We’re continuing our foray into the top barriers to success that we outlined in our top barriers post that chronicles the barriers that keep coming up over and over again in every Procurement survey in our effort to ensure that you don’t have to read another state of procurement study for the next 5 years. Now it’s the barrier of organizational support and, specifically, technical support. (Most organizations just don’t have the IT Crowd they need!)

A Brief History …

As we discussed with the top barrier to success, siloed ways of working, with each successive innovation, business, and process improvement, became more complex and required more education and experience to perform. As a result, with each successive innovation, the available talent pool shrinks. Moreover, with the average large organization having eight (8) or more departments (Finance, Ops, HR, Legal, Sales, Marketing, IT, R&D, Manufacturing, Procurement, Supply Chain, Logistics, Risk Management, etc.), each department is always stretched and needs more organizational support. Plus, the number of IT systems both available and implemented in an average organization has skyrocketed from a handful (an accounting system, a MRP, and basic word processing) to, according to a recent Zylo survey, 660+ SaaS applications (on top of dozens of installed systems). (That’s average. Some organizations have more than 1,000 SaaS applications!) Despite this scary fact, there’s still only one understaffed IT department.

The Problem

In a nutshell, due to the proliferation of complex processes and their component tasks as well as the combinatorial explosion of systems and software to implement and, theoretically, support those tasks, there has been a similar, combinatorial, growth in the need for organizational and IT/Tech execution support in each enterprise department.

The Necessary Realization

The answer here is not easy. It’s not even easy to explain all of the factors you need to understand. But we will try.

First of all, as per an upcoming barrier to success, there is a talent gap in many areas. This is true even if there isn’t a shortage of available talent in the market since organizations have fixed budgets and can’t always hire all of the talent the organization could use, so there could still be a talent gap internally.

Secondly, even if the organization has talent capable of dealing with every support requirement, there’s only so many hours in a day and only so many individual support calls that an overworked (IT) support employee can take.

Thirdly, despite promises that technology would solve everything since the introduction of the first MRP (over 60 years ago), it hasn’t, and the technology project failure rates, which have never dropped below 66%, have been rapidly rising for the past 5 years or so and recently reached an all-time high of 88% (with some informal and formal indications, including a recent MIT study, that AI technology project failure rates are now as high as 95%). (See our article on two and a half decades of project failure.)

As a result, there is no perfect or simple solution to this one. However, there is a simply stated solution, and it is this:

Identify all of the tasks and processes that can be automated and automate them. (And, as per many, many articles on this site — this does NOT mean [Gen]-AI!)

However, this is easier said than done. It requires the classic people – process – technology approach which involves your best people identifying and documenting the right process, along with all of the exceptions, then figuring out what can be automated with technology, and finally taking the time to identify the right technology, define the implementation plan, oversee the implementation, do the testing and validation, and train all of the stakeholders who have to interact with it how to do so appropriately. In other words, as SI likes to say, it’s the modernized talent – transition – technology approach.

This has to be done for each process individually, and the time and effort required will vary. Especially when it comes time to identifying the right technology which, the majority of the time, will not be the tech-du-jour in the latest hype cycle. Sometimes it will be a 60 year old algorithm wrapped in 20 year old RPA. It’s not the tech, it’s the outcome … and whatever gets you there as quickly, efficiently, and free of unnecessary human effort as possible. (Remember, machines are great at thunking, as they can do trillions of calculations in the time it takes us to do 10, which is something we are not good at; but they are not great at thinking, as they are not intelligent, but that is something we are good at — but yet we spend 80%+ of our time doing tactical data processing best left to machines when we should be more focused on strategic decisions and the human element of business.)

It will take a lot of time, but if the organization as a whole follows the 80/20 rule, and focusses in on the processes that are taking the most time and deals with those first, one by one, and doesn’t fall for the vendor and consultancy hype and get misled down the wrong path, within a few years, they will start to make significant progress and within a decade will have all of the time consuming processes under control. (After all, the average journey to best in class by a committed organization is eight (8) years, as determined by the Hackett group in the 2000s.) In fact, within a couple of years of just automating one process at a time, you’ll will suddenly realize that you have made significant strides well beyond what the big consultancies will promise, but never deliver with big-bang AI projects that never end.)

