Category Archives: Best Practices

Myth-busting 2025 2015 Procurement Predictions and Trends! Part 1

The ambitious starting pumping these out late November / early December because, apparently, everyone wants to be first … to say almost the same thing they said last year (and the year before that … and the year before that … ) because, if they just keep making the same prediction, it will eventually come true … right?

However, just like the primary conference topics haven’t changed much in the last decade (and, as we pointed out earlier last year, just check out our 2014 series on The “Future” of Procurement and “Future” Trends and you’ll notice the topics are 90% the same as what were discussed last year … it’s only the current “hype” cycle technologies that change), neither have the predictions. the doctor reviewed 71 predictions / trends across 8 articles, and they neatly fell into 10 topic areas, with vary little differentiation between them. 9 of these were hot a decade ago. Heck, these 9 were being hailed as the core/future of Procurement two decades ago! The only difference is that the top prediction/trend just replaced one technology for another.

To make it abundantly clear how nothing has changed in the prediction world, and how very little is going to change in the Procurement world, we’re going to take the major predictions one-by-one and inject a little harsh reality. Often the dream is very nice, and sometimes the dream should be the reality, but, as we know, what “should be” and what “is” are often two very different situations! And no amount of wishing shall make the two meet. (Only hard work can do that!)

If you want to dive deep, the first 2025 prediction/trend articles that the doctor found are the following eight:

And the predictions they deliver fall into the following 10 categories:

  • AI
  • Category Management
  • Cost vs. Value
  • Data
  • Risk & Compliance
  • Strategic Value
  • Sustainability
  • Supplier Management
  • Talent
  • Technology & Digital Transformation

And if you simply replace “AI” with “Analytics”, you can go and dig up some classic articles on 2015 Procurement Predictions and Trends and realize what you read 10 years ago isn’t that much different than what is being pushed today. After all, it’s likely that the newer Procurement generation didn’t read any of it (and didn’t get any of it in training because there are no training budgets anymore) and it will all be new to them and, if you just change the buzzwords, it all sounds new, right? Right?

However, we’ll save you the trouble. We’ll summarize what the major predictions are, how accurate they are, and what will really happen in 2025. Remember, we’ve been around this space for 25 years and we know that the more they proclaim things will change …

Continuous Improvement is Needed Across the Board!

Risk is going up across the board.

Costs are about to go up across the board.

Supply is getting tight across the board.

Thus, organizations need to improve across the board.

But where do they start?

Good Question!

No Good Answers!

Regardless of how good an organization is doing, it needs to do better in:

  • cost
  • risk
  • supply assurance
  • supplier performance
  • MRO
  • sustainability
  • performance
  • etc.

But just like a solution provider can’t provide a solution that does everything (for everyone), an organization can’t tackle all of its problems at once.

So where does it start?

With efficiency.

Do a process analysis, identify where you are most inefficient, and install a modern technological solution to increase efficiency. At the end of the day, you can’t:

  • reduce cost
  • mitigate risk
  • increase supply assurance
  • improve supplier performance
  • enhance MRO
  • improve sustainability
  • enhance performance
  • etc.

without the time to do it. This means that any investment you make in improving efficiency and freeing up more of your people’s time will continue to return value day-over-day, month-over-month, and year-over-year.

As they become more efficient, they’ll become better at identifying what enhancements will make them even more efficient, and pursue those. With just a few enhancements, they’ll gain the time they need to apply their human intelligence to determine where they have the most to gain.

Quick wins are good, but continual wins are better, and that’s what efficiency delivers.

Dear Vendor: Your Top 10 ProcureTech resolutions for 2025: Part 2

Last Friday we noted that even though we were done with our dumb, dead company walking, and smart company series, that did not mean that we weren’t going to give you good suggestions for 2025 ProcureTech resolutions. The simple fact of the matter is that if you are going to make resolutions, you should at least make good ones. So today we are going to give you five more great ones.

#5 No More Buzzwords (There’s Enough Hogwash Already!)

