Monthly Archives: December 2018

Is That Old Spend Cube Money Down the Drain?

How many times has this happened? You hire some experts to help with a sourcing effort, they produce a one-off spend analysis, you run some initiatives and realize some savings, and … a year later, you’ve got an obsolete spend cube with IP you’ve paid a lot of money for, but can neither use nor extend, because either the experts didn’t share the process they used to create the cube or, even worse, they used “AI” with “intelligent transaction pattern matching” and there simply aren’t any rules to share.

Or, as often happens (due to the competitive landscape), maybe your original vendor has lost interest in spend analysis, or has left the business, or was acquired and sidelined — and your spend analysis system is either end-of-life, largely unsupported, or obsolete. What then?

Well, you have two options:

  1. Write it off, throw it away, and start all over again
  2. Recover the cube

And yes, you read that right, recover the cube!

You’re probably saying, how can that be done, especially if the original cube was mapped with AI or one-time overlay rules that were created by an expert and lost in the sands of time?

With intelligence, observation, and an application of proper, inverse, AI that sifts through the evidence left behind and generates real rules to start you off — rules that can then be extended in a system that supports layering in a logical fashion to not only allow for a re-creation of the original cube, but an improvement that fixes original errors and takes into account changes in the business since the cube was created.

And yes, this is possible, because mappings leave evidence, the same way a suspect at a scene leaves evidence, and that evidence can be unearthed by applying the digital equivalent of classic archaeological techniques that have been used for over a century to interpret the past. (the doctor has given presentations on this and if you are intrigued, contact him)

And it’s even easier in the case of spend analysis when you remember that you can completely map even a Fortune 100’s spend by hand in less than a week to high accuracy by using the classic secret sauce of:

  1. map the GL codes
  2. map the suppliers
  3. map the suppliers and GL codes
  4. map the exceptions
  5. map the (significant) exceptions to the exceptions

… and then run the rules in the same order.

This works because the vast majority of spend cubes are on indirect spend, and indirect spend cubes can almost always be mapped effectively this way. Even if there is no specific GL code in the data set, there should be similar patterns around the key fields that determine GL code (product description, SKU, etc.) And what doesn’t match defines the exceptions.

In other words, it’s theoretically possible to do a reverse engineering when you understand the foundations of most spend cubes and learn how to interpret the mapping evidence left behind.

But, is anyone doing this?

Be Wary of FREE Supplier Discovery

As per our recent pieces on how supplier discovery shouldn’t be a kick in the pants, at least today, it shouldn’t be free either — because a good supplier discovery solution costs a lot of money to maintain.

A number of vendors are now offering, or considering an offering of, free supplier discovery bundled with their Sourcing or Procurement Solution because, just like it shouldn’t cost suppliers to do business on a network, it shouldn’t cost you anything to do searches (when search engines are free), in their view.

And while it sounds great in theory, at least today, it’s not practical in practice. Computing power, storage, internet access, and electricity costs money … as does a lot off the software used to enable this FREE supplier discovery (as there is no free software, someone still has to compile it, integrate it, maintain it, etc. And this resource time is costly as well). Google only enables free search because it makes money on ads and services that it sells, which subsidizes the internet search.

This means that the only way a provider could really offer free discovery is if it was subsidizing that search with other software offerings (which means you’re still paying for it as it could charge less for those offerings if it was not subsidizing supplier discovery). And if it this is its main offering, you need to ask how it’s making money as it costs a lot of money to maintain a good supplier discovery solution, and if the provider tells you it is cheap (and some providers are making this argument), then the solution is not good.

I’ve heard some providers argue that since there is so much supplier information out there freely available on public directory sites (paid directories that are open, supplier associations, government registries, investment sites, etc.) that it would be cheap to scrape and combine all off this information if you have a good AI engine and all you really need is just a lot of storage and fast internet access, which can be relatively low cost. And while this sounds good in theory, it’s not good in practice.

First of all, the majority of all supplier listings are micro-businesses, and most of these aren’t big enough to serve a corporation in any capacity. Many have never done any substantial business and there’s not enough information to assess risk or capability. Many listings are outdated and incorrect and many more are for out of business suppliers. Many listings don’t have enough information to determine products or services to any level of accuracy. In other words, the majority of free information is bit-garbage.

In order to have a good supplier directory, you have to have information that has been manually validated to a reasonable extent. Which means that either the vendor needs to spend a lot of expensive manpower validating or start with third party databases that have been manually validated, which cost money to access. Either way, good information costs money, which means that a supplier discovery vendor can’t create or maintain anything good for free.

Which also means that if the information is good, it’s likely also limited to a directory supplier discovery vendor has built up over time from its customer base, which will only be good for you if there are like organizations doing business in like geographies already in that customer base.

So, just like there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s no such thing as a good, free supplier discovery service. At least not today or tomorrow.

One Hundred and Forty Nine Years Ago Today …

An American Legend was born when Jesse James commits his first *confirmed* bank robbery.

