Category Archives: Market Intelligence

How an Online Marketplace Can Improve Equipment Rental Procurement Part I

Today’s guest post is from Robin Salter, CMO of KWIPPED.

Today, when people are planning their vacations, they typically use an online marketplace like Travelocity or Expedia. Why? Because if you need to book a flight, hotel, rental car or some combination of the three, it’s much faster and easier to go to a single website that:

  • Displays availability
  • Provides ratings and descriptions
  • Offers pricing comparisons
  • Enables scheduling and booking

The cumbersome, time-consuming alternative is to research and compare each airline, hotel and car rental company individually before making a particular booking decision. The online marketplace model provides obvious benefits to the traveler in the form of convenience, simplicity and efficiency. Of course, the travel industry is just a single example. Online marketplaces have popped up across virtually every industry — and why wouldn’t they — the benefits they offer to buyers and sellers are undeniable.

Oddly, the B2B equipment rental industry has been slow to adopt the online marketplace model despite the fact that the granularity of the industry seems to make it a natural fit. There are more than 27,000 rental businesses in the U.S. and that number does not include many businesses that may not consider themselves rental businesses even though they do rent certain equipment.

It’s important to point out that there are currently a few online marketplaces that support the construction/heavy equipment industry; but equipment rental is estimated to be a $38 – $50 billion market, of which construction represents less than half. Businesses and organizations rent all kinds of equipment, for example:

  • Medical equipment
  • Laboratory equipment
  • Audio/Visual equipment
  • HVAC equipment
  • Farming equipment
  • Film production equipment
  • Electronic testing equipment
  • Environmental testing equipment
  • Materials handling equipment
  • Roadwork safety equipment

The list is practically endless, but the point is, equipment rental is big business and is ripe for an online marketplace that provides the technology to connect renters and suppliers across all industries in a more efficient and productive way.

In Part II we will discuss how an online equipment rental marketplace differs from traditional equipment rental sourcing and the advantages it brings.

Thanks, Robin.

How Many Procurement Myths Have You Fallen For?

As a Senior Buyer or Procurement Leader, you probably feel you’re doing almost everything right, or at least right enough to get great results. Maybe that’s true, but maybe you’ve fallen for a handful, or two handfuls, of the procurement myths that still plague even leading Procurement organizations to this very day.

If you think you’re at the top of your game, I urge you to follow the new series on Procurement Myths that the maverick is running over on the new Spend Matters CPO site. While the doctor isn’t co-authoring this particular series, he did work with the maverick to identify the most common myths and outlined what he saw as the most common symptoms, and these inputs are shaping the 25-part series to come.

Myth I and Myth II are already up! Check them out and see if you’ve fallen for any of them. (And if you have, as you are the leader, there’s still plenty of time to fix your perspective and lead the organization into a new era as they will never figure it out without you.)

Infrastructure Damnation 11: Postal Services

While most Supply Chains don’t run on public postal services, and instead rely on private transportation companies for both their freight and package delivery needs, public postal services are still needed. Why?

Without public postal services, there would be an effective private monopoly in mail and package distribution. While there are multiple private options, without a public body to set baseline prices, there is no incentive for the private companies to be competitive. As long as the private companies thought they could charge more, it is very likely that rates would increase across the board, consistently, until the average company switched to independent bike couriers.

More importantly, without public postal services, the average consumer would not be able to afford to shop online as much as she does now, which would likely lead to an across the board decline in sales for many companies, which would, of course lead to a decline in order volumes and Procurement’s negotiating leverage with its suppliers.

And this is looking like a reality in multiple countries right now. As discussed here on Sourcing Innovation over the last few years, The First World Postal Services Are in Trouble and the, US, UK, and Canadian public postal services are all deep in debt and may need to drastically reduce services in the coming years in order to balance the books and keep in business. Consider SI’s recent posts on the US, UK, and Canadian postal services (including, but not limited to, our posts that asked if the U.S. Post Office Can Be Fixed and Too Bad the US Post Office Did Not Follow Royal Mail’s Lead). They are billions in debt (Canada Post is over 1 Billion in debt exclusive of pension liabilities, the recently privatized Royal Mail has a debt to equity ratio of 91% (which puts its debts at over 1 Billion US Dollars, and US is over 100 Billion in debt (cnsnews.com) when underfunded pension liabilities are taken into account, and it’s not getting any better.

While one may think that this will never happen, as Canada has had its own public mail service since 1867, the US has had a reliable public service since the Pony Express started back in 1860, and the UK has had public mail since 1516 — but we could be just a few years away from the day it’s private bike courier for mail and small packages (and we need a Dark Angel for reliable deliveries). It is likely that Royal Mail is only still in existence because it was privatized (and that postal services in North America, if they do not drastically restructure operations, will have to follow suit).
And while you might not see a large impact to your supply chain, since the 3PLs and trucking companies are here to stay, when your order volumes decline and you have to pay double just to send a contract across town, you will.

