Category Archives: Guest Author

IT and Functional Departments – Finding the Middle Ground


Today’s guest post is from Torey Guingrich, a Project Manager at Source One Management Services, who focuses on helping global companies drive greater value from their Procurement expenditures.

One of the challenges Procurement can face when working within the typical IT category is working on IT-related services that are used to support functional areas. Think of the marketing group or supply chain function; there are a number of different systems or software products that support those departments, but how clear is ownership of the solution between IT and the business group or function that the solution supports?

The answer to that question can vary across companies, across industries, and even across those within IT and the department utilizing the solution. Given this ambiguity, it is critical for Procurement to ensure representation from both and IT and the functional group for sourcing efforts that involve products and services that are not “purely IT”.

Does Procurement really need to be involved?

For many organizations, IT groups tend to work in a vacuum or keep their sourcing efforts separate from Procurement. While there are nuances that Procurement professionals need to be aware of and navigate within IT, there is clear value that Procurement brings to the table, especially when other functional departments are involved. Those in Procurement should be comfortable working with different areas with differing needs and finding a cohesive path forward. Procurement also brings market information (suppliers, price points, service levels) that IT may not be as focused on, but that could be critical to the overall solution. IT groups can at times limit themselves to certain suppliers for system or software solutions, but there may be alternate suppliers that easily integrate, or provide enough value to justify the effort required for working with disparate suppliers or systems. Procurement can bring that perspective forward and champion the needs of the business to balance the costs associated with IT change.

How do I know if something is “purely” IT or not?

When we look at organizations today, there tends to be a number of software and hardware suppliers that are categorized in spend data as “IT,” but fulfill a more functional or business need. When looking at spend and suppliers considered as IT, be sure to think through your organization’s end users and how the program or solution is being used by different groups. Marketing, HR, supply chain/logistics, and finance are all key functional areas that likely use some form of software to support their processes and should have a principal role in selection, whereas supplier selection for hosting or PCs and related consumables may be made more centrally within the IT area.

How do I get IT and functional departments to work together and come to a consensus?

When working with multiple stakeholder groups, no matter the departments involved, it is important to establish roles and responsibilities from the onset of the initiative. A key to working with these two groups is to consider what is most important to each group. Likely the functionality, ease of use, and flexibility of the solution will be top of mind for the functional department, whereas IT may be more focused on integration and hosting requirements, continuity with the company’s overall technology strategy, and licensing/purchasing models. Beyond IT and the functional area, discuss what other stakeholders may be affected or if other IT systems (and those who administer them) would be impacted downstream in the process. Focus the two (or more) groups on the goals for sourcing and what criteria is going to drive supplier selection – this will help to ensure that any critical issues or “deal-breakers” are identified and don’t come up later in the process. Each group will likely have their own set of requirements and criteria that need to be aligned and prioritized to ensure they are not in direct contrast with each other. Ask each group to look at their requirements and define the priority of each (e.g. rank as nice-to, prefer-to, or must-have) to ensure the core solution encompasses all must-have requirements.

Who ultimately makes the decision?

This is likely going to depend very heavily on your organization’s priority of functional and IT requirements. Ideally, Procurement can help bring these two groups together and drive to a decision point that all, including Procurement, can agree on. When the solution is business critical or the department relies heavily on the given product/service on a day to day basis, the business function is likely to be the lead in terms of making a decision, but IT will in any case need to validate that the solution will work from an infrastructure and support position.
While most may think of Procurement as a cost-reduction engine, we are uniquely positioned to enable relationships among different groups within the organization. Especially when working with software and hardware systems to meet business needs, it is critical to bring in IT stakeholders at the onset of the process to enable a more efficient and effective sourcing process that balances the needs of IT with the needs (and wants) of different functional areas.

Thanks, Torey!

Still Using Product Photography to Drive Sales? Part II


Today’s guest post is from Brian Seipel, a marking project expert at Source One Management Services focused on helping corporations achieve both Marketing and Procurement objectives in their strategic sourcing projects.

While this guest post is a bit off of the beaten path for SI, it’s a very interesting one and relevant for those Procurement professionals that want to run with the marketing bulls.


Five Ways Rendering will Beat Out Photography

In Part I, we noted that rendering needed to be “as good” as a photograph for organizations to ditch photography, and for this to happen, rendering needs to offer more. What is the “more” that is needed?

