Monthly Archives: March 2019

The Key Reason Spend Analyses Fail (that Often Goes Overlooked)


Today we welcome another guest post from Brian Seipel a Procurement Consultant at Source One Management Services focused on helping corporations understand their spend profile and develop actionable strategies for cost reduction and supplier relationship management. Brian has a lot of real-world project experience in sourcing, and brings some unique insight on the topic.

Organizations that develop an understanding of their spend have an edge when it comes to strategic sourcing: They better understand where money is being spent, with who, and on what than others who enter into the process either blindly or as a knee-jerk reaction to an incumbent price hike. This is particularly important for tail spend in those spend categories on the indirect side that too often fly under the radar.

That edge isn’t a given, however. Building a spend analysis can serve as the foundation for strong opportunity assessments, but doing so won’t automatically lead to better sourcing projects. Organizations who spend time on spend analyses can and do still fail at strategic sourcing for a very big reason. We put too much faith in the front-end process of building this analysis, and forsake the back-end, leaving a critical gap in our understanding of our spend profile.

The Front-End Spend Analysis

The first steps of a spend analysis are akin to cleaning out your basement. What’s the first thing you do? Before sorting into keep-or-toss piles can begin, even before moving and opening boxes – we need to turn on the light and survey the room. “Turning on the light” is really what the front-end of a spend analysis is. Our goal is to shine a light on the spend we have so sourcing project identification can begin. How does a spend analysis accomplish this?


  • Cleansing & Consolidation. Take all of the disparate data sources that make up our profile and create a single view of them, cleaning up supplier names and other critical fields along the way. For example, referring to the supplier “Dun and Bradstreet,” with that single name, even when spend from a second set that refers to “D&B.”
  • Classification. With all spend in one consolidated set, we will now attach meaningful classifications. The discussion around the best way to do this is worthy of a discussion of its own, so let’s simply say care should be taken here. Choose a system that speaks to your organization’s process, products, and objectives.

Let’s cook up an example. Let’s say we want to look into our IT spend to see where we can cut costs. We conduct a spend analysis covering the points above and learn the following: We have four locations using four different managed IT service providers offering similar services at four different price points.

This is the type of intel that suggests a strategic sourcing initiative may be called for. Pitting these suppliers against each other in a market event will drive down costs and potentially streamline operations if we can establish a single supplier for all four locations. We can estimate these savings by building a baseline spend profile and comparing to our average savings by following this strategy within this category. Simple enough. So why do sourcing initiatives often fail to deliver?

Moving Into Opportunity Assessment

Because we just committed a big mistake: We took our initial view of the spend and jumped right to goal setting without taking the time to properly scope. We went from turning on the basement light to selling boxes, en masse and unopened, directly on Ebay without knowing what was inside.

As we go to market, our sourcing event fails each of our four locations for different reasons:


  • The first location is locked into a multi-year contract with a painful termination clause. Without scoping, who didn’t know what our contractual obligations looked like
  • The second location isn’t locked into a contract, but is locked in by a lack of competition in the market. Without scoping, we never looked beyond our own buying history into the market landscape
  • The third location is free of both of these problems, but this isn’t their first rodeo. They used the providers that locations one and two use in the past, but abandoned them due to severe performance issues. Without scoping, we can’t get a good enough view into the decision making process that led to incumbent relationships.
  • Finally, our fourth location. No issues with suppliers, contracts, or market competition. The problem here? When we dig into the spend, we realize the bulk was capex: The purchase of equipment for a new server room buildout. Now that the equipment is purchased, we won’t see this spend come back around for years to come. Without scoping, we assumed spend was annually recurring, and now we have next to nothing.

Better Spend Analysis through Better Scoping

Once our spend analysis is complete, we’ll need to bring additional stakeholders into the fold. Bring in the employees who actually interact with these suppliers and their products and work with them to develop a sourcing history:


  • Did we accurately describe how you use this supplier with our chosen classification system?
  • What are we specifically buying from this supplier, and are these purchases made regularly or only once every few years?
  • How was this supplier selected, and who chose them? Were any competitors engaged at the same time? How did this incumbent beat them out?
  • What does this supplier do well? Where are their biggest points of failure?
  • Has this category been sourced recently? How was the event conducted, and what was the result?