As per another of our posts from July, the Procurement Space is Filled with Hogwash! Too many marketing soundbites, buzzwords, and overall misdirection. the doctor can’t remember the last time he saw real content from a solution provider on precisely what the solution does (without at least a good dose of exaggeration), how it will help the customer now and over time, and what results the customer can realistically expect in the first year.

And definitely, and we mean most definitely, don’t use any buzzwords. As per our post on Demystifying the Marketing Madness, the following buzzwords, among many others, should be instantly dropped from your vocabulary (if they haven’t been dropped already):

  • AI-backed/driven/enabled/enhanced/powered etc.: no one cares; they just want solutions that give results … and a bit of honesty
  • Autonomous Sourcing: the entire point of any back-office technology is to automate tactical data processing and workflows that don’t need human intervention; all platforms should have some autonomy, and, moreover, only a small set of categories should be sourced fully autonomously (as per our recent post, the real answer is Augmented Intelligence)
  • Delightful Procurement: you’re offering enterprise tech, not a culinary experience
  • Intake-to-Procure: it’s not about taking requests in, it’s about executing sourcing, procurement, supply (& supplier) management, and similar events — so who cares if you can take requests you can’t process (no one, and, in fact, this might even upset your customers!)
  • Margin Multiplier: what the heck does this mean? anyone?
  • Orchestration: this is just a fancy term for easy API-based integration; middleware is not new, and the fact that it’s now SaaSy doesn’t make it special
  • Smart Procurement: technology is not smart; it’s dumb; just because computers calculate a billion times faster than we do doesn’t mean they think
  • Spend Orchestration: this is just a fancy word for orchestration of Procurement systems
  • Sustainable Procurement: all procurement should be sustainable, plus, sustainable means something different to everyone
  • Supplier Insights: so generic that every SXM platform can qualify; be specific!

Get the picture? Drop the buzzwords and go back to basics.

#4 No Pay-to-Play, Only Pay-for-Payback

Major analyst firms have recently hiked their fees again. As per our post on does it matter if analyst firms aren’t entirely pay-to-play if the Procurement space thinks they are, analyst firms are now seen as very expensive pay-to-play offerings.

Some vendors are paying the “minimum fees”, even though they are receiving nothing in return. Even worse, as noted in a recent article, some vendors are paying multiple times that, and getting almost nothing in return. A writeup or too. Access to research. A few “leads” that downloaded a select “report”, which aren’t leads at all and rarely result in even prospects, let alone sales.

Real analyst firms don’t charge for discussions, demos, or even basic write-ups. They charge for advice and work product (that you have an unlimited right to if you paid for it) and introduce you to customers who are actually looking for the type of solution that you offer.

Don’t pay for generic research. Don’t pay for papers you don’t get unlimited (non-exclusive) commercial rights to. Don’t pay for shared access to download lists. Pay for research you need. Pay for papers you own. Support partners who can help you identify potential clients who need you.

#3 Get Expert Help

SI has been telling you this for years. You don’t know everything. You’re definitely not experts in everything. So identify your weaknesses, admit them, and get help. Customers don’t care if your team are employees, contractors, or partners. Right now, they want results … and, given that their costs and risks are skyrocketing, they want results fast.

So whether you need help with product, marketing, sales, implementation, integration, or education, get the help, get it now, and succeed. You need to succeed as much as your customers do.

Please remember that, relative to the value they deliver, expert consultants are cheap.

#2 Customer-Centric Focus

By now you should see that the common thread is customer focus. And we don’t mean whatever you can to sell to them — we mean whatever you can do to serve your current customers and make them as successful as you possibly can. The goal should be more than whatever you promise them in sales. Happy customers renew without question. Happy customers trust you and are willing to buy more from you over time. Happy customers are willing to tell their peers about you. Happy customers will speak on your behalf at important events.

Successful companies focus on their customers, who in turn make them successful. After all, implementation success goes well beyond the basics!

#1 F*ck Gen-AI!

If you’ve read our post on valid uses for Gen-AI, you know our disdain for Gen-AI, and that it’s well earned because Gen-AI, overhyped to the max, is hallucinatory, biased (and often hateful), inciteful, scamming, destructive, brain-washing, sleeper, and probably full of dangers we’ve not yet discovered.

