Monthly Archives: February 2025

Yes I’m Okay, But I Am Very Angry. You Should Be Too! (Part 2)

… it’s about getting it right (and not being right) … and all these influencers care about is what gets the clicks, whether it is right for Procurement or not, because whatever gets them likes and subscribes in their book is being right. Unlike THE REVELATOR, they’re not interested in meaningful discussion, constructive debate, educating you, or at least inspiring you to think critically and improve your knowledge and understanding of your field. Influencers only want the clicks, like, and subscribes that give them their next dopamine hit (and strengthen their belief that fortune will follow fame) and metrics that will allow them to get sponsors (whose messages they’ll never question) to keep going.

But, now more than ever, you need to make the right decision for you. Not only are you

  • under-staffed,
  • under-tooled, and
  • under-resourced

in Procurement, but expected to deliver with constant change in the

  • economic landscape,
  • political landscape,
  • technology landscape,
  • services landscape, and
  • funding landscape

which will often entirely invalidate everything you did and knew yesterday. More specifically:

  • an unexpected trade war will decimate a carefully crafted supply chain you’ve been curating for over a decade,
  • a geopolitical dispute, special military action, attack, or war will spark sanctions and totally close borders
  • companies come, merge, get acquired, and go every day; changing, replacing, and then taking their technology to the grave
  • services companies keep popping up, changing the toolsets they use, altering the toolsets (via partnerships) they offer you, as well as their roster — and just like it’s not the analyst firm, it’s the analyst, it’s not the firm, it’s the consultant (you want an experienced consultant, at least intermediate, and definitely not a junior consultant fresh out of grad school with no real world experience and nothing but a Chat-GPT subscription — which you are very likely to get at a Big X training so many “consultants” on AI)
  • funding mania comes and goes; when it comes, money flows like a waterfall; when it goes; it dries up like a desert; this hastens both new product development and productization as well as company bankruptcy (when the firm over invests, doesn’t see the growth, and drops the tech company faster than a hot potato)

You need insight. You need knowledge. You need education. Not influence bullshit. Because without the insight, knowledge, and education, you have no chance of making a decision that will:

  • identify the possibility of tariffs decimating a particular supply chain, so you know where to focus your risk mitigation efforts (it’s too late if you’re just reacting post tariff because, by then, there ain’t much you can do about it)
  • have the right systems in place to switch to secondary sources if a sanction or border closure comes into effect
  • select a technology provider with a solution that solves the majority of your day-to-day problems efficiently, effectively, and empathically (that works with your business model and mindset)
  • select a services provider with personnel with the right experience and toolset to support you
  • select a technology provider at an appropriate risk threshold; for example, a P2P provider that you depend on for daily transactions needs to be stable; an auxiliary experimental analytics/fraud identification solution is not as critical, if the provider disappears, you will be okay while you select and implement a replacement (although you may want to delay the actual payments until you get a new fraud detection solution in place, but with SaaS, that can be done in a week or two if you maintained the RFP information and just go to your 2nd or 3rd choice)

We need to remember that technology project failure rates have reached an all time high of 88% (in the two and a half decades of project failure the big analyst firms and consultancies have been tracking technology project failure since the late ’90s), inflation is back with a vengeance, consumer demand is flatlining in most first world countries with declining birth rates, non-renewable raw material supplies are getting scarcer and scarcer, and your job is only going to get harder with each passing day.

You need help, not bullshit. And the fact that all these influencers is doing is echoing the

  • soundbite driven drivel vendor marketing
  • analyst firms pushing the current hype and the unproven claims
  • vendors shoving Gen-AI into every nook and cranny and down your throat (whether it is appropriate or not)
  • consultants only spreading the FOMO and FUD

and collectively drowning out the few remaining educators left is just appalling. So, yes, I’m angry. And you should be too!

(And yes, I can curate my feeds to keep influencer content mostly out of them, and do, even going so far as to potentially remove you if you push their drivel my way, but that’s not the point! I know the difference between insight and drivel. Without education, a junior buyer / new Procurement professional doesn’t! And that’s why these influencers make me mad and need to go!)

