Category Archives: Market Intelligence

It’s Conference Season Again — Do We Have to Talk About the Future?

Conference season is around the corner and, with it, plenty of talks on the Future of Procurement, Procurement in 2015, and Procurement 2025 — What it Will Take to Get There.

Regular readers will know the doctor is beginning to really despise this. Why? First of all, as will be outlined in an upcoming series of posts, it’s a lot of the same old, same old … which, in some cases, will be recycled for the tenth year in a row. Second, many* of the solution providers will be doing their best to instill in you an unnecessary sense of urgency to adopt second rate sourcing and procurement solutions that you aren’t ready for or that won’t deliver the returns you need now. (While 9 out of 10 companies do need better sourcing and procurement solutions, the solutions these companies need to start with often aren’t the solutions that money hungry solution providers push upon them.) Third, and most annoyingly, come the questions on what does the doctor think the future of Sourcing / Procurement is.

Why is this annoying?

  1. A Future Vision Doesn’t Change Much In Six Months

    Conference season is every six months, but unless a radical, ground-breaking, unexpected innovation hits the scene, between one conference season and the next, one’s future vision is not going to change a heck of a lot. And when one considers there has not been any radical new offerings in Supply Management in over 5 years, one’s future vision doesn’t have much reason to change at all.

  2. Tomorrow Has Come And Gone Many Times, but The Promised Future Has Not Arrived

    If you look at the predictions for 2020/2025, they are not that much different than the predictions for 2010/2015 that were made 10 years ago. Why? First of all, as per our last point, there haven’t been any radical new offerings in Supply Management in over 5 years (just steady improvements, with a few providers progressing much faster than others). Second, adoption of mainstream sourcing and procurement solutions remains slow. Third, the best solutions, and the advanced solutions that an organization really needs to make an impact on their Supply Management return, have not yet been adopted outside of a handful of best-in-class organizations.

  3. It’s Not What You Think the Future Will Be, It’s Where You Need To Go

    When an organization asks What’s the Future of Procurement, it’s asking the wrong question. First, while most of the consultancies, analyst firms, and providers feeding these consultancies and analysts firm their provider preferred messaging tend to agree on what the future is at a high level, each tends to tailor their message to the product or service offerings they can deliver to you today. Second, the future is in a state of flux due to uncertainties in supply management, business, and globalization. Third, and most important, it doesn’t matter what the future is, it matters what the future needs to be for your organization to succeed. The question an organization needs to ask is what is our Procurement Future — where do we need to go to succeed.

So while it’s very important to plan for the future, it’s very annoying to keep talking about it again and again in a way that adds nothing to the message. So, since the medium is the message, unless you want to be annoying, let’s ditch all this feel-good future talk and focus on figuring out how to get the right solutions into the companies that need those solutions now if those companies are to have any hope of having a future. Capis?

*Many, but, fortunately not all. But do you know enough to tell the difference?

If I Succeed in Destroying Dashboards and Razing Report Writers, What Next?

In yesterday’s post, where I responded to the smart alecks, I noted that, once dashboards are destroyed and report writers are razed, there was about a half-dozen next logical steps that could be taken to improve today’s spend analysis solutions, even if that solution was BIQ.

Should cost modelling, award optimization based on historical data and business rules, and federation across related data sets for deeper dives are pretty obvious. Are there somewhat less obvious advancements we should also be thinking of?

Of course. One rung up the ladder, three of them are:

Predictive Modelling

Once you have should-cost modelling, the next logical step is predictive modelling. Use historical data to extract pricing trends and predict likely future prices for the commodity. Use this to determine not only the best time to (re) source the category as well as using deep-dive analysis to determine the best strategy.

Optimize Supplier Relationships

Once you have optimized all of the awards based on historical data and business rules, you also have the optimal allocation by supplier. Once you have the optimized set of awards for each supplier, you can optimize the re-order schedule, shipping arrangements, and even production and sourcing schedules on behalf of the suppliers and take costs out one level down in the supplier chain. Helping your suppliers help you goes a long way to building good supplier relationships and increasing supplier performance.