Here are several examples of what “more” means in this sense:

  • Perfect conditions – every time. Let’s face it: there are plenty of elements of a photo shoot that can (and will) go wrong. This is especially true of outdoor shoots or tricky products. Think of Breyer’s next “ice-cream-cone-on-a-hot-summer beach” ad. With rendering, you control all aspects of the environment, leaving nothing to chance – bad weather can’t shut down your rendering, and there’s no hot sun to melt your product.
  • Don’t like it? Change it. Another reality of product photography is its element of permanence. Once a shoot wraps, it is over. Small-scale changes may be possible in post-production, but also may incur additional charges. Larger changes will require a costly reshoot. Rendering provides the flexibility to make changes right up until the point you have your perfect image.
  • Rendering goes where photography can’t. Imagine filming a fly-through of the many intricate elements of a watch, with the viewer flying over the watch face and delving deep into the watch’s moving inner gears. Imagine this watch transitioning from a solid object to an exploded view, showing how a thousand individual components come together to form the whole – all while still ticking away and moving in time. These are powerful ways to showcase a product, but creating them with traditional photography or videography would be a struggle at best. With digital rendering, achieving these views is no more difficult than capturing a standard image.
  • Entrée into augmented reality. Just how far augmented reality will go in helping an organization reach customers is still an unknown. However, definite marketing plan synergies exist by developing a rendering that could not only replace a photograph but also feature in an augmented reality app.
  • Rendering keeps getting more cost-effective. To be clear, rendering may still be expensive depending on what work you need done. However, the fast pace of advances in this area have dramatically cut costs to the point where many organizations see a direct financial benefit to making the move. Photography costs are much less flexible – the costs related to studio space, product and equipment storage, and prop warehousing will always be present. Even though photography equipment keeps getting better, staying on the cutting edge of hardware still requires a large outlay of cash for studios, which is passed onto customers in every shoot.

Is Rendering Viable Now?

Given the speed at which technology is moving and just how lifelike the results are becoming, a transition to rendering from photography will, for many organizations, be a matter of “when” and not “if.”

So, at what point is this switch viable? For many organizations, this is a judgment call. For many, rendering can achieve results faster than photography and at a better price point. For others, rendering supplements photography to achieve results that traditional production can’t.

Thanks, Brian.

Still Using Product Photography to Drive Sales? Part I


Today’s guest post is from Brian Seipel, a marking project expert at Source One Management Services focused on helping corporations achieve both Marketing and Procurement objectives in their strategic sourcing projects.

While this guest post is a bit off of the beaten path for SI, it’s a very interesting one and relevant for those Procurement professionals that want to run with the marketing bulls.


Still using product photography to drive sales? Why there may be a better way!

Pictures are certainly worth a thousand words when it comes to products sales, and well-shot product photography is a key aspect of many sales and marketing budgets. Many organizations recognize that those “thousand words” are the least of their worries, however – those pictures are worth a large chunk of their budgets as well. In fact, the higher-end or more physically detailed the product is, the more organizations can expect to pay for a proper photograph.

Any organization operating in the luxury space has likely asked the question, “Do we really need to put so much money towards product photography?” Unfortunately, the answer has always been a resounding “yes” from Marketing – until, perhaps, now. As with all areas of business, technological advances are offering a clever disruption to the product photography space.

Digital Rendering: The Product Photography Killer?

Many organizations are either turning to, or considering a test run of, digitally rendered images to replace product photography. In a nutshell for those unfamiliar, a rendered image is one generated entirely from a computer. Without going too deep into how rendering works, here is a brief overview:

  • The Wireframe: To start, we need to build a model of a product. The wireframe defines the shape of an object by taking a 2D or 3D drawing and developing it into a digital model.
  • The Skin: At this point, the model alone has no form. Typically, this empty “space” is represented visually as a simple set of intersecting lines (hence the name “wireframe”). The skin, or texture, applies visual characteristics to the model. Consider a product made with both white gold and brown leather – two materials that are very visually different. The gold would be light, smooth, and highly reflective. The leather would be rough, rich in dark color, and non-reflective. All of the attributes of these materials must be perfectly reconstructed in a digital environment.
  • The lighting: When a product photo is taken, excruciating attention is paid to creating a compelling lighting setup. Lighting is used to evoke specific emotional reactions or showcase key elements of a product. This is just as true for rendering – lighting sources have to be both created (how bright, focused, and warm or cool the light source will be) and directed at the model (determining what direction light should come from, and how many sources are needed to effectively light a product).

Think about any Pixar movie you’ve ever seen – these are beautiful examples not just of rendering, but also a fair representation of just how far advances in rendering have come. As amazing as they seemed to us when they first hit theaters, early digitally rendered movies look crude by today’s standards. The pace of development is moving extremely fast, thanks to refined techniques, better digital tools, and more powerful computer platforms to run them on. In fact, it is becoming extremely difficult, if not impossible, to discern a photograph of a product from its comparable rendering.

But it isn’t enough for a rendering to be “as good” as a photograph. For organizations to ditch photography, rendering needs to offer more. And it will. How? Come back for Part II.

Give Your Procurement Practice Some Backbone! Part II

Today’s guest post is from Torey Guingrich, a Project Manager at Source One Management Services, who focuses on helping global companies drive greater value from their Procurement expenditures.

In Part I, we discussed how as an organization moves from decentralized/departmental procurement decisions to a centralized procurement and strategic sourcing department, there are bound to be some growing pains when it comes to working with departmental stakeholders and that transitioning to an effective central procurement and sourcing model will require changes. We discussed two preventable gaps that undermine the transformation process and in today’s post we discuss two more.