Yes I’m Okay, But I Am Very Angry. You Should Be Too! (Part 1)

Apparently my influencer rants last week caused some concern among my fellow educators with regards to my health, or at least my mental health, so I’d like to assure you all that yes I am okay, but yes I am very (VERY) angry … and you should be too!

As I pointed out in some of my responses to the three LinkedIn posts that advertised my influencer week content, namely:

It’s bad enough we have to deal with:

  • a constant stream of sound-bite driven, education free marketing
  • analysts pushing these unproven claims (and then telling the buyers it’s their fault when the technology fails for buying into the technology their analyst firm relentlessly promoted)
  • vendors shoving (Gen-)AI into every nook and cranny, which not only fails to add value, but often decreases it (see: Mythbusting 2025 2015 Procurement Predictions and Trends! Part 12, for example)
  • consultants spreading the FOMO-FUD at constant Red-Alert levels

 

but now we have to deal with wannabe influencers with very little knowledge and experience in Procurement inundating social media/LinkedIn with obvious statements at best, useless content most of the time, and aggravated FOMO once they get hired by a vendor(‘s social media marketing company).

And that doesn’t help you. Not one bit. In fact, it hurts you. As the doctor wrote in Why the doctor is NOT an Influencer! Part I, as a Procurement professional, you’re unappreciated, overworked, denied the tools that would make your job easier, and blamed for everything that goes wrong. You laugh when you see the Monday.com commercial that shows people underwater by 10 am because you’re underwater 24/7/365 days a year (366 in leap years). You struggle to find a few minutes a day to read something that isn’t one of the three hundred new messages that hit your inbox overnight. If you’re dedicating a few minutes a day to read something, there better be a reward in it for you. It better at least spark a usable idea if it doesn’t give you one. You don’t need to spend 20 minutes reading five posts that tell you less than you already know. You need insight.

And, if you’re at the top of your game, like the doctor, you’d happily spend 8 to 12 minutes to read a deep 4 page article that actually makes you think or gives you real insight on a vendor’s platform than read 4 short LinkedIn posts that give you nothing more than recycled marketing sound bites. Because you need information. You need insight. You need education. Not bullshit laden clickbait designed to get the influencer likes. After all, as THE REVELATOR says …

Put Your Research in the Forefront with Forestreet!

Forestreet is a dichotomy and a juxtaposition in that it is a relatively new entrant to the ProcureTechSphere, as it only launched its platform in late 2022, but a relatively old company as it was founded in 2017 to super power supplier and market research for sourcing and category management professionals.

Like many recent supplier discovery startups (which have been quickly stood up on third party Gen AI, and which could fall just as quickly), as well as category management consultancies, the founders realized almost a decade ago that one of the things that was really holding sourcing professionals back was a lack of market knowledge when they had to source a new category, replace a supplier, or understand the market impact of a regulation or incident and set out to build a platform to make that happen (not knowing how much effort would be required to do it right). This is especially true when the sourcing and category management professionals are being constantly bombarded with marketing spiel and no real product or service insights.

This is the product they have been working on for the past eight years. An advanced technology platform that scours the web, in near real time, and brings back all of the information a human needs to make a good decision on category selection for a market event based on the current supplier landscape, supplier selection for inclusion in a market event, and even basic market entry based upon current market and supplier information.

It works extremely well and enables a human to do the research that used to take them weeks in a couple of hours and make good, market informed, decisions while finding suppliers and insights they never would have otherwise. Moreover, since the foundations were developed pre Gen-AI, the core is built on solid, tried-and-true, hallucination-free, technology that includes traditional AI and machine learning, a deep knowledge graph, and verifier technology (as it does use Gen-AI to identify potentially relevant sites, articles and sources, but then verifies every site, article, and source returned is valid and parses the content using tried-and-true tech for better indexing and cross-correlation [based on the knowledge graph]). The founders, who believe that AI is the most overused and most misused term in technology (and it is), know that the path to success depends on identifying the right advanced technology (or algorithm) for each problem encountered, the right technology may or may not be AI, and it’s ultimately not about the technology but the solution it enables. They know that a sourcing professional needs to have a research superpower and their goal is to give you one, using whatever technology is appropriate. (You shouldn’t care about “AI”. You should care about results!)

