Author Archives: thedoctor

Dear Procurement, Your AI ProcureTech Vendor Is Out To Eliminate You!

Here’s the dirty little secret they aren’t telling you. They aren’t building “AI Employees” (which aren’t real, by the way) because they want to give you a better, more complete, team which is able to work 24/7 and constantly process data, run analysis, respond to supplier inquiries, and have fresh insights in your inbox in the morning.

They are building “AI Employees” to replace you! Here’s why:

1. You Are The Hardest Sell!

A. You are the hardest negotiator! It’s what you do for a living.
B. You do your homework! It’s hard for them to bluff that no one else does this or we’re giving you a great deal when you’ve done your research and know 3 other vendors have similar capability, you know the quoted pricing from all their competitors, and you’ve talked to your association members and know what they are paying for the vendor’s solution.
C. You’re smart, and you know it. The LMFAO sales tactics CXO ego-stroking doesn’t work on you, and you question everything that sounds too good to be true. You’re one of the few holdouts preventing the ChatGPT-dystopia that would atrophy your cognitive abilities to the point you’d fall for their half-truths and beg for their system (which takes us one more step towards their dark city vision of the future).

2. IT Tries to Kill All Your Selections

You’re the biggest threat to IT’s total corporate dominance on system selection and management. In most organizations, every other department falls in line and eventually uses IT’s recommendations (allowing them to stay with preferred platforms or vendors that give IT the best software and hardware toys for free), but you question everything. You don’t swallow the one-vendor / one-ecosystem BS, the big volume discount BS, or the we-can’t-support-more-SaaS BS because you know Open APIs allow for ecosystem integration, that it’s not volume discount but ROI, and that, other then providing the API keys to the systems that the SaaS you selected has to integrate with, there’s no ongoing support requirements for IT. As a result, IT goes hard against your picks and tries to turn the C-Suite against you, complicating and delaying the deal process (and the longer it takes to sell, the greater the [opportunity] cost of the sale, and the less deals they can close in a year. Remember, to them, it’s not about the delivery, it’s about the close).

3. Your Budget is Baseline

In most organizations, Procurement is not sexy and is still seen as the biggest cost center (because too many executives believe profit is entirely dependent on revenue when anyone who can do basic math should realize that if P=R-E, then keeping expenses down can also be very profitable, and if the cost of goods sold is 90% of R, i.e. R – E = 0.1R, then it would take 9 times the sales to have the same impact on profit as reducing costs by 10%). As a result, your budget is baseline and there’s no wiggle room there, limiting their profit margins if they sell to you. On the flip side, they see other big enterprise tech companies making 80%+ margins for tech-cr@p they haven’t updated in years and the tech-bros raising millions, or billions, for AI with nothing more than ethereal claims of future capability, and they want a piece of the action.

But how do they get that action? Well, build something you can sell to the two biggest budget owners in the corporation: the CEO and the CXO, both of whom have been marketed to 24×7 for the past 3+ years by the A.S.S.H.O.L.E. and have now been completely brainwashed into believing that AI is going to totally transform their businesses while allowing them to lay off 80% of their cost-center resources (which, in their view, includes you!).

They’re only marketing to you to sneak in through the back-door, get your blessing, and then when you help them get in front of the CFO and CEO, off comes the grandma disguise to reveal the big bad wolf that lies beneath — a wolf intent on eliminating your job and your entire department so they can get 1/3 of the overall Procurement budget for their custom AI employees that will do all the costly functions you do, do them 24/7, and increase savings by increasing spend under management because they can strategically source, quick-quote, or auction everything you need to buy. (Even though this is an extremely bad idea. If you don’t know why, read our article on why real Procurement Leaders Listen To Roxette!)

In other words, if someone reaches out to you offering you an AI Employee, slam that door in their face as fast as you can while screaming at them to never show their face again! Because, if you don’t, you might just end up unemployed on the street corner screaming about how AI is ending the world, because we already know the inevitable that will happen once companies start relying on technology that hallucinates, (purposely) lies, fails at math, commits fraud, compromises your code, proliferates extremist views, blackmails you, maintains hit-lists, encourages suicide, lets you die to save itself, contemplates murder, and makes you dependent to the point of psychosis (so if got a headache, don’t take an aspirin or query an LLM). [Hint: it’s not good. There’s a reason I’m not yelling loud enough even though I’m already screaming at the top of my lungs.]

There’s No Such Thing as a Data Scientist!

Last month, Koray Köse wrote a great must-read post on why data scientists and orchestration officers are part of today’s silicon snake oil sales people and not qualified to solve your supply chain problems (my less-than-eloquent rephrasing of his words).

