Category Archives: Market Intelligence

Source-to-Pay+ Is Extensive (P13) … But I Can’t Touch The Sacred Cows!

In our last installment (Part 12) of this series here on Sourcing Innovation (SI), we provided you a list of forty-plus (40+) vendors that could potentially meet your spend analysis needs and help you identify the cost savings, reduction, and avoidance opportunities you have in your organization as well as the best modules to achieve those cost savings, reduction, and avoidance opportunities. The right spend analysis tool properly applied will generate returns that are many orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the tool and will surprise you.

However, some of those best opportunities will be in the “sacred cows” of Marketing, Legal, and SaaS subscriptions. And you probably think you can’t do anything because you don’t have the data, Marketing and Legal won’t let you touch their spend (or give you the detail you need to even analyze it, often because they didn’t collect it), and you have no idea on what SaaS is actually being used and how much you overspend.

the doctor knows this, and knows that you might need custom solutions to manage, and analyze, this spend, so, before we move on and tackle the next module in the Source-to-Pay queue, we’re going to take a brief sidebar and provide you with short lists of vendors that specialize in each area that will collect the data you need — and sometimes even provide you with deep, customized, integrated analytics that provide you with the insights that matter (including the insights that matter on your matter spend) — to enable deep spend analysis, benchmark creation, and opportunity identification.

But first, we have to repeat our disclaimer that, as per the lists of e-Procurement vendors provided in Part 7 and the list of Spend Analysis vendors provided in Part 12, this list is most definitely in no way complete (as no analyst is aware of every company, and neither Marketing nor Legal are the particular domains of expertise of SI), is only valid as of the date of posting (as companies get acquired and go out of business, often without notice), and does not include the broader range of offerings that are available for SaaS Management (including provisioning and cloud management), Marketing (including agency management pure-plays, although DecideWare, for example, does this), or Legal (including contract authoring, management, and clause analysis — although we will cover some of these players when we get to Contract Lifecycle Management [CLM]).

Again, and we can’t say this enough, not all vendors are equal and we’d venture to say that this most definitely applies to the lists below. The companies below are of all sizes (very small to very large), offer different functionality (focussing in on different aspects of Marketing, Legal, and/or SaaS Spend Management), different levels of customization and integration, different types of companion services, focus on different company sizes and/or company types, and integrate with different Source-to-Pay and Enterprise ecosystems.

Do your research, and reach out to an expert for help if you need it in compiling a starting short list of relevant, comparable, vendors for your organization and its specific needs. For a few of these vendors, you may find a write up in the Sourcing Innovation archives, Spend Matters Pro, or Gartner cool vendor write-ups, but for many of these vendors, you’ll have to look beyond your typical sources of information as they are highly specialized and don’t fall into the typical Source-to-Pay bucket. But if you have enough Marketing, Legal, or SaaS spend, they can be highly valuable.

Note that, due to the newness of SaaS spend management, the different marketing and legal needs of every organization, and the high degree of differentiation between many of the solutions below, we are not (yet) defining baseline functionality and instead advising you to do a detailed analysis of your spend, processes, and needs and judge potential solutions based on that. If you need help with that, seek out a pro who can do the (gap) analysis and RFI creation for you.

Finally, a second reminder that inclusion on this list DOES NOT imply Sourcing Innovation is recommending the vendor.

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) Subscription Cost Management

Company LinkedIn
Employees		 HQ (State)
Country
Beamy 60 France
BetterCloud 305 New York, USA
Cledera 63 Colorado, USA
Flexera 1026 Illinois, USA
G2 Track 792 Illinois, USA
Hudled 8 Australia
NPI Financial 410 Georgia, USA
Productiv 139 California, USA
SaaSRooms 9 United Kingdom
SaaSTrax ?? North Carolina, USA
Sastrify 166 Germany
Setyl 14 United Kingdom
Spendflo 70 California, USA
Substly Sweden
Torii 114 New York, USA
Trelica 12 United Kingdom
TRG Screen 179 New York, USA
Tropic 240 New York, USA
Vendr 404 Massachusetts, USA
Viio 18 Columbia
Zluri 111 California, USA
Zylo 144 Indiana, USA

Legal Spend Management

Company LinkedIn
Employees		 HQ (State)
Country
Apperio 48 United Kingdom
Brightflag 150 New York, USA
(LexisNexis) CounselLink 28 Ohio, USA
Fulcrum GT 158 Illinois, USA
Mitratech TeamConnect 1119 Texas, USA
Onit 339 Texas, USA
Ontra 421 California, USA
Persuit 100 New York, USA
Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker ?? Ontario
Tonkean LegalWorks 76 California
Wolters Kluwer (TyMetrix 360) ??? Netherlands

Marketing (Procurement) Spend Management

Company LinkedIn
Employees		 HQ (State)
Country
DecideWare 27 Australia
HH Global ?? United Kingdom
Mtivity 15 United Kingdom
Promost 68 Poland
RightSpend 23 New York, USA
SourceIt Market 6 Australia

Onwards to Part 14.