  • Lack of management tools or processes.Procurement needs to be equipped so that once spend and suppliers come under purview, they can effectively manage each component. This doesn’t have to be a full software solution, but Procurement should be setting up some standards so that stakeholders can feel comfortable with handing off pieces of contract and supplier management to Procurement. This may start as a simple Excel sheet tracking contract notice and term dates, and can evolve to full contract management and compliance departments. With Procurement handling these components, stakeholders can reallocate their time to accomplishing departmental goals as opposed to tracking performance and dealing with contracts, SLA, and pricing issues. Having Procurement involved in supplier management can actually help the working relationship between suppliers and end users as stakeholders can rely on Procurement to play “bad cop” and push where necessary without putting the day-to-day relationships in jeopardy.
  • No clear way to provide feedback.When a business moves to a centralized model, there are sure to be some bumps in the road. It is key to have two-way communication between Procurement and other business units to continually improve and refine the process. Positive communication (e.g. sharing success stories) is a great to share how Procurement is benefiting the company and other departments (e.g. reducing costs, improving service, etc.), but be sure to also open a forum for constructive feedback. I have seen positive feedback shared through company announcements, newsletters or quick “blurbs” in departmental bulletins. Procurement departments can solicit feedback from something as simple as a quick email survey when projects close or by establishing more formal project debriefs to talk about what went right and what could have been improved with the stakeholders involved.

As Procurement professionals, it is key understand from a stakeholder perspective the challenges with letting go of control and autonomy for project and purchasing decisions. Procurement and executive-level management need to ensure that the Procurement department is being set up for success by establishing company policies and processes that will give Procurement the authority and standing it needs to be truly effective.

Thanks Torey!

Give Your Procurement Practice Some Backbone! Part I

Today’s guest post is from Torey Guingrich, a Project Manager at Source One Management Services, who focuses on helping global companies drive greater value from their Procurement expenditures.

As an organization moves from decentralized/departmental procurement decisions to a centralized procurement and strategic sourcing department, there are bound to be some growing pains when it comes to working with departmental stakeholders.

Two of the main drivers for this are that:

  • Stakeholders are used to making decisions.End users and department personnel feel they know what is best to support their needs and may have had free reign in the past to make purchasing decisions for department-specific needs as well as more general categories (e.g. office suppliers, laptops and desktops, IT accessories, etc.).
  • Stakeholders are used to managing relationships with the suppliers with whom they work.Because stakeholders are making their own purchasing decisions, they are also typically managing the negotiation, contracting, and ongoing relationship with the supplier.

To transition to an effective central procurement and sourcing model, changes will be necessary within the organization to support the new structure. As someone who has helped clients transform (or build) their procurement operations, I have some seen some preventable gaps that undermine the transformation process and cause frustration for Procurement and the business units they support.

  • No standard procurement process.One of the first steps for establishing a central procurement department in an organization is to ensure that those in Procurement are singing from the same sheet when it comes to process. If you have a mix of past (or no) experience, each person is likely to come to their role in Procurement based on their past processes (or lack of processes) in mind. Begin by defining what the standard sourcing process looks like for your company and communicate that process to the organization as a whole. Reiterate Procurement’s role and the stakeholders’ role within that process; the goal is ensure end users are familiar with and are able to embrace the process, not to cut them out of it. Certainly not every project and/or purchase may follow the same process, but having a standard and communicating this to end users provides a familiarity with how procurement works and what the stakeholders can expect. Having a standard process allows stakeholders to feel comfortable working alongside Procurement and not feel as if decision-making is being stripped.
  • No defined (or enforced) Procurement and Contracting policies.Many times I have seen organizations start pushing centralized purchasing decisions and procurement support without any organizational policies that establish this new standard within the company. Without clear organization policies (and management support of those policies) for where, when, and how Procurement should be involved in departmental purchasing decisions, stakeholders are bound to continue to work in a vacuum.Any policies put in place should cover at a minimum the procurement process, how and when procurement needs to be notified of a purchasing need, and authorization levels (e.g. who can sign for what, spend levels that require certain level of sign off). Many times, part of that process includes a legal component in terms of who is actually authorized to sign agreements, purchase orders, etc. Many companies employ a checklist or agreement cover sheet that requires multiple sign-offs that may include review by the stakeholder, legal, procurement, and others before the final signature on the agreement is completed by the authorized party. Without a clear and communicated (and backed by management) policy, contracts typically continue to be signed by business units without any Procurement knowledge or oversight. While this may threaten the autonomy of some stakeholders, Procurement and management should be explaining the benefits of this oversight, especially for high value agreements or purchases, and the pitfalls these policies help prevent.

If only these were all of the gaps. These are just the beginning, In part II, we will discuss two more gaps that need to be prevented.

Thanks Torey!