He was totally right in his rant, but I’m going to go one step further. There is no such thing as a “Data Scientist”. You can’t do “Science” on “Data” you don’t understand. You just can’t.

I don’t care how many mathematical models, statistical techniques, or “AI” toolsets you think you know (see my previous rants there), that doesn’t make you a “data” scientist — that makes you a mathematician, statistician, or new age script kiddie. (No better than the cut-and-paste script kiddies that hit the scene on mass before the dot-com crash, if you are old enough to remember it!)

I say this as someone who would best qualify if there was such a thing — PhD in CS with a thesis in multi-dimensional data structures and computational geometry, industry expertise in (Strategic Sourcing Decision) Optimization modelling (in high dimensions), spend analytics, etc. etc. etc. I was doing “big data” (more BS — we’ve always had more data than we could fit in memory on the machine resources we had available) before that was a term too.

Koray is also dead on with respect to PhDs. Even 26 years ago, you did a PhD to prove you could (or to stay in academia), not because it added anything of practicality beyond what you’d learn in a Masters.

However, I have to fact check him on the 50% to 70% supply chain tech project failure, since the latest Bain study puts the tech project failure rate in general at 88% and most of the partial to full failure is with the big players and Big X implementers (which is the majority of supply chain projects). The rate is higher (unless he’s talking full failure).

I am also going to remind him that this problem resonates through Procurement as well, so please don’t found just another ProcureTech company either. There are well over 700 now (see the mega map, and probably closer to 800 now) and we don’t need 100 “solutions” for the same problem that are almost the same. Get across-the-board experience, or at least spend years working with experts that have it, when developing your solutions if you are coming from a pure tech background.

Cutting Edge Tech Is NOT Defined by the C-Suite, …

… Financiers, or the Marketers pushing hype (from the A.S.S.H.O.L.E.) at you 24/7.

Nor is it defined by the algorithms it uses, the software stacks it runs on, or the hardware stacks it makes use of.

Cutting edge tech is ANY and ALL tech that

  • solves one or more significant problems that not being solved by your tech today and
  • does it by automating at least 90% of the tactical data processes that can be automated

It can be based on the latest AI algorithm or twenty year old RPA. It doesn’t matter if it shines a light using a LAMP stack, if it is an edgy MEAN stack, an Austin Powers inspired Grails stack, or even a .NET stack (though the doctor personally shuddered typing those last three caps out). The entire point of enterprise software is to solve your problems.

The point of software is NOT to provide

  • an excuse for a C-Suite to cut his tech-bro buddy a fat check,
  • a new Tulip Market for greedy financiers who think they can score big and get out before the crash, or
  • marketers a platform to pump out pompous poop on a daily basis.

As Mr. Koray Köse penned in a recent piece on LinkedIn on how you are in need of cutting edge technology, the last thing you want to do is take your direction from the VC-pumped C-Levels who do nothing but repeat the marketing garbage they are fed, sometimes changing the baseline of the garbage mid-sentence!

You have to remember:

  • All the VCs and most of the PEs want to create the next unicorn and get rich quick overnight. So most of these VCs and PE firms are pumping huge amounts into companies with little to no product (to support their grand vision that even SAP and Oracle haven’t managed to achieve after 5 decades and trillions of dollars) and directing the majority of that to be spent on buzz-creating sales and marketing (and not real product development). After all, you don’t actually have to create anything beyond buzz to get rich — market crashes throughout history have proven that since Tulip Mania. (What was created there of value? Nothing. But hype made a few men rich and many men poor.)
  • Even though today’s LLMs are dumber than a doorknob (and demonstrate more than any previous generation of the tech that AI should stand for Artificial Idiocy), with performance degrading every iteration (because there is no more data to steal, and the AI engines are now training each other on regurgitated digital garbage), marketers are still taking storytelling to a whole new level (and we mean storytelling because ALL the claims are fake) with a spin that even the Spin Doctors of old would be envious of. (Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong now, right? They want to Make You A Believer so you hand over all your Money when you should Exit … Stage Left and Run To The Hills!)
  • This copy is being pushed onto the C-Suites of all of the other investments in their portfolio with assurances that it’s all true, and being similarly echoed to all of the CXOs that attend the conferences they speak at, the golf outings they are invited to, and the exclusive social gatherings they arrange.

Not one of these groups knows what you need, and two of these groups have absolutely no interest in giving it to you — their interest is all about getting your money, building the hype, inflating the value, and, hopefully, cashing out big before the next hype cycle and/or the inevitable market crash that’s coming.