Beyond this interview, ask these stakeholders to provide copies of any active MSAs, SOWs, SLAs, or any other document that can help define the relationship. Of particular note will be termination clauses. What date does the agreement end, and what are the renewal terms? What steps do we follow to terminate on that date, and by when do they need to be taken? If terminating before that date, are there any penalties?

From Insight to Action

Building a detailed spend analysis takes time, and the commitment of resources that could be doing other things. As such, you need to ensure you get a good ROI out of the exercise.

The best way to do that is to see beyond the front-end of what a spend analysis is (the unification, cleansing, and classification of spend data) and consider what a spend analysis helps Procurement do (identify strategic sourcing initiatives and estimate potential impact). Scoping is a critical part of this process, and properly scoping opportunities that a spend analysis shines a light on is a great way to get that ROI.

Thanks, Brian!

The USIS was Established 85 Years Ago Today

On November 17, 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6433-A and created the National Emergency Council (NEC), sing an appropriation authorized by Section 220 of the National Industrial Recovery Act of June 16, 1933, in response to the declaration by the Congress of the United States of the existence of an acute national economic emergency which affects the national public interest and welfare.

The NEC was deemed created for the purpose of coordinating and making more efficient and productive the work of the numerous field agencies of the Government established under, and for the purpose of carrying into, effect, the provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the Federal Emergency Relief Act that were all signed into law in 1933 in response to the Great Depression.

Six months later, Clara M. Edmunds, head librarian of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s public information service, opened the U.S. Information Services library, which was designed to be the comprehensive collection of relevant government documents, updated regularly to record every development in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the government. This library, which centralized information about federal rules, regulations, and administrative orders for the public, was the first one-stop-shop for government information until 1948. In 1945, Truman, who had no interest in funding it, took office. In 1946, the USIS was put under the state department and had its funding reduced. And in 1948, the Smith-Mundt Act, which focussed on the creation of an information service to disseminate information abroad about the United States (instead of to its own citizens) put the final nail in the USIS coffin. (One account of the United States Information Service Libraries can be found in the online archive of the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science. Information can also be found in A Timeline of Events in the History of Libraries.)

It may have only lasted 15 years, but it was a revolution in government information management and deserves to be remembered.

Hi-ho! Hi-ho! The PO will never go!

Purchase orders have recently made the news big time, as a result of Amazon pulling the plug on thousand of vendors who suddenly had theirs cancelled.

And while this story isn’t about the latest Amazon media mess, it is about the PO. With the increase in automation since the introduction of second generation e-Procurement / Procure-to-Pay platforms that could do automated m-way invoice matching to POs, goods receipts, or contract schedules, certain vendors have argued that the need for the purchase order is declining rapidly as there are so many other ways to validate an invoice or an order, especially if there is a contract, an expected fulfillment schedule, a database of agreed upon prices, and so on.

And while they are not needed in some well defined situations, they are still needed. As indicated in our piece four years ago explaining that the dream of Hi-ho. Hi-ho. It’s Off PO We Go! is a pipe-dream.

As we noted years ago, when there is no (master) contract, or in the case of services, no agreed upon rate table, how do you verify you are paying for the right goods from the right supplier at the right time at the right amount!

Now, it’s true you won’t need it for everything that is not on a (master) contract — a T&E expense, an invoice for off-contract services under a threshold, MRO products being delivered at the previous, accepted rate, etc. — but this is not the majority (by dollar value) of the off-contract organizational spend.

Furthermore, as the prophet clearly highlighted in a Plus+ piece last year on Spend Matters [Membership Required] The Consequence of Eliminating Purchase Orders, the results of this can range from errors and mistakes to outright fraud, either supplier-driven or internal.

