Monthly Archives: October 2018

Does Trouble-Free Mean Fraud-Free?

Of course not!

Sourcing Innovation has been informing you for years about how fraud can permeate a seemingly trouble-free supply chain and how the following, seemingly mundane, situations can hide serious fraud.

  • Abnormal Vendor Selection
    especially if the vendor has poor quality ratings or significantly higher costs compared to peers
  • Payments Outside the Normal Accounting System
    when it should be easy to ACH or wire the supplier a payment
  • Unusual Payment Patterns
    when most suppliers in the category get paid monthly and one supplier is getting paid bi-weekly
  • Rates Out of Line with Your Company’s Standing in the Market
    when you typically pay 5% less than market average but instead you are paying 5% more
  • Unexplained Lifestyle Improvement in an Employee or Manager
    who used to drive a beaat-up 10-year old Chevy Aveo but now drives a shiny beamer
  • Complaints or Tips
    from whistle-blowers who notice unusual activity beyond the norm

But the following can also indicate fraud:

  • automatic order triggers in a VMI system
    a vendor can manipulate stock levels to indicate a re-order prematurely to increase their revenue
  • more purchase orders than usual
    although it looks like your team is doing a good job by getting more purchases through the system, this could represent collusion between your buyer and a seller to inflate either the sales person commission or the buyer’s bonus by submitting false orders that will just be cancelled or returned at a later date
  • an unusual number of returns
    your buyer could be colluding with an individual at a shipper’s facility to create orders for unwanted goods which will be filled incorrectly; the buyer will then demand a refund and the goods will get lost during the return process
  • more defective returns than usual
    your quality assurance personnel might be accepting inferior products for bribes

The reality is that the supply chain is ripe with opportunities for fraud. These include:

  • Fixed Asset Fraud
    Fixed assets might be used for purposes other than what they are designated for, or used more than they are supposed to be. This misuse can damage the asset or reduce its useful life-cycle.
  • Inventory Fraud
    Your employees help themselves to your inventory and falsify records so that you don’t notice the loss until weeks or months later. They might even falsify good receipts to indicate less was received than actually was.
  • Manufacturing Fraud
    Your supplier might send you a high quality product (from another supplier) during the evaluation process for testing, but then send you inferior products made from inferior materials after the contract is signed that look the exact same – and you don’t notice the problem until you get an extraordinary number of returns due to defects or inferior quality.
  • Picking and Return Frauds
    Your order pickers in your warehouse might be picking extra items during shipment preparation and pocketing them for private off-the-books sales.
  • Distribution Fraud
    One or more boxes of your shipment will not be loaded by the shipper who will falsify records and blame the third party carrier for the loss.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. So what do you do?

Now More Than Ever, Kill the Left-Suckers!

Ten years ago, by far the best presentation at the 41st Annual Supply Chain & Logistics Canada Conference on Creating a Resilient Supply Chain was Jim Tompkins’ (CEO of Tompkins’ Associates) presentation on Bold Leadership for Organizational Acceleration. (He also gave the keynote, which was a great presentation as well, but this was one of the best presentations the doctor‘s ever been too in his years and years of sitting through supply chain and logistics presentations.)

Not only is Jim a great speaker, and if you haven’t heard him, I encourage you to attend his session the next time you’re at a conference where he is speaking, but he’s also really good at telling it like it is. Really, really good. And in this presentation, where he gave his top three tips to bold leadership success, he didn’t pull any punches. In reverse order, his tips were:

  • Don’t Do Anything Stupid,
  • Focus, and
  • Kill the Left-Suckers.

And I couldn’t agree more! What’s a left-sucker you ask? It’s someone who can’t do his job, and pulls his manager away from doing what the manager is supposed to be doing to help the individual who can’t do his job. Why is this so bad? Isn’t that what managers are for? Well, managers are there to help, to teach, and to guide — but they’re not there to do their subordinates’ jobs. When managers are consistently pulled away from their jobs, they don’t get their work done and then their directors have to step in to pick up the slack. When the directors get consistently pulled away from their jobs, they don’t get their work done and then the (rest of the) C-Suite (in a smaller organization, where left-suckers can suck the life out of a company before you know it) has to pick up the slack. When the C-Suite has to pick up the slack, they aren’t getting their work done, and then the CEO gets pulled into fire-fighting on a daily basis — and instead of the CEO leading the C-Suite in setting strategic direction, and the firm in building the business, she’s bogged down in tactical execution while the company starts burning down around her.

