Category Archives: Procurement Damnation

Top 10 Ways to Be a Procurement Influencer on LinkedIn! Part I

The votes have been counted and apparently everyone wants … an Influencer!

So, welcome to Influencer Week on Sourcing Innovation! It’s time to give the influencers their due.

After all, when it comes to a:

Consultant? Nope! Once the money is gone they leave you with the mess you created (by selecting the system the big analyst firm put on the upper right of the map du jour) and you don’t want that.

Practitioner? Double Nope! Like you, they slave in the dungeon of the Tower of Spend on an old 286 which can barely play a low resolution version of Weird Al’s It’s All About the Pentiums and use Ariba Web 5.

Educator? Hell No! No one wants to learn and they definitely don’t want some random sap expending all their energy trying to teach them.

Leader? Are you crazy? As far as the CEO and CFO are concerned, ALL the bucks stop with Procurement and everything that goes wrong is Procurement’s fault, whether Procurement had any control over it or not including, but not limited to, tariffs no one predicted a year ago when the contract was signed, natural disasters, and the lack of results due to a complete lack of funding for modern technology and skilled talent.

Who does that leave?

An Influencer! Hell yes!

So now everyone wants to be … an Influencer!

Unlike a consultant, you don’t have to do projects doomed to fail. Unlike a practitioner, you get to work in the limelight and not in the ghost light of the old monochrome CRT hooked up to that 286. Unlike an educator, you don’t have to actually teach, just get likes, follows, and clicks! And, unlike a leader, you don’t have to care about results and whether your influences get any! It’s the perfect job!

But how do you become an influencer? Well, you could ask THE PROPHET, one of the OG Influencers of our space (who, by the way, only became one AFTER he learned how to solve business problems), or you could just follow this top 10 list and you’re virtually guaranteed to succeed.

10. Post top 10 lists regularly!

Letterman was right. The masses love these. While 10 is not a perfect number, the average person seems to think it is, so just go with it. They’ve been getting results for 40 years! (Since September 18, 1985, to be precise!)

09. Inspirational Quotes in fancy graphics.

Everyone likes an inspirational quote right? A little bit of feel good to start their day (otherwise they might have to stop by Dr. Feelgood‘s on the way to the office). Make sure they rise and shine to you!

08. Motivational Posters, Procurement Style.

What do people like more than an inspirational quote? A motivational poster! Even better if it has cute kitty kats because we all have to


Bonus points if you can figure out how to make these Motivational Procurement Posters Gangnam Style

07. Don’t Forget Your Hobby!

Yes, remember to tell us weekly about how you ski the specialist slopes, sail the strait, race cars or do something else super cool every weekend because not only are you a Procurement Influencer, but you’re a super cool human! (After all, an AI could never make up a story about how it raced a car at the local track this weekend or generate a picture of itself at the beach because it’s an AI, right?) And everyone wants to connect with, and thus be influenced by, a super cool human, right?

06. And Definitely Don’t Forget the Exclusives!

After all, you’re not a true influencer until you have a cult, sorry, fan club, sorry, exclusive member club of leading Procurement professionals who get access to your most exclusive content that distinguishes them as the biggest suckers, sorry, leading thinkers who will take their careers to the next level with your industry leading content (all designed to keep their dopamine levels at maximum capacity).

But Wait, There’s More! Don’t forget that you have to offer them something to sign up for at the low, low starter price of $19.99 a month! (After all, Mr. Popeil made that the magic number 50 years ago and it’s held on ever since!)

Come back tomorrow for Part II for the top 5 suggestions to be a Preeminent Procurement Influencer!

2025 Is Just Another Year … But Is It All Doom and Gloom? Part 6 (Wayward Son)

The real answer is: yes (for the majority) and no (for the minority). So be in the minority. And continue to

Keep Calm and Carry On

Ignore the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that the vendors and analyst firms are trying to instill in you on a daily basis in an effort to get you to buy, buy, buy something that you probably don’t need and definitely won’t work for you. (Just remember that tech project failure rate has reached an all time high of 88% [and climbing]. The more FUD you fall for, the more failure you’ll see in return.)

It’s not about the shiny new hotness, it’s about what actually solves your problems and works for you. And, as I’m not sorry to say, more often than not in back office data processing (which Procurement is), it’s usually the Old Busted Hotness that gets the job done.

Moreover, the fundamentals of problem identification and problem solving HAVE NOT changed.

