Category Archives: Market Intelligence

The Sourcing Innovation Source-to-Pay+ Mega Map!

Now slightly less useless than every other logo map that clogs your feeds!

1. Every vendor verified to still be operating as of 4 days ago!
Compare that to the maps that often have vendors / solutions that haven’t been in business / operating as a standalone entity in months on the day of release! (Or “best-of” lists that sometimes have vendors that haven’t existed in 4 years! the doctor has seen both — this year!)

2. Every vendor logo is clickable!
the doctor doesn’t know about you, but he finds it incredibly useless when all you get is a strange symbol with no explanation or a font so small that you would need an electron microscope to read it. So, to fix that, every logo is clickable so you can go to the site and at least figure out who the vendor is.

3. Every vendor is mapped to the closest standard category/categories!
Furthermore, every category has the standard definitions used by Sourcing Innovation and Spend Matters!
the doctor can’t make sense of random categories like “specialists” or “collaborative” or “innovative“, despises when maps follow this new age analyst/consultancy award trend and give you labels you just can’t use, and gets red in the face when two very distinct categories (like e-Sourcing and Marketplaces or Expenses and AP are merged into one). Now, the doctor will also readily admit that this means that not all vendors in a category are necessarily comparable on an apples-to-apples basis, but that was never the case anyway as most solutions in a category break down into subcategories and, for example, in Supplier Management (SXM) alone, you have a CORNED QUIP mash of solutions that could be focused on just a small subset of the (at least) ten different (primary) capabilities. (See the link on the sidebar that takes you to a post that indexes 90+ Supplier Management vendors across 10 key capabilities.)

Secure Download the PDF!  (or, use HTTP) [HTML]
(5.3M; Note that the Free Adobe Reader might choke on it; Preview on Mac or a Pro PDF application on Windows will work just fine)

SaaS Procurement for S2P+ Goes Beyond Basic Buying Etiquette for IT Procurement

Medium recently posted an article from ArmourZero, a cyber-security platform provider*, on IT Procurement Etiquette for User and Vendor, which I guess goes to show the lack of knowledge on how to buy among some organizations. It doesn’t go nearly far enough on what S2P buyers need to know, but it does provide basics we can build on.

The advice it provides for a user are:

  1. Do Your Homework (Create a Proper SoW): take the time to provide a proper Scope of Work (and don’t just take a vendor’s sample SoW, edit it slightly, and send it out, especially to the vendor you took it from)
  2. Professional: be neutral and don’t favour any specific vendor
  3. Transparent: be clear about the process, and if all bids exceed the budget and a reduced bid is required, be clear about the reason for going back and any modifications to the SoW to allow vendors to be within a budget range
  4. Fair: stick to the rules; not even incumbents get to submit late; if you have a minimum number of bids in by the deadline, you work with those; you weight on the same scales; etc.
  5. No Personal Interest: don’t accept gifts; don’t vote on the bid where you have a relationship; etc.

However, in our space, you have to start with:

  • Do Your Tech Market Research: make sure you understand the different types of solutions in the market, what the baselines are, and what the standard terminology is (sourcing != procurement)
  • Do Your Deep Dive Tech Market Research: once you figure out the major area, figure out the right sub area — a Strategic Sourcing Solution is not a Strategic Sourcing Solution is not a Strategic Sourcing Solution; a CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) is not a CLM is not a CLM; and an SXM is definitely not an SXM which is definitely not an SXM; in the case of Strategic Sourcing, do you mean RFX? e-Auction? or optimization-backed sourcing? in the case of CLM, do you mean Negotiation, Analysis, or Governance? in the third case, which element(s) of the CORNED QUIP mash are you looking for: compliance? orchestration? relationship? network? enablement? discovery? quality? uncertainty? information? performance? No vendor does more than half of these, and those vendors will only do a couple of areas really deep and more-or-less fake the rest!
  • Write a Process and Results Oriented RFP (& SoW): it’s not features or functions (beyond the foundational functions all applications in the class need to support) it’s the processes you need to support, the systems you need to integrate with, and the results you need to get — let the vendors describe how they will solve them, not just check meaningless yes/no boxes … they might have a more efficient way to support your process, a faster way to get results, etc.; the same goes for any implementations, integrations, services, etc. — make sure it focusses on what you need to accomplish, not meaningless check-the-box exercises
  • Do Your Due Diligence Vendor Research: once you have figured out the solutions you need and the primary capabilities you are looking for, make sure the vendors you invite not only offer the type of solution, but have (most of) the foundations of the capabilities you are looking for; use analyst firms, maps, tech matches, and expert analyst consultants to build your short-list of mandarin to tangerine to orange vendors vs random google searches that, if you are lucky, will give you apples to oranges, and if you are not, will give you rutabagas to oranges to tofu vendor matches