As Jim says, a CEO should have three hours a day to do nothing but focus on the strategic. She needs to think about what the company is doing, what they should be doing in the short and long term, and how they are going to get there over the required time period to either reach the top or maintain their place on the top. If she’s consistently being pulled in half-a-dozen directions, that’s not going to happen. So you need to make sure that it does — by identifying, and eliminating, the source of the problem — the left-suckers!

If you can train them — great! If you can find them another role that they can do — that’s good too. But if you can’t train them, or find a role that they can do without constant supervision and hand-holding, or you just can’t make them happy, then you have no choice … you have to terminate them. Or they’ll terminate your company. (You can slowly phase them out, but they have to go. And the phasing starts the minute you identify there is no converting them.)

Bravo, Jim. Bravo!

You’re Under-Resourced and Over-Challenged, So Remember that Consultants are Cheap!

There are two schools of thought out there when it comes to catching up with crushing workload and/or crushing customer demand (which may only be seasonal).

ONE: Consultants are parasites that charge ridiculous rates, waste precious time, and present obvious conclusions so you should hire the minimum number of FTs you need to “get by” with everyone working crazy over time until things settle down.

TWO: FTs are expensive. They demand benefits. They take fixed overhead. And, if they don’t work out as well as you’d hoped or demand drops, in many locales, you can’t just fire them, or even if you can, you have to give them severance and long-term health-care or other benefits or you can be sued or fined. So just hire third parties. Sometimes consultants, but usually service organizations (who likely employ contingent workers, but not highly skilled consultants).

Both of these schools of thoughts are wrong. Why? In the latter case, for the right job descriptions, FTs are the best resource to have as they build organizational knowledge and get more efficient over time. (But not all jobs fall into the right categories.) In the first case, while consulting does draw some of the sleaziest individuals out there, it draws less than highly demanding sales jobs or executive jobs (that statistically often have more psychopaths than law firms and media organizations). The majority of consultants want to deliver ROI. The only question is how far out of their “comfort zone” can the consultant deliver the ROI you want. (But that’s the beauty of using consultants, you can find specialists for each problem you need solved and guarantee an ROI – more on that below).

As you know, the doctor won’t pay two bits for traditional rhetoric and likes arguments that are backed up with facts and numbers. So he’s going to remind you of the nice little calculations that he presented a decade ago about why you should hire consultants to not only help you with your problems today, but help you design better processes to be more efficient, profitable, and less reliant on contingent help or consulting for repetitive tasks on a regular basis tomorrow.

First of all, we need to cost a top performer.

  1. A top performer demands a high salary.
    Usually 200K to 300K for a high-performer. Let’s say $250K.
  2. A top performer demands pricey benefits.
    Health insurance (10K+), life & disability insurance (5K), 401K matching (10K), and a performance bonus of at least 10% to 20% (25K to 50K) in a good year. This will cost you another 50K to 100K. Let’s be very conservative and say 50K .
  3. A top performer comes with overhead.
    First off, there’s all the standard overhead of maintaining the nice office, the telecommunications equipment, and the IT equipment. There’s also a share of an administrative assistant’s salary, a transportation budget, and a reasonable expense account. This could easily eat up 25K to 50K (or more). Let’s be moderate and say 30K.
  4. A top performer needs a decent vacation to recharge.
    Depending on how long this performer has been with the company, we’re probably talking 4 to 6 weeks. This is a hidden cost, as it means you’re only getting 46 to 48 weeks of work, at most.
  5. A top performer needs to keep his skills up to date, and this will require good training.
    You should allow at least two weeks for any employee. For a top performer, I’d highly recommend three or four weeks of training and education related activities. Let’s be conservative and say this person is an extremely fast learner and you can get away with two weeks. Now your top performer is only working 44 to 46 weeks, at most.
  6. Training costs money.
    Whether it’s courses, workshops, conferences, or self-study guides, expect to shell out for this. A couple of conferences and a couple of courses could easily run you 15K to 25K to keep your top performer at above average performance levels. We’ll be realistic and say 20K.
  7. There will be other costs that arise with respect to raises, promotions, recognition, and performance.
    However, since you can always make them next year’s budget problem, we’ll ignore them for simplicity.