Are You Effectively Using Your “Extended Enterprise”?

For many businesses, more than 50% of their workforce is employed by their suppliers. It is their suppliers who make and provide the crucial products and services upon which their own business depends. So, it makes sense to consider how they can best manage those suppliers as part of their ‘extended enterprise’.

Greater connection and collaboration with your extended enterprise can bring multiple benefits. Among them better access to specialised products or market knowledge; process efficiency improvements; a rise in innovation; reduced risk; improved quality control; boosted surety of supply; and additional flexibility.

The introduction to the 2023 Supplier Management Survey

How well do your run, or should I say orchestrate*, your supply base that constitutes your extended enterprise? Do you maximize their productivity? Capability? Innovation? Shouldn’t you know? Shouldn’t you find out?

The answer is, yes, you should be taking steps to better understand the capabilities of your supply base and use them to your advantage. The first step is to benchmark how well you are doing now. The best way to do this is with the State of Flux 15th annual 2023 Supplier Management Survey which will allow you to benchmark your organization’s maturity and performance against hundreds of your peers for free.

State of Flux is the global leading provider of supplier management research and benchmarks, as evidenced by the fact that this is their 15th year and they have been doing it longer than anyone else.

The survey is only open for a limited time, don’t miss your chance!

* keep reading the Source-to-Pay series!

The 60 Minute Due Diligence Trend is Disturbing!

the doctor posted this on LinkedIn yesterday as a follow up to yesterday’s rant on how a 60 minute call is NOT due diligence, but is reposting it here because it’s something we should all be aware of and thinking about as progressive thought leaders (and while LinkedIn posts may get buried under the electronic sands of time, it will remain here).

Is anyone else disturbed and fed-up by the simultaneous trends of

  • “crowd-sourced due diligence” in 60 minute chunks from
  • the onslaught of new “global” consultancies that just connect you with “experts”
    … where these consultancies are staffed by recent graduates with literally no expertise in any of the areas they are finding the “experts” in and no capability to judge whether or not the “expert” they are connecting the client with has any real “expertise” in the area or not?

I’ve personally stopped responding to such firms altogether because

  • they’ve done nothing but waste my time in the past
    … (pestering me for days, and then when I finally relented, telling me the client, who apparently was insisting on me, was no longer interested — likely because I refused to drop my standard hourly rate for what was nothing but an interruption*)
  • they’ve done zero research as to what my expertise is
    … and when I’ve replied asking for more details beyond “supply chain” or “procurement”, I never received any relevant details beyond “these sample companies”, where I could often figure out that I was the last person they should be contacting if they wanted the true expert (I am a leading expert in Sourcing, Optimization, ML, and other advanced S2C tech [which coincides with my academic background], not in P2P [even though I know it very well, there are those, in this list, that know it better]; and in SC, it’s modelling, not the ins-and-outs of WIMS or Plant Management) …
    which forces one to conclude they are not doing any research on anyone else they recommend because they don’t have the skills to
  • given that they are essentially matching their clients with random people, there is zero reason to believe they are providing their clients with the quality insight that they’re promising
    … the doctor doesn’t care if they match a F500 with a dozen geniuses, if those geniuses have no relevant experience in the particular domain of interest to the client, how will the client learn anything. I know sometimes its “company x / product y” market research, but user experience is not deep insight into anything beyond *that* user’s experience — and if that user wasn’t trained, doesn’t have the right educational background to be using the tool, or was one stepped removed (the manager, and the team used it), it’s incomplete or second hand information.

It’s disturbing, and in some ways disgusting. What these firms should be doing is

  • finding and vetting a true market expert database against an appropriate taxonomy,
  • finding the right (leading) expert for the client (and, if no one expert can satisfy all of the client’s inquiries, identifying a team that will work with that leading expert)
  • having the leading expert put together an education session that covers the core information the client wants, possibly with the support of one or more other experts in related areas, and
  • ensuring the materials are delivered after the course is presented.

That’s worth a finder’s fee and a project management fee, and a rather large one at that given that an expert is worth more than gold, as obviously the client isn’t equipped to do this, and is thus reaching out to the “global” consultancy because of this.

But the model now is, to be blunt, sh!t as a client’s chances of getting what they need when they need deep insight are less than getting the toy of their dreams from a rigged arcade claw machine. It should not be accepted and true experts should disdain it!

* it’s hard to deliver real value in an hour, which is why the doctor typically contracts in a large multiple of days, and, yes, you will get a better rate if you contract for the amount of time needed to do the job right 🙂

How Resilient is Your Supplier Management?

Given that the state of most supply chains is still chaos, and may be for quite some time, if you don’t know, maybe you should find out!