Gen-AI, like all technologies, has uses, but very limited ones. It was designed to process massive amounts of data, and, unlike traditional Deep Neural Nets that retrieve a canned response, instead assemble a response as a collection of sub-responses that are, statistically, most appropriate for the request at hand. As a result, it’s best suited for the summarization of large documents and response generation in natural language. No more, no less.

Plus, the recent 85% Gen-AI failure rate reported by Gartner should be more than enough to make you think twice. Customers are tired of the Gen-AI hype. It hasn’t delivered, and for most situations, it never will. Most Procurement processes require detailed mathematical calculations, analytics, and reasoning, which is something Gen-AI doesn’t do and never will (despite what some of the zealots may continue to believe). Plus, as we’ve already said, it’s not autonomous systems or BS AI, it’s Augmented Intelligence which uses the right solution for the problem at hand, which is sometimes traditional ML and sometimes just workflows that encode expert knowledge.

So unless your uses cases are restricted to massive document processing, creating a more natural language chatbot (which can take and forward requests to real solutions), or creating more natural language summaries of massive data sets, there’s no place for Gen-AI. So just F*ck it!

And use real-AI instead. After all, there is so much you can do with AI in Procurement, Sourcing, Supplier Discovery and Supplier Management with the AI we had before Gen-AI! And if you have advanced (predictive) analytics and optimization, the options are endless.

Dear Vendor: Your Top 10 ProcureTech resolutions for 2025: Part 1

We know that our last post said that we were done with our dumb, dead company walking, and smart company series, and officially we are, but if you’re going to make ProcureTech resolutions for 2025, then you should at least make good ones. So we’re going to give you ten great ones. The first five today. The next five next Monday.

#10 Cut the Cr@p

First of all, Procurement does NOT need to be reimagined! As per our post back in July, Procurement is not something to be reimagined as it is not something that should even be redefined at the core. The purpose of Procurement has not changed since the first known Purchasing Manual was published back 137 years ago. It’s the process of sourcing, acquiring, and paying for the goods and services the organization needs, and doing it in a manner that ensures that the products will meet the needs, at the best price, and show up at the right time — and that as many orders as possible are “perfect” (or, more precisely, problem free). No more, no less.

If you want to survive the coming consolidation that will see a massive amount of mergers, acquisitions, and outright failures, you need to sell. If you want to sell, you need to not only solve customer problems, but convince the customers you can solve theirs. And the best way to convince a customer you can, and will, solve their problem is to be completely honest and transparent about your solution, what it does, how it does it, and what it will deliver against the real needs they have. With no cr@p.

#9 Data Foundation

In Procurement, everything relies upon good data. Solutions require good data — platforms, the modules they contain, the algorithms that power them, and every other technical component. Moreover, the humans relying on those platforms require good data to make decisions — good data that is processed by analytics into good information that give the human professionals the insight they need to make the right decisions. (At the end of the day, it’s human intelligence [HI] and the best platforms support human intelligence with Augmented Intelligence.)

This requires doubling down on creating a good schema, collecting good data, verifying that data, and maintaining that data over time. It shouldn’t be just collect some data haphazardly, execute a function, push it to a table in the database, and forget it. Your solution has to be normalize and cleanse the data, validate the data, use the data as required, store it in a standard schema, and mark any data that can change to be reverified on a schedule.

Organizations need a data foundation. Make sure the data foundation you give your customers is enough.

#8 Risk Awareness

COVID (Pandemic). Special Military Operations. (Geo-Political Conflicts, Border Closures, and Sanctions.) Canal closures and more Logistics Challenges. (Panamanian droughts and Houthis in the Red Sea.) Tariff threats (that are soon to be reality). This is just the beginning. The soon to be total abandonment of climate regulations in the US (and possibly a few other “first world” countries) is going to accelerate global warming (if the number of bombs dropped in the Middle East over the past year hasn’t accelerated it already). This will result in more unpredictable natural disasters. The tariffs coming in the US are going to spark unpredictable trade wars. Monetary and oil shocks that will come from the BRICS allowing alternate currencies to be used, as well as pursuing their own, will lead to more risk and disruption. The ease in trade we saw for the first two decades of this century may never be seen again in our lifetimes. Risk is everywhere, and compounding daily.

