you identify the right vendors to invite to your RFI so you can focus on figuring out which one can provide you with the most value, not which one can survive the longest in a Battle Royale.

* And when the doctor says rumbling, trust him. Some vendors who participated in multiple SolutionMaps are as weary as he is, after multiple rounds in the ring.