This says that your 250K top performer, that you believe is only costing you approximately 1K a day is actually costing you over 1.6K a day in a conservative estimation, and possibly over 2.1K in reality. (350K to 450K+ over 220 days, vs 250K over 260 days)

This is pretty damn expensive. And while it’s still less than a top consultant, who will charge you 4K to 40K a day (depending upon how much market intelligence she brings with her and how much of that valuable IP she is going to perpetually license or give you), we cannot forget the following:

  • Your top-performer will have most of his or her time consumed with the tactical day-to-day operation of the business.
  • If your top-performer is struggling to complete two weeks a year of training or education related activities, he or she is not going to be up to date on new ideas, technologies, and movements within the marketplace.
  • If you’re starting to run into stiff competition or problems within your business, you can be too close to the problem to make good, objective decisions.
  • Even a top-performer can only be an expert on a handful of technologies, processes, or business functions. At least collectively, outsiders will always know more about the best way to run your business with today’s technology in today’s market than you do.
  • It’s an innovate-or-die marketplace out there today. And if we’re in a recession, that’s doubly true.

In comparison,

  • A consultant can focus purely on the strategic, and purely on the problems you need help with.
  • A consultant will spend a considerable portion of his or her time keeping up to date on new processes, technologies, and advancements. Their knowledge is there to be used.
  • A consultant can be much more objective. Furthermore, a consultant probably has a better comprehension of the state of the market you compete in than you do.
  • Even though, like any top performer, a consultant can only be an expert on a handful of technologies, processes, or business functions, you are free to pick the consultant with the skills you need to advance your business.
  • When a consultant puts in a day, a consultant puts in a day. Usually 10 to 12 hours, compared to the 9-5 with a 2 hour lunch an employee will often try to get away with when he or she can. Plus, a good consultant can’t stop thinking about your problem until she goes to sleep at night, and usually starts thinking about it the minute she wakes up.
  • Consultants live by the innovate-or-die mantra.
    and, most importantly,
  • When the project is over, you can cut the consultant loose without any additional cost. In contrast, it could easily cost you six figures to cut a top-performer loose. Furthermore, if you’re smart and do a short initial engagement with a new consultant before agreeing to a long term engagement, the loss associated with hiring the wrong consultant is next-to-nothing. In comparison, the loss associated with hiring the wrong person for a director or vice president job will be hundreds of thousands by the time you add up the losses with dismissing the current employee, finding a replacement, and getting that replacement up to speed.

So, given that a consultant can bring you the badly needed 1) expertise, 2) objectivity, 3) credibility, 4) leadership, and 5) time that you need to be successful, don’t balk at standard consulting day rates. It’s a bargain compared to the value they can bring, especially when you remember that it’s not tactical day-to-day operations that bring you substantial cost savings and new markets, but strategic improvements that consultants can bring with them.

How much?

Let’s say with your current Sourcing / Source-to-Contract / Source-to-Pay platforms, your top buyer can only do 7 major sourcing events (10M + a year) a year which garner an average negotiated savings of 6% (and the total spend under her purview is 100M), which typically result in an average realized savings of 4%. That’s not a bad ROI in this particular situation, given that your organization just saved 4M on a fully burdened superstar that cost you 400K, a 10 to 1 ROI. In fact, you’re probably saying to yourself — how could a consultant beat that.

Let’s say you brought in a powerhouse consultant for a 6 week process evaluation, strategic realignment, and platform redesign project who, for a modest fee of 300K helped you design new processes and select new systems that, when fully implemented a year later, allowed this same senior buyer to handle 15 major sourcing events a year representing 180M worth of spend (not unreasonable at all — some modern platforms and processes take events that used to take 3 months of buyer effort a year ago down to 3 weeks) and identify an average negotiated savings of 8% (and then realize 6%). In other words, 300K of consultant time allowed your top buyer to go from saving you 4M a year to 10.8M a year. Even if you gave the buyer a 20% bonus, 300K more than doubled your ROI from that buyer even after subtracting the 300K for the consultant (as the ROI went from 10 to 1 to 21 to 1). That’s FRAKING cheap! So next time a top consultant proposes to help you, ignore the top line. It’s only the bottom line that counts.