Thus, you must ensure that your solution is as risk aware as it can be. Sourcing modules must collect risk information. Analysis modules need to collect and process risk metrics. SXM modules need to track all available qualitative and quantitative risk information about every supplier being used. Contract modules need to support, check for, and suggest risk clauses. Procurement modules need to bring up risk information before every order, and automatically block suppliers where the risk has become too great.

Risk is critical. That’s why Sourcing Innovation did a 9-part series on supply chain risk.

#7 Focus, Focus, Focus

Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Don’t even try to be anymore than you are. Procurement people are realizing that any company that claims this can’t deliver because you can’t be everything to everyone. Instead, focus on your core modules and strengths, define your ICP, double down on your value prop, and focus on being the best you can on those modules and strengths.

Doing so will increase your chances of customer success, and customer success generates potential customer interest. Plus, focus will allow you to optimize your sales, implementation, integration, and execution processes; get customers up faster; get them results faster; make them happy faster; and that will lead to renewals and, most likely, increased subscriptions at renewal time.

We’ve tried to hit upon this point throughout the years, most recently in our smart company series, but hopefully this is the year it will stick.

#6 Integrate, Integrate, Integrate

Since you can’t be everything to everyone, you need to focus. And since customers will usually need more extensive solutions than any vendor can offer, usually for specialized needs, the most successful vendors will integrate with complementary best-of-breed vendor solutions that will make it really, really easy for their customers to share the data they need between the applications they need.

The key is to support an end-to-end ecosystem for Source-to-Pay+ by integrating with all of the solutions necessary for your customers to support end-to-end Source-to-Pay+ solutions. Successful companies make their customers successful, no matter what. They work with partners and complementary providers as needed.

Organizations need platforms, not just point solutions. Especially since you need to be risk aware.

We Want to Be a Smart Company — Is That It? Part II

We’ve read the dumb company: avoiding the fork in the road articles, dead company walking: avoiding the graveyard articles, the two installments of “we want to be a smart company”, and we truly want to be a smart company, and we are taking the mistakes, and advice, to heart. Is there anything else we can do?

As per Part I, there’s always more you can do! However, there’s not much left to talk about that’s true across the board for all software companies. That being said, we are giving you ten final pieces of advice that just may help if money is tight, leads are few, and sales are hard. Yesterday, we gave you the first five. Today, give you the final five.

06. Stagger the Billing on Suites and Seats

If it will take 9 months for the multi-module suite, don’t charge the annual license fee for the whole suite until all of the modules are fully implemented and in use. Stagger the fee based on the functional modules the user will have each month. The same goes if you are selling on seats. If there is an additional fee per seat, or the pricing is based on blocks, don’t charge for all the users up front who will eventually use it when most won’t until month 7.

Remember that your solution is going to cost the company mid to high six or seven figures once all of the direct and indirect costs are factored in, a cost that won’t be returned right away, especially if you are selling a (mini)suite. This means that even though your price tag might be worth it, it’s a hard price tag to swallow for a customer who won’t get the full use out of it for almost a year, and, thus, a hard sell.

However, if they only pay for functionality as they get it, and will start to see value before the next fee hike, that bitter pill is a lot easier to swallow, and while it might mean less money up front for you, a happy customer always means more money on the back end, especially at renewal time — which will always happen as long as they remain happy.

07. Ditch the Office & WeWork … Get Creative

If you have an expensive office, can you ditch it? Covid proved that you don’t need to work 9-5 in the same space everyday to be productive. As long as people have a space they can come together to meet when they need to, or want to, that’s more than enough.

Also, if you have a dedicated WeWork-like space, that’s not getting used daily, do you need it? If you only have it so your employees can meet one day a week, and that’s all they use it, why do you need a high cost space? (And while these spaces are cheaper than dedicated offices, they are still pricey, especially if they are not used daily.)

