Monthly Archives: October 2017

Are You Doing Your Own Quality Spot Checks? And Should You Be?

By now, if you haven’t heard of the Kobe Steel Scandal, you’ve been living in a cave. (Which, in some organizations, is highly probably given that one of the tricks the CFO likes to do to Procurement when fiscal year end is approaching is to lock them in the basement until the mandatory savings objective is reached … hence our post yesterday on why every day is Halloween for some Procurement departments.).

This scandal is scary. Not only because the data falsification on strength could go back as far as 10 years on some batches, and who knows what bridges, high-rises, and busses that steel has gotten into (and even a .1 degradation, while not enough to jeopardize immediate safety, can impact expected life span and increase susceptibility to decay, making safety a concern down the road before inspection and maintenance schedules kick in).

But this brings up a good point? If more companies were doing more spot checks on shipped product and quality, instead of just trusting Kobe, would it have been 10 years before the scandal was exposed. Even if only a small percent of batches are affected, I highly doubt this would have been undetected for 10 years, even if only one bar or sheet in multiple shipments were tested.

This is an example of what happens when finance tries to get too greed or supply chains to lean by centralizing a function downstream. When one party is responsible for everything, one failure can reverberate up multiple chains undetected — and have potentially disasterous consequences. Now one might say this problem is solved by co-locating people on-site, but if those people never leave the site, even though you pay their salary, their work family is the people they work with day in and ay out and the existence of that company is their livelihood. Are you sure they won’t bow into the local culture and, if the culture dictates, defer to authority or collectively hide the shame?

Just like third party audits are needed, for critical materials, so are third party quality tests. Doesn’t have to be you, could be an independent organization set up between your co-opetition that does random independent quality spot-checks on 1 in 10 shipments and shares the data with everyone.

Just like a good Chef would never use an ingredient without insuring it’s quality, a good Procurement organization should never let a shipment be accepted without a high degree of confidence that it’s a quality shipment. And confidence like that only comes from organizational testing or trusted third-party independent testing. So don’t get too lean or too cheap — your organization, and the lives of its customers, could depend on it.

For Some Procurement Departments, Every Day Is Halloween!

A week from tomorrow is Halloween. While until recently meant to celebrate All Hallows’ Day, it’s common observance today is to provide an opportunity for kids to trck-or-treat, high school and college students to throw parties, and adults who miss their childhood an opportunity to play dress-up once again.

As part of this festival of tricks and treats, celebrants (regardless of religion), will carve pumpkins into jack-o’-lanterns, light bonfires, bob for apples, attempt to divine (and contact the dead), play pranks, purposefully visited haunted attractions (whether supposed to be fake or real), tell scary stories, and even watch horror films.

But for some Procurement departments, this is every day. Every day they are beaten up by the CFO and feel like they are being carved up like jack-o’-lanterns as their performance is dissected with biology lab precision. (Performance that’s not as good as it should be since the CFO won’t let them buy the best tools.)

Stakeholders, who bring (new) requirements, are constantly lighting fires under the team at the last minute, not realizing that great results takes great planning, and that doesn’t happen overnight. That sometimes strategic acquisitions take 3 to 6 months of hard work to find and unlock the hidden value, and that one cannot expect miracles when Procurement, already at 100%, is asked to (re)source a category 30 days before contract termination (and the date was known 1065 days in advance when the last contract was signed without Procurement involvement.

Senior buyers are constantly bobbing for new opportunities, checking out random whims because they don’t have a modern spend analysis system to help them identify the best possibilities for savings. At some point they will get so desperate they will go to gypsy diviners in their quest to identify savings opportunities, and even ask to speak to dead business gurus of ages past.

They will feel like they are constantly being pranked by sales people as they won’t have the insight to build true-cost models, the IT dungeons they have to go to for help normalizing market data from the free feeds they have access to will feel like haunted houses, every new request made from them is a scary request, and their entire
existence feels like a horror movie.