Economic Damnation 07: The 1%

“The 1%” was coined in 2011 to refer to the US income and wealth inequality where the concentration of wealth among the top 1% is significantly above the national average. On average, the 1% earn well over a million dollars each year (and the bottom 99% all make less than 350K) and control over one third of the country’s wealth, meaning that, on average, their financial influence is 33 times that of an average person. In addition, the roughly 536 Billionaires in the US have a net worth that is over 10,000 times that of the average household net worth in the US (and in a couple of cases, almost 100,000 times).

And the US is not the only country with such a disparate income and net worth inequality. China has 213 Billionaires in US dollars, and the top one percent in China also controls over one third of the country’s wealth. The wealth inequality has widened significantly over the last 20 years.

And similar situations appear to be arising in other developed countries around the world. A recent article in the Guardian called the growing wealth inequality in the UK a ticking time bomb, the Broadbent institute recently published a report that found Canadians vastly underestimate the wealth gap in Canada, and even the Australian Institute is finding that the inequality between those with the most and the least is rising in what was once universally thought of as an egalitarian country.

This is bad, because it’s at the point where a select view individuals can not only single-handedly make life a living hell for a large number of Procurement professionals in a number of disparate companies across the globe (as Extreme Activist Investors, Damnation 64), but can individually cause a number of economic, infrastructural, environmental, regulatory, societal, organizational, and technological headaches all on their own. If a small group of these individuals buys a Fortune 3000 and decides it’s manpower heavy, they can cause 10,000 people to be laid off in a day in a small town and cause a major shift in the local, and even regional, unemployment rate (and the market who can afford the product being built). They can start new airlines to increase competition (and logistics headaches), or buy a competitor just to decrease competition. They can create new sustainability initiatives overnight, or turn the fracking dial up to 11! They can fund entire lobby groups to get their standards and requirements in place. They can single-handedly make your supply chains safer or lobby against worker’s rights to keep costs down. They can replace your entire Sales and Marketing teams overnight. And they can dictate your ERP for years to come.

The reality is that, in today’s world, Money Talks, and when you can buy and sell 99% of the world’s companies with your pocket change, their money talks the loudest. It’s another damnation we’d rather not know exists, but it does, so we need to be as prepared as we can (and always expect that even the best laid plans can be set awry by the whims of one wealthy individual).

The New China – The New Global Meltdown?

Last year, China overtook the US as the world’s largest economic powers measured by PPP — Purchasing Power Parity. This may have received little attention, as most people focus on GDP — Gross Domestic Product — where the US still has a commanding lead, but since PPP measures the relative value of different currencies, this is a significant metric.

As a result, this places China at the centre of the global economy as any economic decline in China will send ripples around the world. As one of the biggest consumers of natural resource, the success of many global economies depends on the success of China and its need for natural resources.

And this decline may be coming. As per this recent article over on Business Spectator that asked “what can we expect from China in 2014”, not only has the country lost some of its lustre as of late, but this tarnish on the silver has not escaped the watchful eye of the World Bank, whose chief Economist went on record last month stating that the global economy is running on a single engine … the American one. This does not make for a rosy outlook for the world.

So why the loss of lustre after almost three decades of growth? Simply put, with rapid growth in an economy comes rapid growth in the growing pains associated with rapid growth, which typically include burgeoning local and national government(s) (as cities, provinces, and federal overseers struggle to keep up with growth), excess industrial capacity (once the tipping point where there is enough capacity to meet demand is reached), and a stagnant real estate sector (once the majority of the market that can afford their own homes have them). China has all of these problems. But that’s not the reason that China is loosing its lustre, as many other countries, including the US, have these problems. The real reason is shadow banking.

There is a significant amount of local government and corporate debt in China as these local governments and corporations have borrowed heavily from both the banking and shadow banking sectors to finance their growth. How significant? Standard & Poor’s estimates that total outstanding corporate debt in China was around $14.2 Trillion US at the end of 2013, compared to $13.1 Trillion US debt held by American corporations at the same time. And while exact numbers are not known, local government debt has increased an average of 20% over the last three years and the total government debt level in China is estimated as about 54% of China’s GDP — and that’s just the official debt. The real debt level could be higher when you consider shadow banking and private lenders.

Now, this is a lot of debt, but as the level of government debt is not yet at the level of US national debt or UK national debt which exceeds GDP, it’s not alarming — yet. But it’s enough to cause the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to think twice about China’s rating and if China decides that it’s time to reign in and get the debt under control and significantly curbs spending across the board, a lot of economies that are currently being boosted by China’s spending spree are going to take a big hit.

This will be good and bad news for your Supply Management activities, depending upon where you are in the supply chain. If a company loses a major China supplier, the power shifts back to the buyer and there will be good deals to be negotiated. However, if you lose a major China client and your demand declines, so does your bargaining power and the power shifts back to the supply base. And then there’s the currency hedging to think about. Is the expected drop in currency exchange good or bad for you? (For more about this issue, refer back to our currency damnation post.)