The Technological Requirements

The technological requirements are considerable and require supply chain aware sourcing and sourcing aware supply chain and expertise from source to sink and back again on both sides.

A continuing reminder that if you want guidance in the short term, hope that your favourite provider reaches out to Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters or the doctor and enables us to focus on writing the series (or in-depth e-book) explaining what modern Procurement and Supply Chain Tech needs to look like (and how it needs to be implemented) to address the challenges, reduce the risks, and address the priorities versus just dripping out tidbits as free time permits.

We’re continuing our foray into the top barriers to success that we outlined in our top barriers post that chronicles the barriers that keep coming up over and over again in every Procurement survey in our effort to ensure that you don’t have to read another state of procurement study for the next 5 years. Our barrier today is lack of funding.

A Brief History …

This ties into the barrier of insufficient business wide support which will be discussed in a future installment and it relates to the barrier of silos that we discussed in our first installment. The simple fact of the matter is that, as more and more departments were created, the piece of the pie each department received shank. Similarly, as system and process needs increased, the costs to operate increased. This double edge sword slashes budgets to the bone.

The Problem

As a result of the explosion in departments, and departmental needs, you have more departments fighting for more pie than actually exists. That’s the problem in a nutshell!

The Necessary Realization

Sadly there is no real solution here. Because, while theoretically, the solution is to:

• build realistic ROI models and
• prove the value incrementally with a staged implementation of the plan the ROI models were built on

every other department can do that as well, and why should you get more pie than they do?

Your only chance of getting your fair share of the pie, and getting it first, is to:

• Prove the value before the request goes in.

You will need to find a very low cost tool, pseudo-hack your own solution for RFX, Analytics, SXM, Invoice Automation, etc., and demonstrate a significant value over a significant period time, at least a quarter, and preferably two or three quarters or find a low cost mid-market sourcing execution provider that has a barebones offering you can put on the P-Card for your core team. Then, build a realistic ROI model that demonstrates the full value you could extract from your process if you could upgrade your solution to handle all activities of the type (which might require buying a mature for-purpose solution from a real Sourcing and/or Procurement vendor that has been in business for half a decade to a decade and has all the workflows and capabilities you need to replace the low-cost startup minimal tools you are using now or, if you just licensed the core module from a mini-suite provider for a small number of users, license the rest of the suite, equip the rest of the Procurement organization, and contract some services to customize the workflows and capabilities as needed). The reality is that most low cost solutions or start-ups are 60% solutions at best and moving up and scaling out to 80% or 90% solution will have a huge increase on ROI (as a result of a huge increase in efficiency).

The Technological Requirements

The technological requirements are considerable and require supply chain aware sourcing and sourcing aware supply chain and expertise from source to sink and back again on both sides.

A reminder that if you want to address the problem once and for all, you need the right technology with the right capabilities that support the right processes. If you want some guidance into what this is, hope that your favourite provider reaches out to Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters or the doctor and enables us to focus on writing the not yet written series (or in-depth e-book) explaining what modern Procurement and Supply Chain Tech needs to look like (and how it needs to be implemented) to address the challenges, reduce the risks, and address the priorities. Since most of it has not yet been written, it’s a big effort that, for now, we will only be able to drip out as free time permits in the future.

We’re continuing our foray into the top barriers to success that we outlined in our top barriers post that chronicles the barriers that keep coming up over and over again in every Procurement survey in our effort to ensure that you don’t have to read another state of procurement study for the next 5 years. Today we tackle category and market complexity.

A Brief History …

Simply put, the explosion in innovation since the Gilded Age, coupled with the rampant rise in outsourcing since the information age began, has led to continual increases in product complexity, which has, logically, led to continual increases in category complexity. Category complexity combined with a rapid uptick in outsourcing since the internet age began has led to great increases in market complexity as well.

