Supply Market Intelligence … Harder than it Looks … But Possible with Modern Systems, Part I

Last year, about this time, we wrote a piece on Supply Market Intelligence and how it was Harder Than it Looks because there are a number of sources that might yield intelligence, including:

  • Suppliers,
  • Internal Sources, such as
    • internal stakeholders
    • performance reports
    • SRM programs
  • External Sources, such as
    • news feeds and alerts
    • price index forecasts
    • blogs and social media
    • peer companies
    • research services
    • advisory programs

… but not all are equal. And not all are fully accurate. For example:

  • Supplier company websites only show you what the supplier wants you to see, which is typically not the full picture, and maybe not even a true part of it
  • Internal Sources, such as
    • internal stakeholder interviews capture bias as well as expertise
    • performance reporting can only report on hard metrics the organization had the foresight to capture
    • SRM programs — and the insights yielded — vary by company and supplier
  • External Sources, such as
    • news feeds only cover the stories that interest the journalists
    • price index forecasts use in-house algorithms that are not disclosed that may not be accurate
    • blogs and social media cover the stories that can be sussed out by the bloggers and analysts

But some of them contain valuable data that when appropriately, and objectively analyzed, can yield good insights, as per our follow up post:

  • financial statements, particularly those from public companies (as false statements are a criminal offence for the CFO and CEO in some countries)
  • customer interviews, good or bad, as it’s a third party product/service view
  • performance reporting, as any hard metric is objective
  • internal stakeholder interviews, where the bias is minimized through targeted questions
  • price index data, that can be used to roll-your-own forecasts
  • public consumption data from government contracts, as they are great benchmarks

… and so on. But it can be pretty hard to make sense of all this … unless you have the right platform with the right capabilities. Now, it might not be a single platform from a single vendor and instead be a base Sourcing / Procurement platform augmented with multiple best of breed modules and API services from multiple vendors, and that’s fine. The point is that it’s possible to make sense of this with modern technology. What technology? How? That’s the subject of our next post.