Category Archives: Best Practices

A New Year Will Soon Be Upon Us? Are You Ready for The Coming Changes?

Where Procurement is concerned, the more things change, the more things stay the same is one thing you can count on. Very little changes year-over-year, and that’s probably why the futurists keep pushing the same trends year after year, including those trends old enough to be in many historian’s ancient history books. (We’re not joking. Take globalization, governmental regulations, and supply chain risk for example. These have been issues and trends since “global” trade began between Egypt and Mesopotamia, which occurred over 5,000 years ago. What’s “future” about that?)

Moreover, a best practice, even if its only been adopted by the leading organizations, is not a future trend. It is an ongoing trend if it started a few years ago, but if the leading organizations adopted the practice ten years ago, then it is not even an ongoing trend. It is a past trend that, either due to lack of maturity, resources, or relevance, didn’t cross the chasm. A current, ongoing, trend is something that just in the last few years and is just reaching the point where it will cross the chasm and a future trend is one that has only recently been identified and still in the process of being adopted by the early adopters, which, in Procurement, would be the Hackett Group top 8%.

However, while the changes may be small and few and far between, they do happen, and over time they accumulate and occasionally lead to big breakthroughs which launch new trends. These trends, in the early stages, are the ones you care about. Not trends that were forming ten years ago, because everyone already knows about them, including every competitor you have, and not possible trends ten years out, because, in the interim, the future could diverge significantly from the future required for that trend to materialize. Trends that are in the early stages of formation today. Trends that, if you start preparing for them, put you in the Procurement Leaders camp and keep you there.

Those trends, and only those trends that make you a leader, are the trends that Sourcing Innovation talks about in its latest white-paper on Top Ten Trends for Supply Management Value Generation in 2015 (registration required). Two years ago, SI told you about the top ten things that an organization could do to reign in rapidly rising costs before hyperinflation in key categories put its profitability at risk in its white paper on The top Ten Things to Do in 2013 to Control Costs (registration required). Then, one year ago, SI told you how to mine the goldmine of savings potential an untapped organization is sitting on through the proper application of The Top Ten Technologies for Supply Management Savings Today (registration required).
Now that your organization has its costs are under control and a proper technology infrastructure in place for leading-edge Supply Management, it’s ready to tackle Top Ten Trends for Supply Management Value Generation in 2015 and get processes and programs in place to capitalize on opportunities before the competition.

To find out what the Top Ten Trends for Supply Management Value Generation in 2015 are and what to do about it, download this new Sourcing Innovation white paper, sponsored by BravoSolution, today!

On The First Day of Christmas

My SI gave to me

A glimpse into the eventuality …

Download SI’s latest white papers (registration required) on:

  • Top Ten Trends for Supply Management Value Generation in 2015 sponsored by BravoSolution
  • Optimization, What Comes Next sponsored by Trade Extensions
  • The Procurement Marketplace and The Power of Compliance sponsored by Vinimaya
  • The Benefits of an Integrated Source-to-Settle Platform sponsored by ivalua
  • An End-to-End Invoice Automation Framework sponsored by Nipendo

And start preparing for what might lie in your organizational future!

Driving Stakeholder Engagement


Today’s guest post is from Diego De La Garza, a Senior Project Manager at Source One Management Services and a regularly sourced pundit for sourcing issues in Latin America. As Senior Project Manager, he leads a team of internal resources in the development of strategies to reduce costs and increase service levels for clients.

When organizations undertake new sourcing initiatives, much is said about setting clear objectives for the parties involved and establishing attainable timelines. However, stakeholder engagement is often neglected. Regardless of their business unit, stakeholders will only participate when they clearly understand the process and appreciate the value that strategic sourcing can deliver. However, unlike a timeline or objective, stakeholder engagement may be volatile and cannot just be monitored. It needs to be driven. How quick and how much all stakeholders engage will be paramount to maximize the success of the initiative.

So how, do we drive stakeholder engagement in general? First of all, the expectations need to be adequately communicated to all stakeholders, and their feedback must be requested upfront. The stakeholders’ needs, concerns, and requirements are unique and must be understood. Empathizing with the stakeholders will allow them to see the engagement as an opportunity to drive results, and a clear chance for them to add value that otherwise would be limited due to resource constraints.

The key with communicating with stakeholders is speaking their language. In other words, we cannot engage stakeholders in the finance department by speaking in the terms of the marketing team, and IT will not understand why an initiative is important to Finance. Ongoing communication is the only way a stakeholder will understand his or her requirements are being accounted for.

Stakeholders should also identify the parties involved. In cases where strategic sourcing consulting firms are employed, stakeholders can be offered information, expertise, additional resources, or access to data that will support a successful sourcing engagement. All stakeholders involve must be able to understand what this external party brings to the table, how to collaborate more effectively with that third party, and how to utilize these resources available at their disposal.

Another key ingredient for stakeholder engagement comes from the higher levels of the organization and entails strong sponsorship. Sponsorship drives stakeholder engagement because it acts as the voice within the organization. When senior leadership establishes a deep commitment within a sourcing initiative, it validates efforts and aligns departments. Even when expectations are clear, and roles are well defined, stakeholders who perceive low levels of sponsorship will not engage to their full potential or will lose interest quick.