We’ve went from vertically integrated companies at the beginning of the Gilded Age one hundred and fifty (150) years ago, to companies that rely on supply chains of over 10,000 players to produce our extremely complex computing devices. Think about that. As you descend into the deep dark tiers of your supply chain beyond the few thousand tier 1 suppliers you rely on as a large organization, you go from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of suppliers who are all necessary to deliver your products, and if any single one of those produces a singularly unique component, part, or material that can’t be produced by any other supplier in the complex supply ecosystem (that Bob Ferrari and the doctor discussed in Part V of our Direct Sourcing & Supply Chain Series on how Supply Chains have become Ecosystems), it could put an end to an entire category of offerings and significantly impact, and maybe even bankrupt, your business.

That is why categories and markets are now so complex.

The Problem

There’s an old adage that you can’t manage what you don’t understand (and you really can’t, and that’s why we refer to fresh-faced MBAs who’ve never studied anything but business or done any work in the real world and try to run businesses off of spreadsheets Masters of Business Annihilation), and the corollary in Procurement is you can’t buy what you don’t understand. If you don’t fully understand not only what the product needs to do, but what specs it needs to meet for R&D, Manufacturing, or your client, you don’t always know when there are substitutes that these departments aren’t considering and when there aren’t.

In other words, you need to have a deep understanding of the product and department you’re buying for, and that understanding has to be as deep as your understanding of Procurement. There’s a reason that, in the old days, Procurement was the Island of Misfit Toys and consisted of employees who didn’t cut it elsewhere in the business (and couldn’t be fired due to nepotism) and employees nearing retirement in engineering, HR, etc. who were “rewarded” with an easier job. This is because part of purchasing, especially for indirect or cookie-cutter products, was just going through catalogs and negotiating bulk discounts and even the office dunce could do that okay. And the other part required really understanding what the R&D and manufacturing teams needed.

In other words, Procurement wasn’t ready for the complexity, couldn’t predict or deal with the volatility, and definitely couldn’t take advantage of market saturation when it did occur.

The Necessary Realization

Don’t hire graduates specializing in logistics, operations, and or procurement.

Seriously. Don’t! Hire mathematicians, manufacturing floor managers, and engineers and train them in Procurement to support logistics, R&D/Engineering/Manufacturing, and direct Supply Chain Management. Hire commercial lawyers who like to negotiate and train them on Procurement, vs Sales, best practices to support legal and commercial negotiations. For services, hire ex-consultants who used to perform the services. Don’t hire “Procurement” people who only know the theory. Just like it’s much easier to teach a mathematician accounting than to teach an accountant advanced mathematics, it’s much easier to teach Procurement to a highly trained engineer, lawyer, or consultant with real-world on-the-floor experience than to teach a fresh-faced inexperienced grad with no real world business experience on how a business actually operates.

If you bring back the training, which is a topic we’ll discuss in more depth in a future installment of this series, then you can bring in true experts in a category with the ability to manage the complexity, and the category complexity won’t be such a problem.

The Technological Requirements

The technological requirements are considerable and require supply chain aware sourcing and sourcing aware supply chain and expertise from source to sink and back again on both sides.

A reminder that if you want to address the problem once and for all, you need the right technology with the right capabilities that support the right processes. If you want some guidance into what this is, hope that your favourite provider reaches out to Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters or the doctor and enables us to focus on writing the not yet written series (or in-depth e-book) explaining what modern Procurement and Supply Chain Tech needs to look like (and how it needs to be implemented) to address the challenges, reduce the risks, and address the priorities. Since most of it has not yet been written, it’s a big effort that, for now, we will only be able to drip out as free time permits in the future.

In our first article we where You Don’t Need To Read Another State of Procurement Study for the Next 5 Years!, we told you that all of these studies more or less say the same thing year after year with only minor deviations after a decade. Having compared all of the hot trends for 2024 to the trends from a decade ago (since SI, unlike some sites that purge the majority of their history when they do a site upgrade/migration, has its entire 19 year history intact), we noted that the only differences now versus then are:

• Gen-AI is the new fluffy magic cloud
• Fake-take (sorry, intake) is the new dangerous and dysfunctional dashboard

and that these are, lo and behold, the tech-du-jour!