Simultaneous Drill Across Multiple Data Sets

Once you have true federation, you want to split the screen and update the views to only contain the relevant data in each data set as you drill down through the data. Going back to our previous example, you start in the Payment cube drilling into the goods receipts associated with the wonky widgets, then switch to the Order History cube to find the initial requisitions, but when you drill on the user in the second cube, the first cube is updated to contain only those goods receipts associated with the user. The user can drill through either cube to find the data she wants, whichever is easiest, and both cubes update. She doesn’t have to go back and forth.

These are just a few more things that can be done, and all would simplify the life of an analyst. More to come at a later time but first, this time I’m going to insist that you tell me what you would do. :-;

Doing Procurement Right Regardless of Organizational Size

A few days ago, in our post on how You’ve Negotiated but you still might not be realizing savings on marketing print, we pointed out two great guests posts by Santosh Reddy of GEP on how just throwing a problem over the wall to an expert doesn’t necessarily save you money — it just guarantees that someone else, namely the Print Management Company (PMC), makes money on your behalf.

Today, we’re going to point out another guest post by a GEP consultant, Sanyam Khurana. In his recent post on Spend Matters on “Procurement Lessons for Small Businesses and Large Multinational Corporations”, he notes that some strategies work well regardless of organizational size. Thus, if you are a small business that wants to get bigger, you should take take these lessons to heart and work on these strategies.

Flexibility

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Sourcing Innovation has been emphasizing the importance of the 3T’s to successful Supply Management — Talent, Technology, and Transition Management. Transition Management requires a lot of things, but above all else, flexibility as your organization needs to adapt to, and be in, a state of constant change, in order to navigate the ebbs and flows of today’s global economy.

Cost Optimization

Whether you’re buying 100 units or 100,000 units, you still have to make sure you’re paying the right price for the right product. Over paying by 10% is still overpaying by 10%, and with smaller budgets, and margins to work with, 10% is still a lot.

Supplier Rationalization

Whether you’re a 1 Million, 100 Million, or a 1 Billion dollar company, you still depend on your suppliers for your success. In Sanyam Khurana’s post, he gives the example of a bakery that requires raw material, namely flour, to produce its goods. If the suppliers don’t deliver, the bakery can’t bake its bread. Having the right suppliers that you can depend on through thick and thin is important regardless of organizational size.

Data Management

Not only does each of the above strategies require good data to be effective, but so do other organizational strategies. For example, you can’t optimize cost unless you know how much you are paying, how much you could be paying and the value you are getting. You can’t rationalize on the right suppliers unless you are keeping good performance metrics. And while you can always be flexible, there’s no point in being flexible unless you know the direction that you should be be flexibly moving in! Plus, in today’s economy, social media is often critical to marketing, sales, and advertising — and in order to focus on the right channels, you need data!

Data, data everywhere
And all the tables burst
Data, data everywhere
It can not get much worse!

 

You’ve Negotiated – But Are You Realising Savings on Marketing Print?

You’ve Negotiated – But Are You Realising Savings on Marketing Print?

Spend Matters UK recently ran a two-part guest post by Santosh Reddy of GEP that asked if you were really realizing savings on marketing print (Part I and Part II) if you were using an outsourcing partner, such as a Print Management Company (PMC), to manage your marketing print.

In his posts he notes that the PMC comes with advantages, such as one or more pre-qualified vendors that can do all of the print jobs for all of their clients and who offer the PMC a preferential price for the guaranteed influx of work in addition to IT tools that can help your shop with digital asset management, etc. However, the PMC also comes with a disadvantage — the PMCs primary mission is to make money, not to save money for you. So the savings you get may not be as much as the savings you could get.

