Category Archives: Miscellaneous

The Tower of Spend

To the tune of The Tower of Song by Leonard Cohen.

Well my wits are gone and my hair is grey
I spend in categories where I used to save
And I’m crazy for help, but I’m here getting none
I’m just shuffling papers every day
Oh in the tower of spend

I said to Ignacio Lopez: how bad does it get
Ignacio Lopez hasn’t answered yet
But I hear him pacing all night long
A hundred floors above me
In the tower of spend

I was made for this, I could not sway
I felt that purchasing would show me the way
Out of corporate drudgery to the beyond
But they stuck me in the dungeon
In the tower of spend

So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll
Because it looks like I’m going to be nailed to the wall
There’s no light from the window when it should be strong
A total lack of visibility
In the tower of spend

Now you can say that I’ve grown bitter, but of this you can be sure
If I can not track my spend I’m going to end up poor
There’s a mighty judgement coming, and I sure hope I’m wrong
You see, I’m drowning in paperwork
In the tower of spend

I see you standing on the other side
I don’t know how the chasm got so wide
We were the same, way back when
And all the bridges are burning that I might have crossed
Still I feel so close to everything that I lost
Don’t want to lose it again

Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back
They’re moving me tomorrow even further down the track
You won’t be hearing from me again, after I am gone
I’ll be drowning in the darkness
From a dungeon in the tower of spend

Yeah my wits are gone and my hair is grey
I spend in categories where I used to save
And I’m crazy for help, but I’m here getting none
I’m just shuffling papers every day
Oh in the tower of spend

Innovate Your Marketing with Sourcing Innovation Sponsorships

You can spend foolishly or you can spend wisely. You can take out banner ads and placements on various websites, or you can take out targeted sponsorships on sites where you can reach thousands of highly qualified readers each month – including influential analysts, media, consultants, and end users. Furthermore, you can choose sites where readers come back monthly, or weekly at best, or you can choose sites where readers come back daily. And if you’re really lucky, you can find a site with daily readers focused on your target audience.

But if you’re in the supply management or spend management space … your options are limited. Yes, there is Spend Matters, but it has restricted the number of lead sponsors to four, and all slots are currently full. That’s why I’m pleased to provide you more details on the Sourcing Innovation blog sponsorships that will be available next month!

Not only will a sponsorship of Sourcing Innovation provide you with great value (and valuable advisory services if you commit to a year), but the value will increase over time. Sourcing Innovation is now the second most trafficked (independent) blog in the space (by a considerable margin), and growing in readership every week. Furthermore, I would not be surprised if Jason’s Spend Matters prediction that the leading blogs overtake the more traditional media publication sites (like Purchasing and Supply and Demand Chain Executive) this year comes true. At the very least we should come close!

Moreover, as I hinted last Friday, you will be associated with the only blog with the number one goal of end-user education. Over the last decade, I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how good your product or service is, or how good you market it, if your target audience does not understand what it is and how it helps them. This is where Sourcing Innovation will help you with its relentless goal of user education.

But for those of you taught to Spend Wisely by Spend Matters, annual sponsors will get even more than a good feeling in their investment. Annual sponsors will also get:

  • a linked company logo on the topmost section of the right-hand side of the sourcing innovation blog
  • a “sponsor welcome” post describing your organization and offerings, and then one “interview”, (blogger) “commentary”, or sponsor “update” post each quarter (subject matter at blogger’s discretion)
  • unlimited permission to reproduce blog content, with citation, for marketing initiatives during the sponsorship period
  • attendance, and blog coverage, of one sponsor event per year in Canada or the US
  • assistance with two webcasts or podcasts
  • access to the sponsor advisory program which includes:
    • virtually unlimited off-site advisory services:(availability for four calls of up to one hour each per month to discuss anything related to your technology, business, strategy, or market is guaranteed)
    • one free day of on-site advisory services per year
    • invitation to any private event sponsored or co-sponsored by Sourcing Innovation
    • one affiliate content link
    • one original vendor-independent technology, process, or solution white paper at half off (up to 10 pages)

If you are interested, please reach out using the contact information in the FAQ. Please note that Sourcing Innovation will only be accepting four sponsorships this year.