Let’s talk about the main part of the application today, and what improvements (currently in development/alpha) are slated for next quarter. (More great things will likely materialize later in the year, but SI only covers what it has seen).

Market Explorer (Today)

Market explorer is designed to give you enough domain expertise in 30 to 120 minutes, depending on how deep you need to go, to identify if there is a market (opportunity), who the main suppliers are, and what the primary issues are that you need to be aware of. To start, all you need to do is either provide a sample company (website) or define a category and a geography. In the first case, if you provide a sample company (website URL), it will identify the potential markets and geographies and allow you to refine your search criteria to industry (s) (roles), locations, and keywords, all of which will have auto-suggestions but all of which can be overridden. In the second case, you just define the category by keywords and, optionally, provide a geography of interest.

Once you confirm your market, it will go off and scour the web and in three to five minutes bring back all of the companies it can find with profiles on each. It will preload at least the first page of each website, and pre-load additional pages as soon as you access the supplier so you can click through the supplier’s site through the Forestreet platform. You can then select each supplier of interest, and then it will alter its market intelligence overview of the market accordingly based on your selection. The tool is designed to allow you to quickly scan through 60 to 80 suppliers in 20 minutes, build a reasonable starting set (for further research), and quickly hone in on the right market and supply base. Once that is done, depending on the complexity, it will take the user 30 minutes to a few hours to identify the right pool of suppliers for an RFP or the right elements for a customized market intelligence report to the C-Suite. (This effort, when you think about the amount of time these tasks take now, is nothing. Your effort has been reduced by weeks to part of a morning or afternoon.)

Currently, the market intelligence overview gives you a market size estimate, top company list, company segmentation by revenue range, geographic distribution, mosaic breakdown by primary offering, feature map, emerging topic list, related news and ESG overview (with correlated ESG articles indexed separately). From the overview, you can click into a feature analysis, explore phrases relative to the market, dive into the news archive or the ESG view, or dive into a profile of each returned supplier.

Forestreet built their own custom ESG model across 25 sub-categories and scores the market (and, if possible, each supplier) across that model, using available data and sentiment (that is often the best generic score you can find). In the ESG view, you see the average positive or negative for each major score, the relevant articles, and can dive into individual factors and sources and company groups.

With regards to the company profiles the system builds for you, it pulls back basic profile data like name, location, contact information, revenue, market bracket, a brief overview, and a momentum score against the market based on market overage. It will also pull legal information and identifiers (incorporation dates, status, key personnel, etc.), a summary of key features and services, associated news and events (that contribute to the larger market archive), the ESG rating and a listing of its primary competitors based on the market data.

In addition, it can output the entire market report, or just selected portions, to a PDF presentation for your management presentation.

And, if after the first pass you want to dive into a subset of the market, alter the criteria, and/or retrieve more information on a subset of suppliers, you can make the necessary alterations to your request, run it again, and in another 15 to 20 minutes you’ll have more refined information. Many professionals get what they need after the second try, and if not, it’s the same 15 to 20 minutes to run it a third time. Even the most complicated market research questions are usually sufficiently answered within 3 tries and 2 hours. Considering that a human doing the research manually would, before the introduction of Forestreet, have to spend weeks to compile everything that the Forestreet platform does in minutes, it is a phenomenal tool that enables superhuman performance and a pure focus on the strategic value-add work a skilled professional should be doing, not the manual Google searching or, even worse, the validation of each Gen-AI output because you know many of the results will be useless and and some, sadly, made up!

Market Intelligence (Tomorrow, well, Q2 actually)

Right now, the market intelligence product is quite good, and actually industry leading in many respects, but they know you need more, they are working on more (and SI has seen the development alpha, beta customers will have access by early Q2, product is expected to launch by late Q2), and what’s coming will be even better. You will be able to do the work of expert consultants on your own in a few hours for most markets. Here’s a brief overview of what’s to come (and it looks great).