Then, in our last article on The Top Barriers/Roadblocks to Success/Challenges in Procurement we noted that since the only difference between the majority of these studies is the technology enablement theme the report was trying to sell, there was no need to keep reading them every year if you understood the core issues, namely, the barriers, risks, and concerns. So we decided that we were going to ease you of this burden by addressing the core issues that underlie your problems, explain what they are, help you understand why they keep coming back, and thereby give you some of the foundations to start attacking them. Today we’re starting with the most commonly citied barrier: siloed ways of working.

A Brief History …

You can thank the industrial revolution for this one. Not only did it usher in the Gilded Age^* (as partially documented by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book The Gilded Age), but it ushered in the need for increased specialization, which began the process of compartmentalizing business operations into multiple functions beyond just “management” and “workforce”. It literally started with the production line, where different people had specific jobs, and then carried over into the back-office where Purchasing was separated from Accounting and Sales (and yes, modern Purchasing dates back to the Industrial Revolution which saw the publication of the first published manual we know of in 1887: Handbook of Railway Supplies).

During war time, we saw the emergence of Human Resource departments due to the massive labour demands (and the resulting shortage of workforce). Once Radio, in 1931, and then TV, in 1955, reached the majority of households in North America, the age of the Marketing Mad Men was ushered in and Marketing separated out as a critical function. Then, as outsourcing began to uptick in the 1960s (primarily with EDS that led IT outsourcing in the late 1960s), and really took off in the 1980s when the other big firms (and McKinsey in particular) started touting outsourcing in general (especially for the production of commodity goods) as the way to lower costs, we had true separation of Supply Chain and Logistics in most organizations that didn’t have it before (because they traditionally only bought raw materials from countries they didn’t operate in through Purchasing). Finally, when Purchasing needed to become more strategic, we had the rise in Procurement in the 2000s.

In summary, over the past 150 years, the net effect of “innovation” has only been to further fragment the business into more-and-more smaller task-focused units, each with their own systems, methodologies, software, and language, which has only resulted in an increasing divide.

The Problem

In short, we’ve forgotten that while it might be important to breakdown complex systems and processes into discrete tasks so that they can be managed by people and systems (and especially when each of those tasks requires advanced education, experience, knowledge, or rule sets), it’s also important not to lose sight of the forest in favour of the individual trees.

In addition to breaking down tasks, we’ve also broken down the management of the tasks, and the picture that is used in the decision making by the managers of the task. As a result, we’ve created a situation where everyone works and makes decisions independently with no understanding of the ramifications and impacts of their decisions on other parts of the business. Nowhere is this more evident than in Procurement (which is tasked to save money), Supply Chain (which is tasked to assure supply), or Logistics (which is tasked to get the supply in on time and the customer orders delivered on time).

The reality is that you can’t save money in Procurement simply by accepting a lower bid if that lower bid is from a supplier who can’t deliver the quantity you need on time (or delivers a lower quality with a higher defect rate) because not only do you lose sales but you also lose savings if you don’t hit the guaranteed volumes (for the negotiated discount) because sales dropped or if you have to emergency source replacements from a more expensive competitor charging above market rates. Nor do you have supply assurance in Supply Chain if you don’t ensure that the contracted parties meet your production, quality, and testing standards before the contract is signed or if you don’t have visibility into current demands vs. the current re-order schedule because a demand spike will result in a stock out if the re-orders are set to auto-pilot by Procurement to re-order monthly assuming flat sales. Furthermore, you certainly can’t hit delivery deadlines in Logistics if the new factory that was chosen in China is 1,000 miles further from the port in a locale that isn’t serviced by any of your contracted carriers who can guarantee port delivery times (to make sure it gets on the next ship) or any carriers that will give you such guarantees. Procurement needs visibility into delivery times and quality levels to select a suitable factory. Supply Chain needs visibility into demand and the re-order schedule to ensure supply. Logistics needs insight into required delivery times and current options to meet those mandates, and it needs it with enough time to change carriers and routings and modes if the current plan won’t work.