The technology you need is the technology that is:

  • built with real world problems in mind,
  • tested on real world problems in real companies and proven to deliver, and
  • scalable and extendable to your operations and needs.

This type of tech is built over years and doesn’t use unreliable probabilistic AI at the core. (It runs on traditional, configurable, RPA that is 100% reliable and auditable. Now, this tech might employe AI to help with the configuration by analyzing your systems and processes and self-assessed gap analysis by recommending configurations for you to approve, and that’s okay, because it’s not randomly making decisions, its recommending options and letting you confirm or deny. It might also use SLMs for specific problems where they work a high percentage of the time to jump-start searches, documents, and processes for you, and as long as you retain full control and can accept, modify, or reject, that’s okay too. But everything is built on a solid core, with 100% dependable automation for all key data intake, processing, and pushes that is done without any manual intervention, appropriately calibrated to your business rules, processes, and goals.)

It’s also built slow, rolled out to a small group of beta customers or development partners, and hardened in the field before being rolled out en masse.

And, most importantly, it’s built by a company that is boot-strapped or frugally running on a shoe-string budget from minority SEED investors to get that first version up-and-running successfully in its first 10 customers before that company goes for any VC funding to scale up. A company that has the time to get it right before being under constant pressure to make demanding, if not impossible, sales targets.

Moreover, to have any chance of getting this software, you need to know three things:

  1. how to identify what you need that will form the heart and soul of the RFX,
  2. how to write a good technology RFX and analyze the responses, and
  3. how to identify the right companies to invite to the RFX.

What You Need

For Supply Chain, as Mr. Koray Köse points out, if you need help identifying your true needs and cutting through the noise, he can help you out with that with the eyes of a hawk, the skill of a surgeon, and the wit of a Williams (a Robin Williams). For Procurement, Joël Collin-Demers can slice through your organizational landscape like a hot knife through butter and let you know exactly what you need in priority order.

The Technology RFP

Every consultancy and their mascot claims they can help you here, but you need to be very, very careful.

  • many of their consultants are not technology experts and tend to prioritize features over functions, as that’s all they know
  • many of these firms have partnerships with the (mega) suite players, and you don’t maintain sycophant, sorry, Gold/Platinum/Diamond, status unless you direct a LOT of business their way each year, so they tend to try to fit everyone into one of these buckets
  • many follow the old consulting model of “give the client exactly what he thinks he wants” and don’t take the time to figure out what you actually need and educate you, leading to an RFP that is no better than what you would have written yourself, as they spend half their time questioning you, and the other half writing down your responses

For true success, you need someone who is simultaneously:

  • an expert in the domain,
  • an expert in technology, and
  • not incentivized to help any vendor whatsoever and, preferably
  • an expert in project assurance (but not always necessary)

If you need help writing that ProcureTech / Direct Sourcing/Supply Chain RFP, feel free to reach out. This is my expertise. And for some tips, feel free to start with our recent series on How Do You Write A Good RFP?

Vendor Selection

Very few analysts and consultants know more than a handful of vendors. The big firms focus on the big vendors who cut big cheques, which are the 20-ish same vendors you see in their maps year after year after year. They don’t know about the other 700. Only a few of us independent analysts go far and wide and actually know what is out there and how it can help you.

For ProcureTech, SI should be your first stop. It’s the site that gave you the mega map to open your eyes as to just how wide the playing field is. Moreover, if you need something really niche where the doctor doesn’t have the expertise, he’ll find the right expert to refer you to.

For SupplyChain, Mr. Köse knows a lot of the players. But don’t overlook Bob Ferrari of The Ferrari Group. As one of the original supply chain analysts, he knows all the players and what their platforms can and can’t do inside and out.

And if you reach out to the right experts and get the right help, maybe you can get true cutting edge tech that actually helps you!

Bells and Whistles Lead to Cells and Thistles! Part IV

In Part I, after noting that I’ve been hearing and seeing the following too often lately:

  • smaller vendors struggling to close/losing deals because the bigger/splashier vendors have more “Bells and Whistles”
  • vendors getting lots of (and possibly too much) funding focusing heavy on bells and whistles

I said that we were going to dive into some of the most common bells and whistles and why, in the best case, they’re a complete waste of money and, in the worst case, the thorn prick will end up being so painful that your team will simply stop using the software. (And often do so before the subscription is half, or even a third, up, which leaves you in an expensive subscription jail you cannot stop paying for even though no one is using it.)

We started by diving into Intake before addressing the general situations of Flashy UX and Adaptive AI-Driven Automation which are permeating the space for little to no value whatsoever. In our last post we continued our discussion of the bells and whistles in Source to Pay that offer little to no value and we still need to address a few useless Procure to Pay whistles before we can complete our discussion, but first we have to address another across the board useless feature.