  • Deeper Market Data for a Market Landscape including
    • trends and innovations: the next version of the platform will not just identify emerging topics, but overall market trends and innovations with descriptions of each
    • financial predictions: is the market growing, static, or declining in size
    • ESG themes and [emerging] challenges: what is the bulk of the activity and content centered around, why, and what are the challenges; not just the E in ESG, but for example carbon capture in plant emissions, etc.
  • Deeper Market Analysis including:
    • feature distribution: not just feature maps, but distributions and a deeper analysis thereon
    • topic analysis: deeper dive into topics and related features, ESG criteria, etc.
    • market distributions: dive into a region, feature subset, etc. and have detailed data all the way down like you would in a modern spend analysis system that rolls up an n level category from the transaction level to the global spend view and lets a user drill all the way down
  • Broader Vendor Profiles: there’s a lot planned here, but most of this hasn’t hit full alpha, so we’re not going to discuss it in detail (as it’s unclear what will hit the coming beta and how well it will work), and if they get even half of it production ready, trust me in that you will be amazed (and hopefully throw your Gen-AI chatbot in the virtual trashbin where it belongs)

It will be very easy to walk through the analysis step by step in the next version and, of course, output it, or just sections of it, to a Powerpoint for your presentation. You will be able to walkthrough at least (working alpha):

  • Summary Overview
  • ESG
  • Risk and Challenges
  • Cost and Price Drivers
  • Market Size
  • Acquisitions and Mergers
  • New Products and Services
  • Innovations and Opportunities
  • Trends
  • Regulations and Consequences
  • New Suppliers
  • Growth Projections
  • Key Players … and, of course, deep dive into any company, which will have all of the information available in the current release, a deeper capability overview, a SWOT analysis, and hopefully, a few other pleasant surprises by the end of next quarter

If you haven’t heard of Forestreet, well, you have now, and if you don’t have a tool like that in your arsenal and you have tens of millions in strategic spend, you should … and have no reason NOT to check them out. You know that the doctor is an expert in advanced tech and constantly rails against most of the AI BS that has hit the market over the last few years (and ruined the good name of the great AI tech that came before, which was supposed to give you all the innovations chronicled in these two series on The Complete AI in Procurement, Sourcing, and Supplier Management, but just gave you gibberish that told you to eat one rock a day). This should tell you that if he’s finally saying “there’s something there, and it’s pretty damn good” then there is something there, it’s pretty damn good, and you probably shouldn’t be without a tool like this if you’re spending tens (if not hundreds) of millions on strategic spend categories.

Thus, if you don’t have a tool like Forestreet (and the doctor knows you don’t), check them out. While he’s sure there are exceptions it won’t work for, Forestreet have been building their knowledge graph (real AI tech) for 8 years and it’s broad and deep enough that it will work for the majority of companies. Moreover, even if it only gets you 80% to 90% of the way there, and you still have to do a bit of manual digging into key issues or topics or potential suppliers, it’s still saving you weeks of work. That’s what counts as it allows you to focus your Human Intelligence (and potential) on what matters, not the drudgery of getting to that point.

Has Procurement Tech Peaked?

If you’ve been following along, you know the following:

  • the doctor is very disheartened at the lack of innovation, and even direction, among the major suite players
  • the doctor is tired of the nth solution popping up that does the same thing as solutions 1 through n-1 (which is why SI doesn’t even try to review every solution of the 666+ solutions that exist, but only those with actual improvement or innovation)
  • the doctor is fed up with the fact that almost every vendor has been blinded by the hype of Gen-AI and are focussed on shoving it into every virtual nook and cranny they can find in their product (whether or not it provides any value whatsoever)
  • the doctor is fed up with the constant claims that we will soon have Agentric AI that will solve all of our problems and eliminate the need for Procurement professionals

Which begs the question. Why is all of this happening?

  • why is there a lack of noticeable innovation, and even direction, among the major players (besides cramming Gen-AI into all of the nooks and crannies)?
  • why are there so few new, innovative solutions (and 40 carbon calculators when one will do)?
  • why are so many vendors jumping blindly on the Gen-AI bandwagon (heading straight for a cliff with no steering and no brakes)?
  • why are so many vendors claiming that the next generation of tech is Agentric AI?

Is it because Procurement Tech has peaked?

Sadly, for the time being, the answer is … YES!

Even though there is sill much that can be done, for the time being, procurement tech has peaked. There appears to be three major reasons for this:

  • an almost all-in focus on Gen-AI, a technology that has not delivered on its vast over-promises and likely never will;
  • an emerging focus on Agentric AI in the hopes of replacing people, instead of augmenting them; and
  • an over-focus on orchestrating what is there, instead of orchestrating what is missing.