You see, if there isn’t another document with all of the information needed to verify an invoice, the supplier could accidentally, or maliciously, charge the wrong price. And if it’s for a new SKU, with no prior price, there’d be no way to even flag that maybe, just maybe, the invoice should be manually verified before being auto-paid.

So even if you took all of the great advice that the prophet gave you, which allows you to minimize situations where you need POs, and enable better purchase controls, implement better e-invoicing systems, allow good suppliers to qualify for discounts or early payment, etc., you’re still at a much higher risk than if you simply create, and send, a PO which, guess what, like an invoice, could, and should, be electronic.

So, while the paper should go, the PO, and what it enables you to do, will never go. So implement the right systems so it’s auto-generated, auto-sent, auto-verified, and auto-matched in all appropriate situations and then you can almost pretend it’s not there. Almost.

How Time Critical Does Your Transport Need to Be???

Expedited transport is definitely the hot topic in the consumer world, and time-critical transport is still a hot topic in the JiT manufacturing world. But just how critical is the topic of “time-critical” transport?

We addressed this topic in the past, and looking at it again (as a result of some vendors promoting real-time logistics visibility), the reality is still that, for any Procurement and Logistics organization that is with the times and using the right technology, time-critical / expedited / rushed transport is easy but should only be needed very, very rarely.

Traditionally, time critical transport was needed when something went awry in the supply chain and a shipment had to be expedited to prevent a disruption or stock-out that could be disastrous to a company’s bottom line. Otherwise, unless you were talking about perishable deliveries on a non-refrigerated truck, proper planning mitigated the need for expedited shipment. This situation, of course, worsened with the introduction of JIT (Just in Time) Manufacturing and delivery in the supply chain, especially considering that not only have natural and financial disasters been on the rise since this paradigm became popular, but, as expected, so did disruptions as there were no longer weeks worth of buffer inventory to absorb a minor supply chain shock.

But if you have good visibility, proper planning, and the right tools at your disposal, whether or not you are JIT makes no difference — the odds of a disruption being so significant as to require expedited shipping are low.

Specifically, if you have:

  • multi-tier supply chain visibility,
    like the kind multi-tier risk management or supply chain visibility providers gives you (like Resilinc or SourceMap), and know about a disruption the minute it happens three levels down in your supply chain, and not the day after a product was supposed to reach your warehouse
  • access to modern platforms to find and secure transport in real time,
    like FreightOS or TenderEasy, then you can quickly get a truck when you need a truck and
  • license to global trade document platforms,
    like Integration Point or Amber Road that handle import and export compliance, including advance notification, that help you to insure there are no delays at the border

then you will be notified of potential disruptions well in advance and in time to take appropriate actions, and in the situation where it was an unpredictable disaster (such as a fire, earthquake, or flood) at your supplier’s DC just as product was about to ship, and a new shipment has to be made immediately from another location, your immediate ability to secure a new truck almost always alleviates the need for an expedited shipment — a need which is further alleviated by your ability to get your import, export, and compliance documents in order before the product ships, preventing unnecessary delays at the border.Basically, about the only time you should have to do an expedited shipment is if you were a medical organ transport company and a new donor heart, needed halfway across the country, just became available. Other than that, with all of the options available to you to prevent the need for unanticipated (rushed) shipments, or to get them under control as soon as the need arises, there just isn’t that much of a need for overpriced time-critical transport anymore. (Unless you’re still living in the eighties and using paper and fax to manage your logistics.)

Your thoughts?

Geek Cat Still** Says

You know I never
I never heard you talk so good
You never chat the way you should
But I like it
And I know you like it too
The way that I want you
I gotta have you
Oh yes, I do

You know I never
I never ever get home late
You know that I can hardly wait
Just to ping you
And I know you cannot wait
Wait to ping me too
I gotta chat you
Cause baby we’ll be

On the Facebook
In the Farmville pen
Behind the bushes
Until I’m begging again
In the chartroom
Lock the public out
And baby
Talk qwerty to me

Again, many apologies to Poison. Many, many apologies.

* He hasn’t changed his tune in eight years!