Stakeholder engagement is essential because it creates collaboration across business units, even in cases where sponsorship is lacking, or other stakeholders seem disinterested. When stakeholders are engaged, they become loyal supporters of the sourcing initiative. Driving shareholder engagement is a dedicated effort. As needs change and evolve, checks and balances should be managed throughout in order to increase the success of the initiative.

Thanks, Diego!

Procurement Trend # 11. Transparent Pricing

Only eight anti-trends remain. Doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that we have been blasting away at these for two months now, it’s still a lot, especially since it’s going to take us another two and a half weeks to reach the last anti-trend that the futurists gave us. At least most of the “future” trends are recent enough that the older generation can actually remember their inception. (No, not the Leonardo DiCaprio movie!) But I have to agree with LOLCat that it would be nice if there was a way to stop the beat of the futurists‘ drum because, even with these trends that started in some of our life-times, the drum has been beaten to death and I fear, like LOLCat, that the futurists’ may soon return to the age old art of cat-skinning to make a new one!

So why do these hopped-up historians (who’ve obviously had one dozen lagers too many) keep pushing transparent pricing as a future trend? Besides alcohol-induced brain-cell asphyxiation, possibly because they’re still trying to figure out this new-fangled thing called a computer and still struggling to understand just what the world wide web can do for them. Regardless, it’s clear that they’ve just figured out that:

  1. the internet makes global commodity market data instantly accessible

    even in far-away places like China and Russia and Australia

  2. online marketplaces makes average market price data instantly accessible

    including prices that are actually paid by the public or contract prices that will actually be honoured because the contracts are with the public sector

  3. should cost models allow for reasonably accurate price estimation
    which can be calculated in real time using the data from #1 and #2

    so there is no excuse for not knowing when you are being over-quoted 20% by a supplier’s sales rep who thinks you are too dumb to know otherwise

So, what does this mean to you?

Commodity Markets

You should always know the current market price of any base commodity that you are buying and/or that the products you are buying are dependent on (if that commodity generally accounts for 10% or more of the product cost). You should subscribe to commodity market feeds, track them, and set up alerts anytime there is a significant change in prices one way or another over a short time period as this is often a signal to lock in a new contract (before prices climb to high), extend a current contract (if it looks like prices are going to skyrocket and then stay high for a while), or spot buy (if prices are declining and are expected to steadily drop over a period of time) until the time to lock in a new contract is right.

Consumer Marketplaces

You should always know the average price of any consumer good that you are buying in the open market or in the public market as public contracts are public! Don’t just rely on 3-bids and a buy for standard consumer goods, office suppliers, or other off-the-shelf purchases. Get baseline market data and negotiate from there based on leverage, economies of scale, and projected pricing trends.

Should Cost Models

Raw market data combined with local labour market data, local energy market data, and good should cost models will give you a good idea of what you should be paying for any custom manufactured good. Don’t go into a sourcing event without this baseline. If the suppliers have a history of colluding, and you don’t know it, that 5% you knock off of current pricing could still be 15% higher than what the supplier needs to charge to make a profit margin at the high-end of what suppliers in the vertical typically make.

It Might Be Wabbit Season …

But you don’t have to go all Elmer Fudd and shoot everything in sight …

Even though it would appear to be the case that this is precisely what some bloggers would have you do. A few weeks ago we published a two-part piece on It’s Conference Season And That Means it’s Travel Season on why — even though it’s very, very, very important to get your Travel and Expense spend under control — it’s not Procurement’s job to question the validity of the spend or whether or not it aligns with organizational goals put in place. That’s the C-Suite’s job because, when it comes to T&E, it’s not always about immediately measurable financial ROI.

However, last week saw yet another post over on CPO Rising on T&E, which purported to give you “the three goals that every travel and expense management program must achieve” which, like the previous post, illustrated two of the right things to be doing and one potentially wrong thing because, doing it could be akin to shooting yourself in the foot. Presumably that is not something you want to do?

The post was right in theory when it said that you should strive for alignment between the travel and expense management program and both procurement and finance, but only right in practice if alignment is appropriately defined. According to the author, alignment is achieved when three goals are achieved. The first two goals, which should be achieved, were:

  • Linked capabilities that can capture all booking options which is important because no spend, and no relevant detail, should be lost and
  • Seamless, repeatable processes that result in “straight-through” expense-processing and the ultimate elimination of manual intervention for any expense that does not require manual intervention

because once you see where the spend is going and what the spend should be, and put the right rules in place, there’s no point in wasting a whole lot of manual effort on it.

And the third goal, which should never, ever be pursued without proper definitions was:

  • Pure alignment between the travel and expense management program and both procurement and finance objectives

Why? Because pure alignment dictates that an exception to the rule is never allowed, and there will always be situations during travel where the rules need to be relaxed, and full adherence to the objectives defined in the author’s previous post means that no T&E without an immediate financial return is justified. We already did a two-part rant on why that is not the case (in parts I and II), but it seems we have to remind you of the importance of controlling spend and keeping departments on budget, and the importance of keeping your hands off of policy.

Track, measure, report, and process efficiently — but stay out of policy. The minute you over-step your bounds, the minute the other departments turn against you. And that’s not what you want.