Each of these reasons prevents the necessary innovation that is needed to take Procurement Tech to the next level.

  • As the doctor has repeatedly told you, Gen-AI is only useful if the problem at hand can be reduced to either large document search and summarization or natural language translation of inputs and outputs. The continued quest to force this technology to solve problems it fundamentally can’t is preventing any research and development on tech that would actually advance Procurement.
  • As the doctor has repeatedly claimed, the answer is not in Artificial Intelligence but in Augmented Intelligence
  • As it stands now, orchestration is just gluing best of breed systems together, it’s not really enhancing any ProcureTech.

And until

  • Gen-AI is relegated to just another AI tech that is only used where appropriate,
  • we stop trying to replace people and start trying to make them productive at a super human level, and
  • we stop gluing and start truly enhancing

ProcureTech is stuck where it’s at. That’s just how it is. For now. Maybe someday it will change. But not before you insist you want it to change, and do so loud enough that maybe a few vendors will hear you and listen and stop wasting all their time and all your money chasing the wrong tech for problems you don’t actually have.

The Green Cabbage Grows Another Leaf

When we first invited you to Take a Leaf from the Green Cabbage eighteen months ago, we covered one of the most extensive services-backed indirect-focussed spend analysis players in the market (serving clients like Delta, Home Depot, Dell, Adobe, etc.) with deep support for:

  • SaaS Subscriptions: going well beyond many of the dime-a-dozen SaaS cost analyzers (and there are quite a number of those now, see our coverage of the Sacred Cows), Green Cabbage can unpack the purposely confusing consumption models the big players throw at you (to try and get you to spend more than you need to), do SKU level price comparisons, provide you deep insight into negotiation opportunities, and, through their MITs, provide guidance into how to achieve actual savings
  • Contingent Workforce (CW): detailed insights into over 70,000 position-level-market (geography) combinations for deep negotiation insights across 120 countries
  • Clinicals: deep knowledge and insights into clinical SKUs and sourcing
  • Invari: their Invoice management platform, which allows invoice and payment data to automatically be extracted into the appropriate spend cubes while also providing core I2P capability (and eliminating the need for YAP — yet another platform)
  • MITs (Market Intelligence Theses) across SaaS, CW, and Clinicals: which could be lightweight, comprehensive, or competitive; guaranteed to be completed within 3 days, and usually completed in 1 to 2 days for lightweight and comprehensive
  • Contract Library: Green Cabbage starts by loading your contracts, not your spend data, extracting the key terms and pricing, and then loads your spend data, tying as much as they can to your contracts (for immediate insights into any pricing violations); this is important because this is the foundation for the deep insights they can provide via Elegion, which we mentioned, but didn’t get into as it was in earlier stages at the time

Now, since it’s only been six months, you’re probably wondering how much new stuff could there be that would entice Sourcing Innovation to pen an update after such a short time. Quite a bit actually. There are five improved and new offerings in particular that need to be addressed:

Elegion (formerly GC Legal)

Elegion, their in-depth contract clause repository, contains hundreds of business, commercial, and legal terms; conditions; and standard contract clauses with an explanation of what each term is along with best-in-class definitions of each clause.
The platform makes it a point to call out the highly-relevant “mousetraps” that suppliers will use to (often unfairly) protect themselves through inclusion, exclusion, or modified language. The best-in-class definitions are drafted by licensed attorneys with expertise in the relevant subject matter and areas specifically supported by Green Cabbage (IT, Marketing, and Contingent Workforce). Moreover, the attorneys who drafted these clauses have collectively negotiated thousands of deals from both sides of the table in these areas.

In addition, directly through the platform, via secure end-to-end encryption, users can use their credits* to asynchronously request input on specific clauses in the agreements presented to them during their negotiation with a response guaranteed within 48 hours. Moreover, they can also request synchronous 30 min or 60 min 1-on-1 consultations with an on-staff Green Cabbage Attorney who is an expert in the contract they are currently negotiating. (Green Cabbage‘s top attorneys used to work for the top tech giants and contingent workforce providers.) This service, of course, uses up credits much faster than one-time asynchronous message requests, but can be invaluable when negotiating a multi-million dollar contract. However, the best part of the offering is the deep insight into terms, conditions, clauses, and best language/practice that can allow a buyer to address most of their legal questions self-serve with confidence!