Then apply the rest of the advice in the linked article by ArmourZero.

You’ll have better success in your RFP, negotiations, and your implementation if you do all of your homework first, even though it is a lot more extensive than you want it to be. (But remember, there are expert analyst consultants who can help you. No one says you can’t hire an expert tutor! And the reality is that you should spend five figures before making a six to seven figure investment (as there will be implementation, integration, and support costs on top of that six-plus license fee), and maybe even do a six-figure deep dive process and technical maturity assessment, market scan, and custom RFP/SoW generation project with an expert analyst consultant before signing a recurring [high] seven figure suite deal.

* A CyberSecurity firm is the last vendor you’d expect to be authoring such a post (given the massive increase in CyberAttacks since 2019), but I guess it shows just how bad buying can be if they felt the need to write on this vs. a SaaS Management Vendor

The B2B Software Marketplaces Will Rise. Then the Hammer will Fall!

Thanks to Apple, every consumer thinks there’s an app for that. And for most consumer desires, there probably is. Especially since Apple’s App Commerce climbed to 1.1 Trillion in 2022. Yes, that’s 1,100,000,000,000 US Dollars! That’s a lot of money, especially when most apps are being sold for a few bucks.

When you consider:

  • consumer app marketplaces are now a Trillion dollar business
  • enterprises are buying more SaaS than ever, as every employee in every department wants an app(lication) to support every task they do
  • enterprises pay 10X to 100X what individuals pay per user license, and, thus, the opportunity of enterprise app marketplaces is in the tens (to hundreds) of Trillions
  • enterprises want easy, centralized, acquisition to limit the number of vendors they need to deal with / handle subscription invoices from

It’s easy to see why all the big software / cloud vendors are opening their own app marketplaces. A recent article on IOT Analytics shouted the rise of the B2B software marketplaces while quoting their B2B Technology Marketplaces Market Report (2024-2030) that noted that:

  • they are the fastest growing procurement channel (for software)
  • dedicated platform providers are seeing success
  • some sellers make Billions

And they will continue to grow for a few years. But then, the hammer will fall.

What one has to remember is the following:

  • many of these marketplaces are taking a big cut, like 30% or more, which is what a sales partner would have taken to compensate its employee(s) that actively sold the product, but they are doing NOTHING but creating a listing, making it searchable, taking an order, collecting a payment, and providing a license key … even when you consider cloud fees, payment processor fees, platform maintenance fees, they could be very profitable at 13% (remember that recent article on how roughly half a trillion dollars will be wasted on SaaS spend this year … well, this is only going to increase that as you’re paying almost 20% more than you need to for the licenses you do need and use)
  • apps, licenses, and overspend is going to proliferate rapidly as “approved” app stores make it easy for every employee with a p-card to buy what they want, when they want
  • those SaaS audits and rationalizations that identify 33%+ overspend are only going to reclaim at most 20% of that, if you’re lucky, because, even if the software developer is willing to refund unused licenses, they’re not going to refund that 30%+ they already paid the marketplace … and that’s if they’ll even talk to you because you acquired the license through a third party
  • there’s no real negotiation opportunity when you buy from a marketplace

So as businesses race to digitization, they will embrace the marketplace as it will help them get part of the way there very quickly, but then when they realize just how much they are spending on app(lication)s, and turn Procurement on strategic procurement of SaaS, the first thing to go will be the app marketplace purchases … and then … it will be time for the hammer to fall.

Beware of Magical Thinking In Your Procurement!

