… because while it looks great on the surface, in our space, looks can be deceiving and what you get may NOT be what you want. (And you’ll have to read this full series to find out if it’s good, bad, both, or neither.)

Zip issued a strong encouragement to check out their newly sponsored Intake and Orchestration RFI, authored by Spend Matters, noting that there’s nothing that will get you smart faster that checking out how this tech works under the hood (Source) because it would take the guesswork out of your evaluation process (Source) and allow you to choose the right intake and procurement orchestration with confidence (Source).

Zip should not have issued a public challenge because the doctor has a very hard time refusing them considering he has been ranting and raving against vendor RFIs for almost two decades (since not long after Procuri^# started the craze back in 2006 where they issued FREE templates for e-Sourcing, Supplier Management, Contract Management, and Spend Analysis (each with their own dedicated domain to make them look independently developed, especially since they added service provider or Procurement [but NOT source to contract] logos on the sidebar). These free templates, as has been stated many times, not only made them Procuri look, good, but better than the peers you would evaluate them against, whether or not they actually were. Since then, the doctor has NEVER found an RFX in our space written/sponsored by the vendor that doesn’t favour the vendor, or even one that is actually good as a foundation for provider selection^*.

In other words, the chances of Spend Matters and Zip creating the first RFI that would allow for firm-appropriate unbiased vendor selection is pretty low, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they couldn’t (although the doctor is going into the review doubting it) or that the RFI wouldn’t have any value if used and/or referenced appropriately (either for self-education and/or a foundation for a larger, wider evaluation effort). After all, used appropriately the Spend Matters Solution Maps are highly valuable (as you know that you are evaluating vendors that are apples-to-apples on the core functionality, know that they are all technically likely to meet your needs, and can focus on all of the other requirements of the provider). However, this means that a very careful, independent, third-party evaluation is needed to analyze the efficacy of the map being handed to you.

Especially when there are a number of easily identifiable strikes right off the bat.

• Sole Sponsored: this means that Spend Matters would have analyzed Zip (which is one of the first “intake” to “orchestrate” vendors they covered) heavily as the foundation for building their RFI (as Zip would expect every aspect of their solution to be analyzable); so while the analysts would do their best to be unbiased, some unconscious bias will creep in
• Forrester Scoring Scale: the scoring scale is 1 – 3 – 5; presumably this was done to allow for some room for interpretation or “half” points as “whole” points, but there are three major problems with the Forrester scale
  • it has been grossly misused to evaluate tech by people who don’t understand tech (in one of their reports, a vendor was given a 5 for software architecture if it was done in house, 3 if part of it was done in house and the rest was built on top of a third party architecture, and 1 if it was done by a third party, which is, well, WTF? who does it has NOTHING to do with how good a software architecture is)
  • it presumes there is a “best” capability that cannot be beat, which is not the case if vendors are still innovating, and could only be the case at the point the RFI was written and only IF the analysts had seen every solution on the market (which is doubtful); there is a reason scales in Solution Map only defined functionality to a “4”, some vendors kept innovating and this allowed that to be captured without needing to update the Solution Map more than every two years
  • it presumes that there is enough information for average buyers to accurately score; given that even analysts needed training and clarification before they would all score Solution Map 99% the same (even though every element was very explicitly defined, first scoring passes by new analysts were often only 90% as they often needed deeper technical explanations of requirements and/or more insight on how to question vendors to get the right answer), how likely do you think it is that buyers with limited technical solution knowledge are going to score solutions the same even if they understand what the seller is offering?
• Intake Heavy: 49% pure intake, 30% intake-slanted (requirement could be in an intake or orchestrate RFI, but very intake-slanted); 21% orchestration; while this is not bad if you are looking for an intake solution, it is bad if you are looking for an orchestration solution, which is what you should be looking for; the doctor has explained in multiple posts how intake has no value on it’s own (including a deep take in point 11 of market madness where the doctor explained that intake is just pay for view on your data [and why should you pay to access your data]); moreover, intake is NOT new as many P2P solutions (especially those that are based on or support catalogs) have had intake built in since day 1, and Zycus released the first stand-alone intake solution [for its suite] called iRequest back in 2015; and there’s no beef (and it’s always important to ask where’s the beef) … and just adding orchestration alone doesn’t create value (because if you only buy modern applications with Open APIs, you can integrate them all directly upon purchase and not have to pay yet another license and maintenance fee for yet another app)
• Orchestration Light: while implied by the last point, this has to be called out because the only value from intake-to-orchestrate comes from going beyond just integrating standard Source-to-Pay modules at touch points and either extending into the supply chain or enterprise, adding workflow capability not previously possible across product and service life-cycles, and/or enabling data modelling and analytics not (easily) doable with current applications — there’s one element for beyond S2P (except for, of course, the ERP backbone), workflow coverage is baseline, and analytics is defined as simple “reporting” … not nearly sufficient to capture what orchestration should be and should do
• Focused on “DOES” and not “ENABLES“: the RFI was clearly modeled after solution map which is great for allowing side-by-side comparison of solutions based on their support for certain technical functions, which may or may not be relevant for your organizational needs and does a great job of comparing how relatively advanced multiple solutions are but doesn’t tell you whether or not they will enable YOUR organization with the processes YOUR organization needs with the systems YOUR organizations uses with the interfaces YOUR people, and their TQ, can understand (and, of course, no hints at all on how to evaluate whether or not the provider can support you, custom integrate new solutions on an ongoing basis for you, be available on your working hours, support the languages of the third parties you need to work with, or culturally be a good fit — you know, all the important things when selecting a solution)

Not the best of starts, especially when it’s three-strikes-and-you’re-out in baseball, but still there could be deep educational value in the RFI itself and maybe it’s a good starting point for solution comparison (or, better yet, a Spend Matters solution map module).

So, in the next three parts of this series we will evaluate each part of the RFI: Intake, Common, and Orchestrate and then give our verdict.

^# Procuri was one of the first Source-to-Contract vendors that was acquired by Ariba in 2007, and then Ariba was acquired by SAP in 2012. (Also, before the RFIs, they published an 84 page book back in 2004 on Driving Business Performance with Strategic Sourcing, edited by Randy Glasbergen. ISBN 0971859841, Library of Congress Control Number 2004112419, and ASIN B000MZKZB2 if you want to track it down.) [And yes, the implication is that the doctor would expect the ZIPpy^@ Procurement Handbook to be the next publication from Zip.]

^* Yes, the doctor did author the Source-to-Contract Solution maps AND the common foundation for the Source-to-Pay Solution Maps while he was at Spend Matters, but these were NOT for provider selection — the purpose was to identify which vendors were relevant to shortlist in your RFI process (which should consider considerably more than the tech, but the point was to evaluate the tech alone because that is the one thing that most Procurement departments ARE NOT equipped to properly evaluate, while providing an overview of unbiased customer ratings through an aggregate score).

^@ Assuming zippy (P.1, P.2) doesn’t violate a trademark of Rainbow.