The 10 Worst Innovation Mistakes In A Recession (Update and Repost)

Are we in a recession? No.

Could we be in one real soon? Yes.

Regardless of what “the experts” tell you, two things are true.

  1. Trade Wars are BAD for the economy.
  2. Economic Alliance Breakdown (like Brexit) is BAD for the economy.

Both of these events can spark recessions, and are very statistically likely to at least spark localized recessions in some industries in some geographies. And while it’s hard to say which geographies and industries and to what extent due to the proliferance of alternative facts on even the major media outlets (which is what happens when you let party oriented moguls conglomerate holdings and reduce journalist headcount), it’s still not hard to say the risks are rapidly increasing.

It’s also not hard to say that, based on past behaviour, most organizations are bound to do the wrong thing when it starts. So, to this end, SI is reposting this classic piece from 2008 to remind you of what not to do if things get tight (which is based on a great piece on the 10 Worst Innovation Mistakes in a Recession that appeared in Business Week in January, 2008.

Moreover, making these mistakes creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that spirals you towards hardship.

  1. Fire Talent
    Talent is the single most important variable in innovation. And innovation is the single largest lever you have to increase productivity and decrease costs.
  2. Cut Back on Technology
    The rise of social networking and consumer power means that companies have to be part of a larger conversation with their customers. This requires technology. Furthermore, the best way to insure you are getting the best price is to tackle the right categories, as identified by spend analysis, with strategic sourcing decision optimization to make sure you are making the award with the lowest total cost of ownership. It’s also important to make sure that all of your invoices are submitted in an electronic format that can be automatically matched against contracted rates to make sure you are being overcharged. This requires leading-edge technology.
  3. Reduce Risk
    Innovation requires taking chances and dealing with failure. Although it’s important to control risk, trying to eliminate it entirely will just end up eliminating any chance for innovation at your company.
  4. Stop New Product Development
    This hurts companies when growth returns and they have fewer offerings in the marketplace to attract consumers. And with today’s rapid pace of technological change, you could even lose customers in a recession to a competitor who keeps innovating while you stand still.
  5. Replace a Growth-Oriented CEO with a Cost-Cutting CEO
    Most recessions only last two or three quarters and, these days, are relatively shallow. Penny-pinching CEOs don’t have the skills to grow when growth returns. Plus, a penny-pinching CEO is the most likely individual to fire your top talent.
  6. Retreat from Globalization
    Emerging markets are sources of new revenue, business models, and talent. And, like it or not, emerging economies like India and China are soon going to have more buyers for your product than the countries you’re currently selling to.
  7. Replace Innovation as Key Strategy
    … With Systems Management and Cost-Cutting. Once focus shifts away from innovation, it can be very hard to get the focus shifted back.
  8. Change Performance Metrics
    Shifting employee evaluations away from rewarding riskier new projects toward sustaining safer, older goals. This leads to risk-averse behavior and stifles innovation.
  9. Re-inforce Hierarchy over Collaboration
    A return to command-and-control management. This alienates creative-class employees, young Gen Y and X-ers, and stops the evolution of the corporation. In today’s world, companies that don’t evolve die – and they do it quickly. The average life-span of a Fortune 500 company is shrinking every year.
  10. Retreat into Moated Castles
    Cutting back on outside consultancies is seen as a quick way to save money. Yet, one of the key ways of introducing change into business culture is to bring in outside innovation and design consultants.

Remember that winners always emerge out of recessions and they always win on the basis of something new. If you don’t always have something new in your pocket, you’re not going to win. And if it is a recession, and you don’t have something brand spanking new to pull out of your pocket when the recession is over, you could literally be toast. Furthermore, even a recession provides growth opportunities. People still spend money. They still need to eat, maintain their homes, and their life-styles. The difference is that they don’t spend as much money and look considerably harder for the best deal. This means that they’re much more likely to waver on brand loyalty if you can provide them a better product on a better price – and this means that you can still grow by taking market share away from your competition.

So don’t make the innovation mistakes. If it is a recession, then whether you come out of it a winner or a loser is up to you.