Actual Animated Bells and Whistles (complete with Bell and Whistle Sounds) …

Along with their equivalents.

First off, let me state that this is something I should NOT have to write. Let me also stat that it angers me that in 2025 some companies still mistake flash for substance or believe that it adds any value whatsoever. Not only does flash NOT add substance, but the annoyance factor soon becomes aggravation and leads to users ACTIVELY boycotting the platform you spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions on, and in particular, the users who should be using it daily.

Let me explain with one of the worst examples of this, which is present in some of the (big) intake/orchestration platforms and upstart P2P platforms. Animated images that signal when a user has received a requisition, PO, and purchase order (sometimes complete with bell sounds). Now, to a manager, this looks cool because the system draws an animated graph from requester to purchaser to supplier back to purchaser and shows an animation on request complete (purchaser processed the request), requisition complete (and supplier received the PO), acknowledgement complete (purchaser received the acknowledgement, and possibly a delivery date), invoice received (purchaser approved and sent to Accounts Payable), etc. To an average user who uses the system once a month to make a requisition for something, it looks like it will be very easy peasy to use.

But for the Procurement Buyer who has to deal with, and verify the routings on, 50 requisitions a day and deal with 50 “where is my payment” requests a week because the supplier rep is literally too technologically stupid to both login to the platform AND do two clicks to get to the right search screen and then enter their PO # flawlessly, IT IS AN ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE! (And not the Alice Cooper kind!)

Think about it. REALLY THINK ABOUT IT! They have to review 50 requests, deal with them, reassign them, or just verify them. After every request. they have to deal with an animated graph that just slows them down. Plus, because each request has these big animated logos, maybe they can fit 10 on a screen in a table view, vs. being able to see all 50, sort by type, drill down, reassign in bulk, and move on.

But it gets worse when a supplier accounts receivable rep or seller calls and says what’s the status of my invoice (and for some reason, doesn’t have the PO number because the PO # is in the system he can’t figure out how to get into), and you have to do multiple clicks to even bring up the advanced search/filter tab, and even when you manage to filter down to the 3 day window it’s in, because the supplier batches, them, you have 50 on that day and can only see 10 at a time — and no line item details. Vs. No animations at all, a tabular view with key line items, and the ability to quickly scroll and find the invoice, and a single, quickly scanned, word that shows the status. After a few weeks of animation atrocity, you get so angry and fed up you beg to get the green screen ERP back! I’m not joking here. Your back office people are overworked, and any system that slows them down quickly gets their ire and loathing and if they can avoid it, they will.

P2P: Consumer-Style Catalogs

Your requisitions want a one-click, but your Procurement personnel DON’T want an Amazon style catalog. They don’t want “the best deals today” popping up beside the on-contract / preferred vendor catalog items and the budget owner with catalog authority choosing that off-contract “best-deal” thinking she is saving the organization when, in fact, a failure to meet your contractual commitments negates the rebates you were counting on at quarter’s end.

Moreover, when a user wants to requisition a new phone or laptop, she doesn’t want 20 options if only 2 are company approved for her. Nor does she want a lot of fancy graphics and super deep dives on the main screen, with hard to find “add to cart” and “buy now” options because they are buried in too much text/images.

Buyers want a get-in, find it quick, buy/requisition it now, and get out experience. Procurement personnel want a system that not only enforces policy, but makes buying on the contract easier than doing literally anything else, including going to a third party site and ordering something on the P-Card. Remember, as a fellow analyst likes to say, humans are lazy and if doing it right is easier than doing it wrong, they’ll do it right. (As a classic example of this, take music piracy. It was rampant in the mid to late 90s, but as more on-line / streaming options, like Apple Music and Spotify, came online it dropped suddenly because getting what you wanted at the best quality was cheaply and easier to do legally. Make Procurement like that, and policies just get followed.)

There are other examples, but by now you should get the point. Buy a solution because it has the breadth and depth you need, NOT because it has bells and whistles, because as soon as the solution is found lacking, usage will drop. Moreover, if all the solution does is annoy your daily users with useless bells and whistles, they will do their best to stop using it entirely!

To repeat one more, and hopefully final, time, as we said in the last three parts, bells and whistles look and sound cool, until you realize that the ringing can be deafening to the point it gives you such a headache that you can’t get your work done. So don’t get lured in by the bells and whistles, focus on real solutions that will make the majority of your work easy and the remaining minority possible, even if the solution doesn’t look much better than the green screen you have now. You want solutions, not shock-and-awe where only shock remains once you realize the awe was fabricated.