Back in 2017 (yes, that was 7 years ago, but the subject is still relevant), the doctor penned a post asking if there was magical thinking in your procurement noting that:

the Procurement Department that is getting the worst deal is the one that hallucinates the most — and needs to — in order to keep their worldview intact

And, furthermore, it was these Procurement departments that were most against modernizing their processes or platforms because their worldview requires them to believe that the antiquated processes and (severely) outdated platforms they are (still) using are just fine. (And they don’t recognize that their Procurement departments still run on the island of misfit toys principle — staffed with people who are nearing retirement, related to the boss, or technologically adverse and have been doing it this way for far too long.)

the doctor also noted that the easiest way to identify these organizations was by their telltale arguments of:

  • our processes are just fine, we just need more people
  • our platform is just fine, we just need more people
  • it’s not worth the cost, and it will slow us down

which were soon augmented with the additional telltale arguments of:

  • the problem isn’t with us, it’s with logistics / risk management / compliance / support
  • the problem isn’t with us, it’s the suppliers who aren’t holding up their end of the contract
  • our needs are just too unique and there’s nothing out there that will close the gaps

as supply chains started to crumble under disruptions. Because, if you just gave them more time, money, and people, everything would work out fine with a little pixie dust.

But we know there’s no silver bullet, and the only answer is to implement the best technology, with the best processes, so you can identify the biggest risks, plan mitigations, detect when they have occurred, respond quickly, and, the rest of the time, deal with exceptions and not standard operating procedures that can be entirely automated.

And, in the late 2010s, that was the extent of the magical thinking theorem. But now, thanks to the Gen-AI garbage marketing overload, and the addition of tail end Millenials (who replaced those put out to the Procurement pasture when they called it quits during COVID or when companies tried to force their return to the office), we have a new corollary to the the Magical Thinking Theorem:

the Procurement department getting the worst deal is also the one that thinks they only way to solve their problem and get the best deal is to adopt and implement Gen-AI as fast as possible

because the Millenials, who grew up glued to their smartphones, and always received instant gratification via Google and Apple, believe there is an app-for-everything and that a natural language Gen-AI app combines the best of both worlds and will solve all their problems.

Their thinking is not only as magical as the last generation thinking (that more time, money, and people can solve anything), but more dangerous (because their answer is to just turn their problems over to the artificial idiocy machine and blindly accept whatever comes out of it, no matter how hallucinatory or ridiculous the answer is).

the doctor said it before and he’ll say it again. There’s no room for magical thinking in Procurement. Just like alchemy needed to be replaced with science, magical thinking needs to be replaced with realist thinking, and random unpredictable Gen-AI replaced with proven deterministic procedural (rules-based) solutions that use tried and true mathematical techniques. (Because, the classic analytics, optimization, and machine learning that you have been ignoring for two decades will do just fine.)

Supply Chain Certifications Lost Value Quite a While Ago …

… and they won’t ever reclaim any value until they start offering training on digitally friendly processes and the core of modern digital technology. That’s why it was no surprise to the doctor to see this recent article over on the Acceleration Economy that noted that Supply Chain Certifications Lose Value as Product Expertise Gains Traction.

He was surprised to hear that the research foundation found that a whopping 18% of certifications issued through career and tech education programs are sought by employers. As someone with a background in tech, he can honestly say that he’s never worked for, or with, any employer that actually valued a tech certification because they were outdated before they were issued — the leading tech employers valued good education and experience that provided a candidate with the ability to learn and adapt on the job. Which, by the way, is exactly what a Procurement professional has to do.

As the article notes, since the machine has taken over the task of doing the calculations — computing the inventory, creating demand plans, and analyzing lead times — we don’t need in depth courses on how to do this manually, we need certifications in whatever technologies our companies have chosen to use so we can take the utmost advantage of that technology, or at least a certification that covers the basics across all technologies of that type.

But even though it’s now the mid-2020s, we still don’t have any certifications that even cover the basics of the tech that hit the scene across Source-to-Pay in the mid 2000s. After all, the basics they convey haven’t change either. So, as some have noted, while they are a decent starting point for someone just getting into Procurement, it won’t get them very far. And they certainly don’t add any value to anyone with more than 3 years of experience.

Hopefully this will change, because it would be nice if Procurement professionals had a certification option that would allow them the opportunity for a lifetime of learning, vs. checking the box for a certification where they know more than the teacher.