And the scariest part of this story, is that it’s not just a few departments, it’s a sizeable number of Procurement departments. Remember, 40% don’t have modern Supply Management tools, and of those that do, the majority have major holes in the Source to Pay to Delivery Cycle.

So, CFO, this Halloween, only you can change Procurement’s existence by giving them a treat — the budget to acquire new systems next fiscal year. Trust me, Procurement needs them.

Want to Know Another Great Thing About SolutionMaps?

It doesn’t give broad, generic, totally useless Software Advice on categories so vague that they compare head-to-head vendors doing 3rd party logistics and vendors doing catalog based procurement!

SolutionMaps are on specific Supply (Chain) Management categories, that are precisely defined and tailored to a specific Sourcing, Procurement, or Supply Chain business process.  Right now, they are defined for e-Procurement (e-Pro), Invoice-to-Pay (I2P), and the broader Procure-to-Pay (P2P) areas, (Strategic) Sourcing, Analytics, SRM, and Contract Management with Contingent Workforce Management and Services in the pipeline.  Future areas may include GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance), Direct Sourcing (focussing on BoM, Should Cost Modelling, Production Planning, Etc.), WIMS (Warehouse and Inventory Management Systems), and Logistics/Freight Management.

We do not compare apples to oranges (as such a comparison is pretty useless) in SolutionMaps, but we definitely don’t compare apples to bananas, peaches, pears, and oranges in a single market basket.  They might all be fruit, but that’s about all they have in common.

Granted, there are analyst firms that think that pretty much all Supply Chain Management Solutions are the same.  One even has a big bold advertising page which says it can help you compare the following 12 vendors:

3PLCentral, Bellwether, CobbleStone, Coupa, CongaNovatus, ContractWorks, Deltek, Fishbowl, FreightView, Halo, Kinaxis, and Procurify.

If you ever compare more than any set of three of these at a time, either you don’t know what you’re doing or the advisors don’t know what they are doing.  These vendors fall into the falling seven distinct categories:

  • Business Intelligence
  • Contract Management
  • ERP
  • Freight Management
  • Procurement Software
  • Supply chain Management
  • Warehouse Management

SolutionMaps only evaluates vendors in a defined market segment, and then it only evaluates demoable product.  We know that some (not all) analyst firms review the solution component of vendors based largely off PowerPoint and other documents.  Given some of the hyperbole the marketing gurus at the market leaders can generate with the flick of the wrist, this is also quite scary.  Just because a new cloud-based SaaS solution can provide you with community intelligence, that doesn’t mean it does.  The crowd has to buy into the solution in order for its wisdom to be shared.  That usually takes time.  But forcing demos forces reviews on real functions, not perceived capabilities.

And, finally, as we hinted at in yesterday’s post, rose colored glasses have no influence on the scoring.  It doesn’t matter how much we like, or do not like, a vendor, it only matters whether or not they can meet the binary requirements to advance up the scoring scale.

SolutionMaps are based on the existence, or nonexistence, of functionality, in a well defined domain, tailored to real-world buyer needs.  And even the customer questions, and scores, are meaningful to other real world buyer needs.  SolutionMaps are different.  And that’s why they are awesome.

And if you adopt a SolutionMap methodology in evaluating your potential vendors, when asked how you came up with the best solution, you will be able to honestly say, “Because I’m Awesome”!

Why the doctor Loves SolutionMaps, Besides the Obvious …

the doctor loves SolutionMaps. He loves them for many reasons.

But most important of all, it’s because of the scientist in him.

SolutionMaps are expert. And constant. And data driven.

Unlike some analyst reports whose methodology and “qualifications” often insult the name of the authors and parent firm (e.g., requiring baseline revenue or geographic footprint requirements further tailored to weed out smaller providers or fiercest competitors) and typically have participation and validation requirements that change from report to report, SolutionMaps are based on rigidly defined capabilities (where every capability has a pre-defined scale at least to 3, if not to 5) that must be demoed for a 2 and rigorously demoed for a 3.