Furthermore, if it is a recession, and your company supplies sourcing and procurement technology and services, then this should be a major growth period for you! After all, how else is your average blind-in-one-eye company going to save money? This means that not only do you have to make sure that you don’t make any of the top 10 innovation mistakes, but that you invest for a growth period because, if you play your cards right, it will be.

Platform iZombie, Part II

As we stated yesterday, we’re all zombies. Procurement is continuing along in the most undead fashion possible, going through the same motions day after day like a clockwork automaton of the 19th century. The platforms that the visionary consulting firms and platform providers were supposed to provide us by 2020 (less than 15 short months away) have not materialized and we are stuck in a tactical nightmare. Which is about the worst kind of nightmare.

We’re dead serious about that last part. If you consider the most common bad nightmares — being naked in public is only going to embarrass you at most once (and not at all if you are a nudist), a broken bone will heal, a fall just wakes you up, we’re all cheated, we’re all interested in the unknown, we probably know or believe ghosts aren’t real (or probably can’t harm us), many spiders are more scary than dangerous, teeth fall out when we’re young to regrow, danger is always present, we will eventually be late for something because Murphy’s laws tell us sh!t happens, people are always trying to steal our IP, we all fell like we’re drowning in the modern world (of work), it’s easy to be lost in the big picture, and we all get fed up of loved ones sometime — I think the living nightmare of doing the same thing day after day expecting a different result (which is the definition of insanity by the way) is the worst of all. And, remember, you can always wake up from a nightmare. You can’t wake up from the zombie state modern platforms have put us in.

But it could be better. In our last post we indicated how a modern platform could have saved over 80% of our time with simple capabilities that really should have been in every platform for the past five years.

But would this be the case in general? Would a modern platform really eliminate 80% of our entire workload? Let’s run through the rest of the day.

We return from lunch to our stakeholder meeting. Now, it’s true that no platform can eliminate the meetings and you’re still going to lose that time to a degree, but with the right platform, you can make meetings more productive.

With a good platform, the customer success rep would see that her peers were happy with the supplier’s performance and that it was improving and that her customers were next to get the replacements. She’d still be unhappy, but well informed and willing to wait until the next shipment before taking her final position.

The finance rep would already know why you disqualified the lowest bidders. Any discussion could thus be focussed on the question as to whether or not one of the lowest bidders could be improved to a level of acceptability over time versus an inquisition as to why the bidder was eliminated.

The engineering rep could see all the cost models and the savings projections over time and understand the issues everyone (else) has with the incumbent.

And the marketing rep would know that while you want suppliers with exciting features, there are critical requirements that need to be met in order to keep production lines going and shelves stocked. And those needs must come first.

Instead of thirty minutes of complaining, ranting, and basic Q&A before you can get down to meaningful discussions, since all the stakeholders have insight into all the facts, you can get down to real discussions and debates. It may not be productive, but at least you skip addressing the stuff you should already know.

And then there’s the issue of the meeting conclusion — more suppliers are needed and that’s another discovery project that you estimate at 20 hours or more. But if you had a modern discovery platform with deep intelligence and match capability, it would not be a 20 hour project, it would be a 2 hour project — at most. The first phase would be like 20 minutes, and you could slip out and do it on a break.

But anyway, because it’s not something you can make any progress on today, you move onto supplier emails and that’s where discover that your steel shipment didn’t ship yesterday and you need a replacement in 21 days or your production line is going down. And you spend an hour and a half trying to find a substitute. With a good platform, you know all of the suppliers that provide a similar or substitute product, which are under contract, and what the last bids were. You can start calling them immediately, and likely find a replacement supplier in three calls and 30 minutes, not 90 or more.

And let’s not mention the 40 minutes you waste reviewing emails that ask questions that could be answered in a good supplier portal or automatically answered by a chatbot.

It’s almost five before you get down to the project work. The platform won’t save you the time required to answer technical supplier questions, the time to manually score an RFX, or the time to figure out why suppliers aren’t bidding, but you’d get to it about 5 hours earlier in the day!

And when you accomplish something by noon, versus working to seven and accomplishing nothing, you find your headaches are a lot less and you don’t need to pop quite so many painkillers.