Author Archives: thedoctor
You Wouldn’t Let Your Banker Pick Out Your Job …
So why do you let a systems implementor / integrator choose your Sourcing / Procurement system???
And while you might initially believe that this simile is far-fetched, the reality is that it’s very close to home. While a banker is the right partner to help you manage your money, he or she is probably the worst person to figure out the right job for you given that he or she doesn’t really know you. Similarly, while you’re preferred implementation / integration partner is probably the best company out there to implement the platform that will control the majority of your organizational spending, chances are that partner has no knowledge of the true breadth of your Procurement processes work and no clue what the right kind of system for the organization would be. And as a result, just like a banker might steer you towards a job you’d fail miserably at (and lose, leaving you without a pay cheque), an implementor / integrator might steer you towards a system that will not work at all for your organization, and cost your organization millions in the process.
Furthermore, this is also true for any consultancy that has partnerships with a select group of source-to-pay vendors. In fact, taking advice from any of the consultancies that have partnerships with a select group of source-to-pay vendors is MORE risky than an implementation partner without any relationships. Why? Because these consultancies, by way of their partnerships, tend to ONLY recommend their partners because:
- that’s all they tend to implement, and know, and
- their partnerships provide them with referral fees, guaranteed services, and / or higher margins (and the senior partners at these consultancies mandate that these options are always recommended)
So, if your preferred consulting partner only has relationships with platforms that are primarily for indirect S2P, but your organization is primarily direct S2P, your organization’s chances of getting a good recommendation are zero. That’s right. Zero! (Even worse than a generic systems implementor with no knowledge of the space doing a Google search, coming up with five vendors, and making a random recommendation — at least then you have a 20% chance of getting a good recommendation!)
In other words, if you want a good recommendation, you have to ask a neutral third party, like an analyst firm, a niche consultancy which does not do implementations (and has no partnerships), or a consultancy that uses third party evaluations to provide you with the best recommendations it can, leaving aside any partnerships the consultancy might have. (For example, such a consultancy could license Spend Matters Customer Maps, which are Solution Maps with custom personas defined specific to the client needs, to help your organization identify the best fits and then help your organization with the RFIs to identify the best-of-the-best).
Otherwise, the doctor can pretty much guarantee you’re always going to be recommended vendors A and B (and maybe C) in North America and vendors X and Y (and maybe Z) in Europe … even though there are 8 S2P platforms and dozens of best-of-breed solution providers that might be right for you (as Solution Map ranks over 50 and plans to add many more over time). [Not that A, B, C, X, Y, and Z aren’t good in the right situation — but in S2P, one-size does not fit all — especially when you consider direct vs indirect, product vs service, head vs tail spend, strategic process requirements, optimization and analytics needs, automation, etc. — and the fact that some providers never get recommended even though for certain industries they are usually the best choice.]
So again, unless you want a quick way to triple your losses, don’t let an implementor choose your S2P platform. You choose it, and as per a recent piece of the doctor‘s over on Spend Matters, you take what you want!
Synertrade: Looking Forward to Powering Inter-Planetary Supply Management
the doctor thoroughly enjoyed the theme of last week’s Synertrade Digital Procurement Summit, which was the “Mars Age of Procurement”. Not just because it was forward thinking, but because a vendor finally proved to SI that at least some of their staff have truly been following the doctor‘s writings for years (including the writings here on SI).
Long time readers will recall that back in 2013 SI asked Why Aren’t We on Mars Yet? because General Dynamics promised us a manned mission to mars in 1975 back in 1963 and almost 40 years had passed since the promise and a mission to mars still looked to be decades out. And it wasn’t just interest in the space race that prompted this — it was knowing that this would force us to look ahead to the next generation of Supply Management challenges (and start thinking about truly next generation solutions to address them).
Simply put, it’s one thing to source everything needed to build and equip a shuttle for an International Space Station (ISS) mission, another to build and equip a craft for a mission that could easily span half a decade, and another challenge yet to manage the reverse transport of recyclable products and any raw materials we may be able to mine from Mars. So, as you can imagine, seeing a conference embrace a theme around the “Mars Age of Procurement”, even if only metaphorical, is very satisfying as it means the vendor knows that supply management challenges are always going to increase in complexity as our goals and needs evolve, that a company needs to take a long term vision in order to adapt and succeed, and that they understood the hidden metaphor the doctor put forward all those years ago.
Especially since times have changed in the six years since the article was penned. Now that the space race has become the chosen pet project of the tech billionaires, we are being told that we could see a mission to Mars by as early as 2038, which, while over sixty years late according to the General Dynamics timeline, is less than two decades in the future and gives us hope that we may yet again try to explore beyond the planet.