* each subscription comes with a certain number of credits, and clients can always buy more

Better Support for Corporate Hierarchies

As we indicated in our first article, Green Cabbage supports a number of big Private Equity firms, including Private Equity Firms that manage a number of other Private Equity Firms (where each has specialized funds). As such, they have built an infinitely extensible corporate hierarchy with appropriate view and access permissions, that allow an individual, with the right permissions in any department or company, to see all of the spend in all of the departments and companies under their purview down the chain to identify opportunities for contract (re)negotiations through the utilization of a common platform provider, CWM provider, etc. (You may not believe it, but even the mega-corps will respond to a renegotiate now or we stop using you across 10 of our companies … no need to wait for the renewal.) This helps them answer questions like “how much do I spend across my portfolio with supplier S or on category X”, which is very powerful information to have for leverage and can often support contract negotiation at a group or higher level.

Receptio Integration (GPA)

If you’re a large mid-market or Global 3000, you use a lot of tech. These will range from small task/function/department specific small SaaS apps that go on the P-Card to multi-million contracts with the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, or Google. And while there is savings available in virtually every contract in every price range, for a large mid-market or global multi-national, it’s not worth chasing 5K on a 50K contract when there is likely 200K to be saved on a 1M contract. In this situation, you’ll just blindly accept the renewal for the small SaaS app if the price increase is 10% or less, and spend your hours negotiating an extra 10% from the behemoth because that’s big bucks. But what about the mid-range? The 50K to 250K contracts where there’s likely 5K to 50K of savings? That’s nothing to scoff at, but the cost of the effort involved, especially if you need to involve Legal, sometimes negates the value you realize.

So what’s the answer? Pre-negotiated Terms and Conditions from specialized GPOs that specialize in the best rates, on average, from these providers by bringing these, usually smaller, providers more business volume than they’d get on their own. That’s Receptio — an integration platform that connects you to Green Cabbage‘s Group Purchasing Arm partners that can get you better deals from many SaaS providers and Contingent Workforce providers than you can get on your own when your needs fall into the mid-range of spending.

Supplier Newstand

What’s the one thing missing from most supplier management and contract management platforms? Supplier Insights that are meaningful at contract negotiation and renewal time. Why is this typically missing? Because it requires scouring the internet to find relevant news that relates to the supplier, pulling in the links and creating summaries (hallucination free), and then tagging the articles to relevant subject matter (ownership, management, product, etc.) to allow a buyer to determine not only the org type and management but whether that’s likely to change (e.g. the organization just brought in an expert consultant on going public, announced a new CEO, etc.).

Green Cabbage recently released the first version (that currently scours over 750 news channels and vetted news sources) of this that allows you to see and search all of the recent news associated with a supplier — including, but not limited to: acquisition/merger activity, pricing changes, layoffs, executive movement, etc. — and is currently working on the next release that will associate these articles with pre-defined tags to provide quick insights.

Marketing Spend Intelligence

This is the newest offering of the Green Cabbage platform — deep, specialized insight into marketing spend. IT Spend may be the biggest at 5 Trillion Spend, but Marketing is no slouch either at an extrapolated estimated value approaching 2 Trillion when you correlate various sources and metrics, with Advertising spending alone topping 1 Trillion in 2024 (with the E&M industry being a 2.8 Trillion industry in the US alone). And, like SaaS, there is a huge amount of overspend in this category as well, especially in the non-creative spend in production and distribution when material and standardized service costs are not analyzed. Moreover, very few spend analysis, procurement software, or consultancies can provide these deep insights and guidance — and fewer still with guidance for marketing professionals with little-to-no Procurement experience. This alone almost warrants an update as market intelligence alone unveils huge opportunities, but, as you just noticed, this is just one of many improvements.

In other words, Green Cabbage has been advancing their offering at a rapid rate, as they also expand globally, with offices in the United Kingdom and India to complement their US office, and expansion into AustralAsia imminent.