We see it daily on LinkedIn.

Twenty-something founders on LinkedIn claiming their Configurable Agentic Gen-AI Enhanced Systems (CAGES) (with marketing messaging coming straight from the A.S.S.H.O.L.E.) will solve all your problems, although they don’t have a clue what those problems really are, and even if you told them, they wouldn’t have a clue themselves how to solve your problems because they have no real knowledge of, or experience with, Procurement or Supply Chain.

New-Age Influencers barely out of college giving themselves nicknames like the Supply Chain Sovereign or Sourcing Sorcerer and promising you best practices and deep insights in your daily email but who have never stepped foot outside of the big consultancy and don’t know anything beyond the 7 year old playbook they were given.

Advertisements from the Big X Consultancies or “Next-Gen Analyst/Services Firm” promising to replace your workforce with AI Agents, despite the 95% failure rate (as only 5% of AI projects have led to a return, which is 2.5 times worse than a traditional technology project, where a whopping 12% are now delivering a return), and somehow do so cheaper (despite the soon to be exponentially rising costs of LLMs as compute costs go through the roof due to a lack of energy to power them and water to cool them).

As so astutely pointed out by Mr. Koray Köse’s in his recent article on how our supply chains are literally drowning in wannabes who mistake theory for expertise, when the gap between their theory and reality could never be wider!

In theory, Procurement is easy. In theory, Supply Chains are smooth well oiled machines where I order X from you, and you ship it to me. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth!

Nothing makes the point clearer than when Mr. Köse points out that most of these so called “experts” could not pass his Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) exam question, which is totally correct, as I will dive into in a future post. (This is because, among other things, 1. the classic “textbook” formula isn’t always right, 2. doesn’t understand volume breaks and supplier economies of scale, and 3. requires you to be able to do actual math and logic to figure it out.)

Mr. Köse’s excellent article reminded me, as Bob Ferrari and I pointed out in a joint series in late spring on how Legacy Sourcing and Planning Solutions Struggle with Supply Chain Challenges, Direct Procurement is Failing. There are three big reasons for this:

1. Direct Procurement CAN NOT be cut off from supply chains, as we outlined in detail in our 7-part series.
2. Everything Mr. Köse’s addresses in his post!
3. Most Analysts and Consultants fall into this fake “visionary” and “guru” category as well! (They’ve never worked in supply chain or worked hand in hand with experts with decades of experience trying to build useful solutions for those experts to use. One of the best example of this is when these f6ckw@ds use third party analyst firm studies to tell you that your headcount is too low or too high or your tech investment too low or too high without having an actual clue what your company actually does or what your Procurement and Supply Chain personnel actually do. [These Masters of Business Annihilation believe they can manage off of a spreadsheet when, again, nothing could be further from the truth. There’s a reason that the first Gilded Age was ruled by Engineers, they actually knew how to run a company! All today’s financiers can do is take a company with stratospheric profit potential and have it come-apart mid-flight, with Boeing being a prime example — if Engineers were in charge, planes wouldn’t be falling apart in the sky AND the revenue and profits would be a lot smoother!])

Over the summer, Bob and I reviewed over 40 recent studies from the past 5 years from big analyst firms and consultancies on the state of Procurement & Supply Chain — and they all have the same two things in common:

1. they all tell you about the same barriers/roadblocks, risks, concerns/priorities, and talent gaps that are facing Procurement and Supply Chain
2. they don’t tell you what to actually do to solve these issues (except, of course, “drop Agentic Gen-AI in” because that will “auto-magically solve everything“) because they don’t have a clue how to address these real world problems!

(Right now we’re trying to figure out how to write our next series, or maybe book, on how you actually address the issues with real process and real supporting technology to get results, assuming, of course, you have real talent that’s been-there, done-that and not these tech-bro AI hipsters that literally can’t create a PO [or even read a contract without putting it through faulty AI first]. It’s quite challenging because, apparently, no one has actually tackled writing something truly helpful before in our joint space and we’re struggling on how to make it useful and digestible in the age of marketing sound-bites!).

The reality is that, just like Procurement has not changed since the first handbook was published 136 years ago, neither has Supply Chain! While Mr. Köse doesn’t explicitly say this, he does allude to the fact that we’ve had global trade for THOUSANDS of years and we’ve always had the same challenges (that revolve around geo-politics, risk, cash-flow, and trust) — it’s just that we’ve replaced paper with digital bits and found new ways to make it more complicated. However, the processes, goals, and realities are the same — and you’d know that if you ever actually worked in or supported global supply chains (and not just pretended you understood what they were to try and sell your shiny new tech toy)! If you don’t understand this, you’re going to continue the 25 years of project failure (where the technology project failure rate is now at an all time high of 88%) and possibly be the next great tech-led supply chain disaster!

Finally, Mr. Köse was right again! Orchestration really is just clueless for the popular kids, selfies included!

P.S. If you haven’t figured out yet that you should be following Mr. Koray Köse on a weekly basis, then figure it out now. You might think that some of his forays into geopolitics or broader supply chain is not all that relevant to your daily Procurement tasks, but the reality is that if you don’t keep up with what’s going on in the world and how that could impact your supply chains beyond tier 1, you’ll be in for a real shock to the system. This is because, when you least expect it, a critical product or component won’t show up, the supplier will be unresponsive, and you’ll have no notice that you immediately need to find a replacement (but because that supplier controlled a significant percentage of market share, there won’t be one). Unlike Billy Idol’s shock to the system, yours won’t feel so good when this happens. (But if you keep up with major events, you can identify those that may impact your supply chain, verify or disqualify, and then start working on mitigations for those that might impact you significantly before it’s too late.)