How? Benchmark your current supplier management performance against more than 800 global organizations that participated in the 2022 State of Flux Supplier Management survey at this link (and receive a free maturity benchmark analysis for your organization).

The reality is that supplier resilience, the foundation for supply chain resilience, is becoming more important than just about any other kind of resilience as a business without the products to sell or operate is not a business, and if its suppliers are not resilient, it won’t have any sources of supply … and will not be able to operate.

That’s why, once a an organization has implemented an e-Procurement core and a sourcing core, if it has any supply issues, it should tackle SRM as soon as possible in wave 2 (and this can be done simultaneous with implementing the analytics core — after all, it’s good to have supplier data to crunch on). Plus, SRM supports end-to-end source-to-pay processes when done right, as explained in the State of Flux research publication front-material that brings you best practices from over a decade of research.

The research report, which reviews their six pillars of supplier management:

  • Value
  • Engagement
  • Governance
  • People
  • Technology
  • Collaboration

Also provides you with a four-phase action plan to guide you through your four-phase supplier management journey. At a high level, the journey is to:

  1. Explore the opportunity … with a value opportunity diagnostic
  2. Create the business case … by fleshing out the value proposition
  3. Setup and run … with supplier management in real time
  4. Scale and grow … and achieve ROI

And this is something you want to do as leaders significantly outperform on each of the pillars even compared to “fast followers” …

In a later post we’ll dive into a few of the findings, but for now, if you’re having problems (and you are), and you’re not sure how well you’re doing against peers, take the benchmark, download the report, and start planning for supplier development — even if you aren’t ready to implement a custom solution as all P2P or e-Sourcing platforms can support the basics of supplier management, and the reality is a platform isn’t a solution without a process and trained people to follow it. (And keep your eyes peeled for the State of Flux 2023 research survey which will be launching soon … responding early gets you the results early, and leaders in this space are in the best position to win!)

Sustainable Supply Chains Sacrifice China! (Most of the Time.)

Where your supply chain is concerned, China has just demonstrated what SI has known for over a decade — it is the enemy. (This isn’t the only situation where China or the CCP is the enemy, but those are different rants. Note that we do NOT equate China or CCP with Chinese people. Most Chinese are NOT the enemy of your supply chain or democracy just like most Americans are NOT the enemy of intelligence and common sense.)

Long time readers will know that in the naughts, SI spent a lot of bandwidth telling your deaf ears that you should be investing heavily in nearshoring and home country sourcing because of the dangers of outsourcing in general, and, the dangers of oversourcing to a specific country, like China, in particular — which have finally become very apparent. It’s too bad it took a freakin’ pandemic to make clear how dangerous it is to outsource so many critical products and JIT materials to a country halfway around the globe, especially when such sourcing in bulk across the industry leads to the lack of capacity close to home due to factory closures and talent evaporation.

There’s a reason the doctor told you two weeks ago to remember the 80’s (and the early 80s in particular) … and that’s because that’s the last time most multi-national corporations in the Americas got outsourcing right … when they were near-sourcing to Mexico (who should build the wall just to keep Trump out, but that’s yet another rant for another day).

Let’s face it, some stuff just shouldn’t be sourced from home. Stuff that’s not critical, stuff that’s very expensive to make at home (but easily trucked across a single border) for various reasons (which can go beyond labour to energy costs if there are no affordable renewable sources nearby, transportation costs for raw or unprocessed materials are ridiculous otherwise, etc.), or stuff where most of the raw materials or necessary environmental conditions (for growing, mining, etc.) are just not present at, or near, home.

But when you consider a typical organization, how much stuff really falls into this category? First of all, you have to exclude any product for (re)sale that’s a primary profit line. Then you need to exclude any raw material or component critical to production unless you just can’t get it nearby. Then any product necessary for security or safety. And so on. At the end of the day, you don’t have much left, and if you’re doing the analysis right, you’re going to be left with:

  • raw materials and products just not available nearby (because you need certain growing conditions, large deposits of a mineral only found in certain geographies, etc.)
  • processed materials or chemicals where the raw materials are very expensive or dangerous to transport
  • products unique to a culture or region
  • novelty or other items not critical to your business

which (before the short-sighted wall-street loving common sense hating clueless and unskilled consultants of the late 80’s and early 90’s, like Steve Castle, put everything into the outsourcing bandwagon and blinged it out beyond belief) were the only products a company would outsource halfway around the world and still the only products a company should be sourcing from halfway around the world. Everything else should be near-sourced, and if really critical or the cost differential is small, home-sourced.

This also means that just shifting everything to another country in the BRIC, and India (which is ruled by a more open, transparent, and dependable democracy) in particular, is also NOT the answer. (They may not be the enemy, but they are still NOT the answer.)

So, unless you want your Supply Chain to completely collapse after the next global disaster, go back to basics, remember the smart outsourcing decision from the 80s, reopen those Mexican factories, and start near-sourcing again. And then, where you can, bring it back (close to) home.