Local hotels with empty meeting rooms during the week will give you a good deal if you buy food. If you’re bringing people in quarterly for a meeting, they’ll give you the meeting room for free if you fill a room block, and give you a good price on that block if you have breakfast and lunch at the hotel.

And if you’re small, get more creative. Some restaurants and pubs have private function rooms that sit empty most of the day, or all day if there are no private after work functions on a weekday. They are super cheap, especially if you eat there. Some will give you a contract for, say, every Thursday for a quarter or year! the doctor knows a company in London that has no dedicated space except for a room in a pub connected to a tube station that they use weekly. Costs them next to nothing (as they’d buy their employees food anyway when they are asked to come into London) and the location ensures that if the employees stay for a few drinks, they can safely tube home. (Now, this won’t work for every company if they are in “dry counties” or have a lot of employees that don’t drink, but you get the point that creativity can save a lot of money.)

08. Compete on Service

This is not said enough. Customers don’t want software. No one every wants software. Absolutely positively f6ck1ng no one wants software! They want solutions, and, more specifically, solutions that help them do their jobs more efficiently and effectively and come with the support they need to learn the solutions and learn them to the best of their ability.

And before you say “but everybody in business buys software”, let the doctor stop you right there. They buy it because they need it. They don’t buy it because they want it. Have you ever heard your buddy Joe say “hey, I can’t wait for the new version of AccAtack25 so I can get started on my taxes for next year“. Or hear Jesse say “I really need a new glitzy word processor to accompany the 6 others I don’t use for the screenplay that I’m thinking about but not actually writing“. Or Carl say “I want the new version of Excel so I can write even more convoluted, and pointless, macros for my financial analysis to appease my boss“. You haven’t. Because no one wants business software. They want tools to do their jobs, which is why you can’t sell software like consumer entertainment apps (video games). Business software is not fun, and, thus, no one wants it.

So once you’ve made the solution as usable as it is, compete on service. That will make a huge difference.

09. Think Sponsorships — Esp. Educational Ones

As per our last instalment, customers need education and want vendors who educate them. Those vendors always win in the end. If you don’t have the time, experience, or in-depth knowledge to do so, sponsor independent authorities (blogs that aren’t going anywhere*, educationally oriented consultancies, independent analysts and/or small firms) and associations that do and they will focus on educating your audience on what your audience needs to know to understand what your solution does and why your audience needs your solution when they talk to you.

Don’t underestimate the value that a potential customer places on education. The only thing that can come close to equalling that value is the right service level, which will be dependent on, and deliver, education.

10. Get Help Where You’re Lacking

We can’t say this enough. Stop pretending you can do it all, that you can figure it out once the mistake is pointed out to you, or that you can find a new full time resource (when you look at the cost of the part time consultant) that can wear six different hats and accomplish the same goals in a short amount of time. You can’t. Focus on the niche consultancies and the true experts and you will find that consultants are cheap relative to the value they bring.

11. Bonus: Fire the MBAs!

If the only degree they have is an MBA, show them the door as fast as possible. MBAs are Masters of Business Annihilation and have done more damage to modern corporations than even the most visionary of us could have predicted (with some of the utter ineptitude covered in Jason Premo’s LinkedIn article). Real companies, like real structures, have always been built by real engineers, not spreadsheet pushing financial analysts who don’t have a clue what the company actually does.

The point of an MBA should be to teach engineers the basics of good business and financial management, and how to operate in different regulatory and reporting contexts, so they can make the right trade-off decisions to grow their company and improve their offering in step-wise fashion, not to arm nitwits with spreadsheets to make ridiculously unsound decisions that could ruin the corporation in the pursuit of near-term profits!

* Specifically, look for blogs that have survived at least 3 years. In the mid 2000s, shortly after THE PROPHET, the doctor, and THE REVELATOR started, we went from less than two dozen in the mid 2000s to almost 160 across Source to Pay and Supply Chain around 2008/2009. By 2011, dozens disappeared. By 2016, dozens more. By/during COVID, the majority of those that remained left us. Of the 160 blogs SI once chronicled on the now defunct resource site, less than two dozen remain. You can count them on your fingers and toes even if you are missing a few digits.