And these requirements will not change from iteration to iteration. More specifically, as long as the doctor is involved, the scale for any requirement will be static for at least one year and while requirements may be added, they will persist for at least one year before being dropped. And, furthermore, since SolutionMaps are designed so that the average score for any vendor should be 2.5 to 3 (or less, depending on the “Map”), the number of 4’s should be 10% or less, and the number of 5’s should be 1% (or much less), and since functionality does not typically improve that much quarter or over quarter, when we have to do a renormalization after a year or more (when we hit enough 5’s and 4’s), we can do a fair, equal adjustment against historical scores (which can’t be done when everyone starts at a 5).

And, as we noted yesterday, these rigid objective scales not only allow an expert analyst to score providers consistently against a common goal, but multiple analysts to do so, because the baselines are all set in stone! Whether it’s the doctor, the prophet, the maverick, or the revolutionary doing the scoring, it’s all consistent on one scale.

Moreover, we know that technology is only half the battle, so half of the scoring is based on average customer reference scores, which are scored over a dozen or more factors, not just one or two! This also means that, just as in real life, there’s more than one right answer depending upon whether you value technology innovation or customer service more, or just want an equal mix. Plus, the ability to differently weight the analyst vs. the customer dimension allows vendor profiles to be constructed against different personas, because the right vendor changes based upon your actual needs.

But that’s not the only reason the doctor loves SolutionMaps. The other reason is that — they are surprising!

Given all the angst that is out there from some current and many former SAP Ariba customers, would you have expected them to score so well on the customer references? Not by a mile! Obviously this vendor is a love it or hate it or nothing in between type of vendor, with a lot of customers lovin’ it! (Kinda like McDonald’s.)

Also, I bet not a single person, including the entire analyst team, would pick EC Sourcing to the be the value leader for Nimble Sourcing. But one thing is for sure, it’s days of being overlooked as a small Best-of-Breed vendor are now over! (Especially since you can set up decent size RFX projects in 15 minutes. If you don’t believe the doctor, ask for a live demo and see it for yourself.) Also, while we always knew it was the little-engine-that-could, no one predicted that Keelvar had made it so far up the hill. Sure, it still has a lot of work to do on rounding out its RFX and Auction features (for example, it’s easy to lock lots in optimization, but you can’t force vendors to fill all or nothing in setup), it’s hit on every major optimization requirement, developed a novel approach to parametric bidding, and is currently weaving in AI in a novel way (which, when released in a quarter, could bump it even higher in the rankings).

But sourcing and optimization weren’t the only surprises. In analytics, large pieces of the pie went to, wait for it, Anydata and Spendency! While the analyst team expected (even though the market may not have) SpendHQ to do well, this was a bit of a surprise. These are both new players with small customer bases relative to the big boys, but they both made an amazing grade.

In SRM, we have State of Flux and PRGX Lavante killing it on the capabilities front (even if not so much on the customer references, but customer response counts for State of Flux, who participated at the last minute, were low and PRGX forgot about the customer references entirely), and are likely to fair better overall next iteration as more customer references come in. And from a reference perspective, Ivalua and SAP Ariba (yes, SAP Ariba again) are just killing it. Ivalua is really proving that a single-platform home-grown S2P suite can really do it all (well, almost all, they need work in optimization and direct sourcing, but then again, name any S2P platform that has both of these capabilities) and do most of it well. You can learn a lot of lessons in sixteen years, and Ivalua is showing it.

In other words, when you dive past the marketing, and the vision, and the pretty, pretty deck, and just get to the heart of the problem, or in this case, the solution, sometimes the results surprise you. But that’s a good thing. This knowledge benefits everyone and we don’t expect these (relative) rankings to be static. Not in the least.

the doctor looks forward to the next iteration of SolutionMaps, and another 8 to 12 vendors being added, and seeing how things shake up. It will be illuminating to say the least.

And to those vendors who didn’t fair as they expected, shake it off and get back to work.  You know what you need to do to get a better score.  Nothing is hidden here. You have the RFI.  You have the scoring scale.  You have our feedback.  It’s all up to you!

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.