What does this have to do with Procurement? Besides the fact that, when you think about it, many suppliers will rob you blind on a daily basis if you are unprepared during the negotiation, during the invoice review, or during the warranty process.

Well, if you think about it, sometimes if you want to get famous, you have to take big risks.

But, more importantly, if you take risks, you can get famous … but in the case of Procurement, you don’t have to rob a bank to make money. You just have to get smart about how you buy. There are savings to be had in every category, and all you have to do is find them to bring millions to the bottom line.  And take the risk of doing something new.

And all you need to do to figure out how is to read the archives, strategy, process, and the tools you need to make it all happen.

Are You Sick of the “Digital Transformation”?

the doctor is certainly sick of the terminology. Not a day goes by that some backwoods yahoo doesn’t think this makes the perfect headline, twenty years after we were introduced to specialized Procurement tools, almost thirty years after the introduction of the ERP, and more than forty years since specialized MRP systems were introduced to the market. The “digital transformation” is now new and hasn’t been since the internet evolved to the world wide web and every software company started transitioning to the cloud (which, by the way, is just someone else’s computer!).

the doctor is also sick of all the article stating that the digital transformation will not displace (real) Procurement professionals because that’s obvious. Besides the fact that we are nowhere close to real AI systems, most of Procurement today is not number crunching. It’s fire-fights. Stakeholder-pleasing. Countering disruption blights. Supplier appeasing. It’s a lot of relationship management, which is something a piece of software just can’t do. (There are a few good SRM platforms that enable SRM, but they do not accomplish SRM — that is accomplished by the expert relationship managers that astutely use the system.)

the doctor is also sick of the futurists who are stuck in the past and still predicting a great digital renaissance to come. Our collective IQ has dropped since the renaissance started; Twitter is making us dumber than goldfish (and you wonder why the doctor despises Twitter); the more we trust the machine, the more blind we become to the risks involved; it’s creating an unparalleled digital divide worse than anything William Gibson and his Neuromancer mind can come up with; and Ready, Player One might be the best possible future if we continue down the current road (assuming a certain dictator-want-to-be doesn’t start World War III first).

For better or for worse (and its for worse if we don’t stabilize our power grids and shield the hard drives that contain all of the data that drives our economy, as a natural EMP could wipe out economies in a second), we’re going to keep moving down the digital highway at ever increasing speeds, which means pending something drastic, the next twenty years are going to the be the same as the last twenty and all this hullaballoo about digital transformation, at this point, is just unnecessary noise.

Top Nine Posts of 2018 … From Years Gone By

As per yesterday’s post where we highlighted the top 10 posts from 2018, of which five were on GDPR, the top 9 visited posts of the year were actually from year’s gone by. Today we are going to look at those, and even speculate as to why.

  • 9. The Purpose of a Contract is Easy to Define Is it because people, for reasons that perplex the doctor , struggle with contracts? Is it because Lawyers have done a great job pulling a fast one over the majority of the population and convinced them contracts are difficult and must be worded in complex Legalese? Is it because no one believes that contracts are relatively easy to create and can be written in plain English. It’s all about defining what both sides want, what happens when things go wrong, who’s responsible, and how you get out. It’s predicting all the scenarios and accounting for them up front. In plain English.
  • 8. Common Challenges of Indirect Procurement Most people in indirect Procurement know these, but it’s always nice to be sure, right? Direct wants to know that the other side of the wall has similar problems? The reason for this post’s popularity is a conundrum.
  • 7. A Strategic Sourcing Plan Outline This is probably the most direct, to the point, article out there on what should be in a basic strategic sourcing plan, with a hat-tip to Robi Bendorf of Bendorf & Associates .
  • 6. The Evolution of Purchasing
    Who doesn’t like a good history lesson? Especially when it’s one of the few guest posts in SI’s history on the subject (from Lisa Nyce).
  • 5. Is There a Difference Between Strategic Category Sourcing and Strategic Category Management
    This is a confusing question, to this day. Both terms are interchanged, used, and misused on a regular basis. No surprises a lot of readers would be looking for some clarification.
  • 4. I Will Survive
    Wow! the doctor knows you like his lyrical humour — he often gets more “fan mail” on these pieces then deep expositions (which he knows you read to cure your insomnia), but how did an ode to vendors who need to be forgotten become the fourth most visited post of the year? At least one inquiring (but not Enquiring, Americans will get this) mind wants to know!
  • 3. RFX Defined This is obviously the de-facto definition of RFX on the entire World Wide Web.
    This is a top post year after year after year. Webster’s should just point to SI. Seriously. the doctor would be a top ten NYT best-selling author if everyone who read this post bought a book!
  • 2. Five Types of Supply Risk and How To Mitigate Them This is probably SI’s top-visited post of all times. Normally 10X the traction of a top 10 post after the top 3 posts of the year are discounted. Can no other source define supply risks so succinctly? the doctor wants to know! The secret sauce in this post is worth a fortune!
  • 1. Its My Blog This post is obviously mistaken for the about post. SI’s rant anthem is pretty damn good, but #1 good?