Selling Your e-Sourcing Pilot I: The Perfect Pitch

You’re an over-worked, under-paid procurement professional unlucky enough to be employed at one of those companies still in the dark ages where ERP is the magic fire that’s going to solve all your problems and you’ve just been charged with reducing spend by 10%. Your company is a contract manufacturer, all your contracts are coming due, and you know that all of your suppliers are about to demand significant price increases due to rising raw material costs above the board. You’d be happy to be stuck between a rock and a hard place because, right now, you feel like your ass is already in the fire … heck, you’d be happy if you were just in the frying pan.

Although you don’t really understand the power that lies within the lightening that modern man has captured in the world that lies beyond your cave, you know you need an eSourcing tool to help you manage more projects, open more contracts up to competition, and be more productive. However, despite your best effort, your technology-inept (or, if you’re really unlikely, just plain inept) CFO won’t even consider allowing you to buy such a tool – because that costs money, and your job is to save it – not spend it. You’re an unrecognized genius and you know that without help you’re doomed to fail. But you’re getting more response from the squirrel outside your window then you are from your superiors. What can you do?

You can deliver The Perfect Pitch. I will not claim to know what this is (if I did, I’d be a sales guy, not a process and technology supply chain [information] technology consultant), but fortunately for you there are those that do (or at least claim to) know what this is, and even a few willing to share their advice. One such individual is David L. Anderson, A VC in Vacationland, and Managing Director of Supply Chain Ventures, LLC.

Last September, he delivered the keynote address at the Procuri’s (acquired by Ariba, acquired by SAP) User Conference and this led to the Procuri sponsored white-paper The Perfect Pitch: How to Succeed in Selling and Doing Technology Initiatives. In this white paper he not only describes a perfect pitch, but gives you ten simple rules to follow in your quest to create one.

The ten simple rules are:

  1. Know your friends and enemies.
  2. Clearly define your value proposition and business plan.
  3. Credentials – you better have lots of them!
  4. Why an elevator pitch is critical!
  5. Prepping the Players.
  6. Finding the Big “No” early.
  7. It’s all about the pizza, not the delivery person.
  8. Socializing your friends and enemies.
  9. Selling the deal.
  10. It’s all about the process, not just the presentations.

Simple, right? Wrong! It’s more than just these basic rules of business – it’s understanding how they fit together and evolve into not only a pitch, but a plan of attack that will allow you to sell the project you need to succeed. So check out “The Perfect Pitch: How to Succeed in Selling and Doing Technology Initiatives”. It will be worth the time it takes to read it.

The Talent Series X: Personnel Best

Talent location, acquisition, and retention is a big problem for many companies across the board. It’s not just restricted to the Spend Management Talent Game. Given my inclination to blog about the talent deficit, and my recent proclamation that You Will Lose Your Top Talent, it’s no surprise that the recent Supply Management article “Personnel best” caught my eye.

In the article, the author discusses some steps that you can take to insure you retain the talent you are lucky enough to attract. The steps start on day one, upon the induction of a new recruit into your corporate culture. According to the article, you should:

  • ensure a new recruit clearly understands what you expect from them
  • listen to your new recruit’s expectations
  • establish the skill sets necessary for the role
  • based on a mutual ranking understanding of their competency in each skill set, develop a career development plan and help them identify the appropriate training, experience, and knowledge they will need

Furthermore, once the induction process is over, its critical that you continue to make sure that they feel valued and empowered and that you remain involved in their career development. The article recommends that you:

  • review their progress regularly, encourage them frequently, and ensure your rewards and remuneration package keeps pace with their increasing value to your organization
  • provide leadership
  • insure any managers or supervisors that report to you share the mutual goal of advancing the careers of your underlings
  • project a positive image of the company and their role in it
  • insure workloads are fair and that your team members can maintain an appropriate work/life balance
  • give something back to the community