In other words, we’ve forgotten that while specific complex functions are best accomplished as a sequence of discrete tasks that can be masted by appropriately educated, experienced, and/or trained people and agentic systems (no AI needed, by the way; but that’s another series), the management thereof is best done from a holistic viewpoint. As Dirk Gently believes, everything is connected and losing that connectivity is what is crippling many business units today because they don’t have the data, insights, and holistic wisdom to make the right decision that balances the competing priorities which, unsurprisingly, is also one of the biggest barriers to success.

The Necessary Realization

The silos aren’t going away. No one is going to give up their fiefdom and even if enough of the fiefdom rulers retire, no one knows how to run an integrated business anymore. (This most definitely includes MBAs who are the new Masters of Business Annihilation as most of them try to run a business from a spreadsheet with no actual understanding of what the business does and how it does it. They all forgot that the super rich “railroad tycoons” of the industrial era were all brilliant Engineers who knew exactly what the business made, how it was made, what was required, who was required, what it cost, and what it didn’t.) But, in the end, the silos aren’t really the problem.

According to the survey, the problem is the siloed ways of working, but they aren’t going away either. Systems, processes, and tasks are just too complex to re-integrate as many tasks now are already so complex that there is a shortage of talent to accomplish them. (And don’t think AI is going to save you here. The AI that works is that designed for precise, well defined tasks, not systems thereof.) Fortunately, it’s not the siloed ways of working that’s the problem, it’s the siloed decision making.

While the siloed decision making isn’t going away either (because then the fiefdom managers wouldn’t have a fiefdom anymore), it’s only a problem because the decisions are made in isolation. If the decisions were made against the bigger picture, made with the same (agreed upon) priorities (in mind), and made in the best interests of the business, while the decisions might not be perfect, they’d be pretty close most of the time. Just as the Pareto Principle tells us, if we can identify and agree on the major issues and priorities, that 20%, and make the right decisions against those, we’ll get 80% of the potential results, and for most businesses, that would be more than good enough (and years beyond where they are today).

The key to making this happen is Data Harmonization and the Integrated Strategic, Tactical, and Operational Framework that the doctor and Bob Ferrari (of Supply Chain Matters) presented in our 7-part series on Direct Sourcing and Supply Chain Planning (summarized in Part 7).

Even SAP has pivoted to data harmonization and Unity Analytics because it realizes that there is no more inherent value in its Business Data Cloud than any of the other modules, systems, and platforms it has brought to market over the past fifty (50) years unless the business can get a unified view to do unified planning and execution. If you can harmonize your data through a central business intelligence platform so that all business units that are part of the source-to-supply-to-service process flow, and feed that data into modelling platforms that can synch that data with agreed upon priorities, then at least the decisions, while still technically siloed, will be made with the collective in mind and while there might still be some issues, we guarantee it will no longer be a barrier to success (but might find its way onto a top opportunities list for optimization, but at least you’d finally be taking a step forward).

The Technological Requirements

The technological requirements are considerable and require supply chain aware sourcing and sourcing aware supply chain and expertise from source to sink and back again on both sides.

In order to address the problem once and for all, you need the right technology with the right capabilities that support the right processes. If you want some guidance into what this is, tell your favourite provider to reach out to Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters or the doctor as we’d love to write the series explaining what modern Procurement and Supply Chain Tech needs to look like (and how it needs to be implemented) to address the challenges, reduce the risks, and address the priorities. Since this has NEVER been inked (because the studies continue to focus on just documenting what these challenges, risks, and priorities are, not solving them), it’s a considerable effort to say the least. But if, instead of sponsoring the same old consulting or analyst survey year after year after year they wanted to sponsor something new, we’d definitely be interested in creating this for you! Otherwise, you’ll have to wait years and years as we can only drip our insights out as our free time permits or beg Pierre Mitchell to de-mothball and share his writings from the early 2000s (when he was at AMR and Hackett as Pierre, along with Chris Sawchuk, are among the very few analysts left in our space from the early days and Pierre actually addressed some of these challenges and priorities way back when.) Note that before we can even start writing the true requirements, this blog has thirty (30) barriers, risks, and concerns that need to be explained — each of which will require its own article!

^* Don’t worry if you are American and don’t know what the Gilded Age is — you will soon! Your administration is doing its best to usher in a new Gilded Age.