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.