This is sound advice, especially considering the statistics quoted by the article:

  • 43% of top employers reported a shortfall in the graduate market last year (Association of Graduate Recruiters)
  • 86% of young people want progressive management to inspire them (Institute of Leadership and Management)
  • 52% think their manager is not helping them to develop (ILM)
  • 40% do not get along well with their manager (ILM)
  • 27% would leave an organization as a result of poor management (ILM)

We may be in a Talent Crunch, but not everyone has to lose the Talent War.

Wharton Nuggets (on Market Share, Entrepreneurship, and Grocery Purchasing Patterns)

Over the last couple of months, Knowledge @ Wharton has published three articles that caught my eye. (Well, more than three, but I felt that these three were worth blogging about.)

The first article that I am going to draw attention to is “The ‘Myth of Market Share’: Can Focusing Too Much on the Competition Harm Profitability?”. The article starts off by noting that it is a common practice of many companies to focus their attention on grabbing market share from their competitors, but such efforts can actually be detrimental to the firm’s profitability.

The reality is that even fifty years ago research indicated that competitive choices are often low-profit. Back in 1996, a study by Armstrong and Collopy analyzed data amassed by scholars to measure the level of competitor orientation of 20 major corporations for five nine year periods beginning in 1938 and ending in 1982 and found that competitive-oriented objectives were negatively correlated with ROI for the data. In other words, the more managers tried to be the biggest in their market, the more they harmed their own profitability. In contrast, companies whose only goal was profit maximization posted stronger returns on investment than the other firms.

The article ends by quoting Wharton Marketing Professor J. Scott Armstrong who says We’re not saying companies shouldn’t pay attention to their competitors; they might be doing reasonable things that you may also want to do … What we’re saying is that the objective should not be to try to beat your competitor. The objective should be profitability. In view of all the damage that occurs by focusing on market share, companies would be better off not measuring it. ‘Nuff said.

The next article that caught my eye was “Dos and Don’ts for Entrepreneurs, from Those Who Have Actually Done It”. As someone who spent the early part of their career working in a lot of start-ups, I know from extensive experience that most entrepreneur’s don’t have a clue what they’re doing. When you fail when you (a) have the best technology, (b) have more than enough money to do what you promised, or (c) have great talent across the board, or (d) have all three … something’s wrong … and it’s not with the employees.

Therefore, whenever someone who has a clue offers to share their advice, I thoroughly believe you should heed it. Tidbits you will take away from the article is that not every business idea needs venture capital, successful businesses solve a real problem (not a hypothetical one), disruptive technologies enable a start up to jump into a large, lucrative market where established leaders have become complacent, good entrepreneurs manage risk, and the KISS rule is always in full-force: get the prototype out as soon as possible, get feedback, and improve only where needed. Remember, a camera, mp3 player, personal organizer, web browser, etc. may be great, but sometimes you just need a phone.

The final article is “The ‘Traveling Salesman’ Goes Shopping: The Efficiency of Purchasing Patterns in the Grocery Store” about the application of the “Traveling Salesman Problem” to the study of the behavior of grocery shoppers.

Wharton marketing professor Peter S. Fader insists that the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which seeks the shortest route available to a traveling salesman who has to visit a number of cities and then return home, closely resembles the problem faced by a typical grocery shopper who plans to purchase a certain list of items in the grocery store. To achieve the same efficiency as the salesman who meticulously plots his route, a shopper would need to know where products are located, and have a game plan on how to go about gathering the items on his list while covering as little distance as possible. However, the average shopper is quite inefficient.

What’s the goal of the research? To understand in-store behavior and how stores should place items to ( a) increase customer efficiency and ( b) increase sales. Does it affect your supply chain? Not really – unless you are in grocery retail, because more efficiency and better sales increase demand, which increases revenue, which should increase profit. But it’s still a very interesting article.