If you’ve been keeping up to date on our ongoing blog series, you know why we’re all zombies. The reason, simply put, is that, instead of Procurement recognizing that it was supposed to be dead and buried two years ago, and maybe rising from the ashes, it has instead continued along in an undead fashion. Each day, we go through the same motions, using the same processes, on the same old platforms. Platforms which, according to the visionary consulting firms and platform providers, were supposed to solve all our problems and release us from this tactical nightmare. Instead, they have done nothing to ease our woes and, in many situations, have made them worse!

Not only are the majority^* of platforms still based on last decade’s processes, but they aren’t even making them easier. In essence, they are fueling the Procurement zombie nation and they should be ashamed of themselves.

To understand how, let’s consider our average Monday morning, as documented in iZombie: A Prelude Part I, and how a modern platform would have prevented us from wasting four hours of our day.

First of all, it takes you five minutes just to judge how many emails are from each type of project stakeholder. A good platform with integrated communications would give you that information in 5 seconds, with communications already arranged by urgency and seniority (based on your organizational structure and derived from your typical review patterns).

Secondly, the modern system with the integrated cognitive monitor would immediately detect that an email didn’t go out because it didn’t have the new SSL certificate, invoke the process to download the SSL certificate, and send the email again.

Thirdly, you never would have gotten that call from your widget supplier because:

• as soon as the invoice was marked “DO NOT PAY”, you would have been alerted, known of the issue, and marked it for “monitoring”
• as soon as it was past due, you would have followed up with Engineering, who would have said “yes, we got the shipment, it’s in the system”
• you would have searched for all invoices with similar products, found one for the proper product, noticed the invoice ID was miskeyed, fixed it, and sent Finance an e-mail to remove the “DO NOT PAY”
• the invoice would immediately enter the payment queue, and the supplier would be notified on their portal
• it would have been paid on the next payment date, 7 days in the future, and 23 days before you got the angry screaming call

and all this would have taken you 10 minutes a month ago, instead of almost an hour now!

But now the biggie — because of your antiquated platform, it took you 3 hours to construct a project overview report that summarized the status on all the key projects, issues, and actual/projected vs. budget. A modern platform would automatically track all those metrics, allow you to record issues as they arrive and tie those metrics to issues, and then, when a summary report is created, automatically pull the issue summary and status into an appendix.

A modern sourcing platform would come with a customizable template that you could customize in 15 minutes and (schedule to) run, as needed, saving you hours of work compiling all the information that is already known, and linked. The only thing you should have needed to do was edit the executive summary to contain a few expert notes on the situation and expectations based on team dynamics and broader organizational knowledge the system didn’t capture. In other words, your three hour effort should have been a 30 minute effort that started with a 5 minute scan of the auto-generated report, a 20 minute edit and augmentation of the executive summary, and a final 5 minute proof.

In other words, the work that took you four (4) hours and 15 minutes should have taken you about 35 minutes. And that’s only because one of the reports was being presented to the C-Suite and needs a human touch and review.

But because the average amoeba has more “artificial intelligence” and “automation” than an average Procurement platform, you had the privilege of spending yet another half workday as a Procurement Zombie.

^* A few providers are actively working towards the key next generation capabilities we outlined in our * series, but the majority of platforms on the market today are still based on processes and capabilities innovated a decade ago. In internet time where even the largest provider will roll out bug fixes, patches, and minor updates on a quarterly cycle, that’s a professional lifetime!