However, the key to savings in print is typically volume, so if you don’t use a PMC, then the category manager has to function as the PMC and make sure all print jobs get routed to the preferred vendor with preferred pricing and value-add benefits. But, as Santosh points out, this can be difficult to achieve since many internal departments, including marketing, retail, and HR, may not see the presence of Procurement as a benefit but instead view it as a loss-of-control or an unnecessary time-wasting step in the process. So how do you get the other departments on board?

Santosh presents four benefits you can sell and four less-friendly tactics you can employ if need be. Four of these suggestions in particular are quite powerful:

If these two benefits don’t get the job done:

  • one point of contact
    either the PMC or the category manager will be the sole point of contact for all internal customers – they won’t have to deal with five different print shops to find out who can do a rush print job
  • budget compliance
    it’s Procurement’s job to keep costs in line, not theirs, freeing up more of their time to do their jobs

then these two tactics will:

  • involve AP and inform them that policy states all invoices must be approved by you before being paid, as per the Procurement policy, then
  • incentivize compliance through gain or pain by rewarding those who use the process with faster services, more savings credited to their budget, etc. and punishing those won don’t by delaying invoice payments, reporting organizational losses from their actions to management, etc.

And he also gives you great advice on how to source, select the right technology to manage the process internally (whether or not you use a PMC), and establish a contract. This 2-part series is worth checking out. Given the cost of ink in North America, every penny counts!

There’s More Than 50 Ways …

… to leave your lover. There’s more than 50 shades of grey (as there is infinite intensity to grey-scale). And there’s certainly more than 50 shades of pay … (see: 50 shades of pay spend analysis many profitable pleasures)

Over on Spend Matters, Pierre Mitchell is penning a series on 50 Shades of Pay: Spend Analysis’ Many Profitable Pleasures where he notes that spend analysis is not a quickie event and nothing could be closer to the truth. Spend Analysis is an on-going process that never ends. There’s always new spend, always new quotes, and always new ways to look at data. It’s wham, bam, spend cube and start all over again. And again. And again.

And it must be an evolving competency that is refined over and over again. There are many reasons for this, and, as Pierre pointed out,these include the facts that:

  • You can’t manage and improve what you cannot see
    and the more you see, the more you manage, and the more you’ll manage, the more you’ll see …
  • It’s a fundamental part of corporate strategy as the more you see and manage, the better you’ll be able to manage your resources and opportunities, which is what corporate strategy should be focussed on.
  • Managing your spending includes internal spending too even if you can’t control it, you still need to understand what it is, where it is going, who controls it, what could be done about it, and what the recommendations should be.
  • Spend analysis is a gift for your partners – not an IT project because it really is decision support for the organization.
  • Spend is the flip side of supply and it is about maximizing bang (supply value) for the spent buck (spend magnitude). It’s the other end of the source-to-settle process. And to optimize your Supply Management, you need to optimize your entire source-to-settle process.
  • Finance will get even more turned on by spend analysis than you if you do it right. They like shiny reports — and a good spend analysis solution can produce them en masse. (The reporting engine is actually the least useful part of a good spend analysis tool, but just like Sonny goes cuckoo for cocoa puffs, finance and the C-Suite love their reports.)
  • Spend analysis shines a bright light on the master data problems which can be cranked up to the point that it’s blinding. Some people may be embarrassed at the mess master data is in (because they spent millions on a broken ERP), but what’s more import, their pride or your bonus (which requires the company to be profitable)?
  • It’s incremental in nature – the Trojan rabbit of procurement transformation. Just like the rabbit of Caerbannog, it looks cute and sweet, but, in the right hand, spend analysis is a vicious killer of inefficiency and waste.

If Pierre manages to write 50 pieces, it will shape up to be a great series for those of you who have Plus membership. For those of you who don’t, I’ll remind you that SI co-wrote the book on Spend Visibility with Lexington Analytics 3 years ago, and this book, which has garnered over 10,000 downloads since its release, is still available for free. I’m sure Pierre will get to more advanced topics in the later part of his series then what we covered in the book, but it’s a great start. And maybe by then you can convince your boss to pay for the Plus membership to read Pierre’s posts.