And this is another reason SI is very satisfied with the conference theme! The mere fact that an IT company, which has already survived for two decades as a stand-alone player with a single code base that has never grown by acquisition, wishes to be around as a stand-alone company in twenty years is truly admirable. We are in an industry where most companies want to see how fast they can get acquired or merged with another company at an investment multiple that makes the investors and founders rich; an industry that has already become the new “hot” landscape for Private Equity (PE) firms looking to roll-up, take public, or flip as many companies as they can in the Source-to-Pay (S2P) space now that it has three stand-alone Unicorns (valued at over 1 Billion); and an industry that creates solutions required by every single mid-size or larger company in the world. (All successful growing companies buy and sell — that’s just how business works.) When you consider all that, the fact that Synertrade is one of the few platforms that has deep support for direct (materials) and optimization, it’s leadership rankings from multiple analyst firms (including Spend Matter’s Source-to-Pay Solution Maps), and the fact that Synertrade, especially over the past few years, has grown to be a dominant player in the Source-to-Pay space (especially in Europe) that has been increasing it’s customer base by over 15% year-over-year and it’s revenue by about 30% year-over-year for the last four years, this is very notable.
And yes, the event was very well done. For more insight into the event, SI is directing you to the doctor’s pieces over on Spend Matters which talk about some of the key insights brought forward.
How Do You Identify Dead Companies Still Standing?
They still use Excel.
We’ve known for over a decade now that errors in spreadsheets are pandemic. Needless to say that it boggles my mind that Microsoft Excel still continues to be the application of choice for supply chain and logistics managers around the world. Why do we need to remind you that Fidelity lost 2.6 Billion as a result of a spreadsheet error, that Fannie Mae made a 1.13 Billion honest mistake with a spreadsheet, and RedEnvelope lost more than a quarter of their value in a single day after they warned of a fourth-quarter loss due to a spreadsheet-based budgeting error that resulted in an overestimate of gross margins.
How long is it going to be before someone accidentally uses a plus sign instead of a minus sign in a profit formula and forgets to uncap an inventory calculation and instead of ordering 100,000 units of a profitable product, instead orders 1,000,000 units of a product that actually results in significant losses at the target sale price, for which the market demand is weak, ties up all of the organization’s working capital, and essentially bankrupts the company?
My guess, with the steadily increasing complexity of S&OP, JIT inventory management models, and supply chains, any day now! But, maybe after a few companies are brought to their figurative knees from spreadsheet errors, we’ll see the day when Excel is sh!tcanned along with the dinosaurs who still think it has any more use than a HP or TI calculator.
It’s time for anyone still using Excel to wake up and realize we don’t live in Walt Disneyland and that the story of the prince and the pauper is a fairytale. A pauper is not going to become the benefactor of princely riches by trying to save money on real supply chain and logistics software by stretching Excel to the limits just so that it can temporarily inflate the balance sheet or the profit and loss statement. In today’s uber-connected world, appearances don’t account for much. It’s not long before someone digs deep and uncovers the truth.
There’s a reason why customers are demanding end-to-end visibility of their supply chains, including those of their supply chains logistics’ partners. And a reason customers ow expect all of their suppliers and business partners on the supply chain (including logistics providers) to participate in a supply chain network. It’s because they know that the only way they can accurately manage their supply chain is to keep on top of it, that the only way they can build accurate models is with accurate data gathered from partners, and that the best reports they are going to get are going to come from supply chain visibility and planning software plugged into these “networks” (where, in reality, these are “enterprise communities” that allow the necessary collaboration, not “consumer [social] networks” where you can poke, prod, and shake your buddy for no apparent reason).
In other words, Excel has become the new paper, and, like paper, it needs to be abandoned. So if you don’t want to be the pauper, move off of this outdated technology and onto solutions designed for your supply management needs. With a plethora of Best-of-Breed solutions on the market, including modern Source-to-Pay solutions, designed for large and small providers, it’s extremely likely that there’s at least one solution that meets your needs almost exactly without too much tweaking. If you look hard enough, the doctor would bet that there’s at least three, or will be before you can look twice
Suppliers in the Solution Economy are NOT Suppliers in the Industrial Economy
Given that, in today’s Solution Economy, a company that suppliers a customer with a product or service often outsources the production of that product, or the implementation of the service, to a third party, the company needs to thoroughly understand its suppliers’ strengths and weaknesses to select the right supplier to manufacture that product or provide the service to the end consumer.
This means that, where its suppliers are concerned, a company needs to have a much better understanding of its suppliers than it did in the industrial economy. This means that a company has to start by:
- Asking different questions, much more often
- Observing the supplier directly
The questions need to move away from “do you have the facilities to make this product” to “what value-add do you add in the term of usability, reliability, or warranty support that we can use to meet the needs and want of our customers” and the questions have to be asked every time the customer needs change, not just once every three years when the category is resourced. You may not be able to change suppliers or alter the contract, but if you put in continual improvement and collaborative design clauses, you can at least make sure that subsequent iterations improve in the right direction. Similarly, on the service front, the focus should move from “do you provide service X” to “give us examples of how your delivery of service X met the following customer values and led to higher satisfaction ratings”.
Similarly, it’s not enough to just do a plant visit during the supplier qualification phase. There needs to be continual observation and interaction through the full contract life-cycle to make sure that the supplier undertakes continual improvement efforts, that issues are quickly identified and brought to your attention if they can not be quickly resolved, and that the level of professionalism and attention paid to you does not decrease over time as new customers enter the pipeline.
In other words, it’s not just send out an RFQ, select a supplier, have the product shipped to the end consumer … it’s make sure it’s the right product that meet’s the consumers needs and gets there at the right time with the right level of usability and reliability.