  1. Understand the problem
  2. Formulate the problem
  3. Find the root cause
  4. Identify potential solutions
  5. Evaluate potential solutions (independent of marketing or underlying tech)
  6. Select and implement a solution

And you can do this using one or more general problem solving strategies. Moreover, if you need to understand the underlying tech, you can employ an expert to help you. When it comes to solution selection, the right consultants are cheap, especially when they have a solid foundation in Tech and the Domain in which you are trying to solve the problem, and you don’t, and these consultants already know a large number of potential solutions to help you evaluate. (Sometimes hundreds of them.) (Need help finding the right consultant? You can always contact the doctor.)

Furthermore, while it could be difficult to figure out the process you should be using and the system you should be using to implement the process, there are expert consultants who can help you map what you have, explain the art of the possible, explain the pros and cons of each process choice, and come up with the real requirements for a solution RFP (which should NOT be a list of feature and functions, and should not specify the how, only the what — and if you don’t understand why, engage a technology expert to help you with the solution/technology RFP and DO NOT use a FREE RFP Template as they are all lies)!

Roll Up Your Sleeves

Staples lied to you and all of the vendors repeat the lies daily. There is NO Big Red Easy Button. There is no Magic Gen-AI solution. There will be no Agentric AI that will come along and make your job super easy — and if you are using any of your intelligence whatsoever to make strategic decisions, the technology will not replace you. (But properly applied, it will enhance your performance beyond belief … you’ll be able to do the work of ten (10) or more peers! Now, this might be bad news for your peers if they can’t adapt and aren’t near the top of their game, but fortunately for us, talent is super scarce in Procurement and no one who’s good at their job should be in danger of losing it, as long as they are willing to skill up and keep performing).

But you will need to do a LOT of work to figure out what you need, why you need it, how you employ it, how you will utilize it most effectively, how you will achieve the ROI, and how you will build and sell the business plan. Then you have to manage the vendor selection process properly, the implementor/integrator process properly, the training and adoption process (because it’s NOT a matter of if you buy it they will use it, it’s more like if you buy it they will do everything they can to bypass it until it is easier to use the system than bypass it and everyone understands it). And when it comes to training the ML/AI enabled systems and verifying their recommendations, you won’t just need your brain on full, but your research skills on full as these systems are so convincing even when the recommendation is the worst recommendation possible that lesser minds will just accept the recommendation blindly.

Be ready to use your Human Intelligence (HI!)

The more advanced the technology gets, the MORE you need to use your human intelligence. Your job will get much more mentally challenging, as it will soon revolve entirely around strategy and system training (and, of course, human relations — what the technology cannot do), as the promises of an easy life multiply. However, once you select, implement, train, and wrap your mind around the new technology, the (physical) effort and drudgery you will have to employ will decrease significantly as that is the work that will be turned entirely over to the system. A human intelligence that can properly make use of augmented intelligence is the one that will enable Procurement to thrive.

And Remember

Just because 2025 is just another year, that doesn’t mean it has to be another year of struggle. Just because vendors won’t make a difference; analyst firms won’t make a difference; and the C-Suite likely won’t see beyond their desperate need for cost savings (if only to increase profit so the CEO can take home a few more million dollars he doesn’t need); that doesn’t mean you can’t make a difference. As we’ve pointed out, we’ve reached a point where you can, even with very little budget to help you. You just need to do it, start saving, and use those savings to invest in more tools and processes that create more value. But you have to take the lead. It’s up to you.

2025 Is Just Another Year … But Is It All Doom and Gloom? Part 5 (Risk Reduction)

It’s just another year, unless you look beyond the hype, identify true talent, give them real solutions, and then truly tackle the threats … with strategies for success.

Supplier (Plant) Shut Down

In reality, typically only three things shut down a supplier:

  • Bankruptcy
  • Disasters
  • Governments

With respect to each of these:

  • you can typically predict bankruptcy from financial monitoring, which is easily available for public companies, semi-available for private companies that survive off of international trade (just monitor the public trade data), and highly correlated with a noticeable decrease in quality or performance (which can be predicted off of your data)
  • you can’t predict disasters, but based on geo-location, you can predict type and likelihood, and subscribe to news-based event monitoring services to identify when one happens that likely impacts your supplier (and then verify) so you know the minute a disruption occurs, and not three months later when the order doesn’t materialize
  • governments will generally only shut down a company if it is a fraudulent enterprise or when they are taking something over that was private; your category expert consultant can let you know whether or not the country the supplier/plant is in has a history of forced public acquisition or is eyeing restrictions on the industry (and otherwise, the risk is pretty much non-existent)

Supplier Becomes Unreachable

This usually happens as a result of three things:

  • sanctions
  • border closings
  • customs / port shutdowns due to strikes

With respect to each of these:

  • sanctions are typically politically driven and hard to predict, but a sanction list monitoring service can inform you within 24 hours if a supplier or connected party has been sanctioned
  • border closings usually result from trade wars or real wars, and news monitoring can indicate potential that can be monitored, and once the threat gets too high, you can proactively identify new / switch suppliers
  • customs / port contracts with unions in terms of validity dates are typically public knowledge, and you can monitor when they end, and whether there is any news that negotiations have started once you get close (say 3 months) to expiry … as well as monitor statements put out by both sides during negotiations that could indicate a strike (vote) (and look at the history to see how often a strike [vote] results in a strike, how long it usually lasts, etc.)

Supplier Loses Access to Raw Materials

With respect to a supplier losing supply, they have the same risks you do with respect to supply lines, plus two more major ones and one more minor one:

  • sanctions, border closings, and strikes
  • mine collapse / crop destruction from a natural disaster
  • government reclamations or limitations on natural resource extractions
  • mine / well runs dry!

With respect to each of these risks, if you map your supplier’s critical supply chain:

  • you can monitor sanction lists for sub-tier suppliers and news sources for events that would lead to border closings and strikes as you do for your suppliers
  • you can monitor news sources for events that indicate a natural disaster that would threaten or destroy raw material supply
  • you can research past history and monitor news sources for indications a government might restrict access to or reclaim natural resources from the private supplier in your supply chain
  • you can contact environmental experts to determine when a given source a sub-tier supplier depends on might run out!

Logistic Route Cut-Off

This is pretty straightforward to enumerate. In addition to port closures above, you have:

  • major carrier strikes and failures (as only public postal services can run deficits ad infinitum)
  • natural disasters that take down major roads, bridges, and ports
  • intermediate border closings on current routes

And the way you handle each of these is to:

  • monitor the financial scores from the financial monitoring services and the union contract expiry dates to know when you need to look for negotiations and negotiation status to try and predict if you will need to lock in new carrier contracts before competitor quotes go through the proverbial roof in response to your carrier striking
  • monitor news sources for natural disaster events along your major supply routes
  • monitor geopolitical situations across countries on your routes

Procurement risk management doesn’t have to be hard to not only be good enough, but considerably better than your peers. Dwell on that.

2025 Is Just Another Year … But Is It All Doom and Gloom? Part 4 (Risk Redux)

It’s just another year, unless you look beyond the hype, identify true talent, give them real solutions, and then truly tackle the threats.

Risk Management IS Easy

And so is getting started with risk management as long as you approach it correctly! The key is not to try and identify every conceivable risk that might impact your business (there are literally too many to enumerate now and trying will drive you mad — but if you really want to try, we suggest starting with the 101 Damnations that SI chronicled for you back in 2015), but to identify what impacts would seriously hurt your business and work backwards to risks from there.

For example, if your primary revenue stream is products, what are your major product lines where a disruption would significantly hurt (and possibly even end) your business? Analyze the Bills of Material and identify what are the key components that can’t be easily sourced from a different vendor because they are proprietary and/or need a specialized manufacturing process. It doesn’t matter how much you spend on them or with the supplier, it matters how hard it would be to replace the component if it suddenly became unavailable.

Once you identify those critical components, look at

  • the supplier,
  • where the supplier is located,
  • what critical material inputs the supplier needs to make the component, and
  • how it gets the component to you.

The critical risks, that you have to monitor for, mitigate, and manage if they arise are precisely those risks that would

  • shut down the supplier
  • cut the supplier off from you
  • cut the raw material supply to the supplier
  • cut off the logistics routes you depend on

That’s it. Yes, there are more risks. Yes, they could occur. Yes, they could have a big impact on your brand and your business. But chances are that as long as you keep getting product in, selling that product, and moving it out, i.e. as long as you have assurance of supply, everything else will eventually blow over or be forgotten. Even if there is a temporary disruption in profit, it will return and the business will continue. Sensationalist media can’t keep people’s attention if it tries to sell them the same story everyday, so unless your product actually kills people, you don’t really need to worry about brand damage (unless it’s due to a lack of quality control, but you should already be ensuring that on every contract signature and critical shipment). (Plus, preventing brand damage for something out of your control is PR’s job anyway!)

If you analyze these four risks, and cross-correlate with the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report, you’ll see that most of the time there’s not that many risks with a reasonably significant chance of occurrence that you really need to worry about. (Except Pandemics! There’s going to be more of those as the world still isn’t ready for them and wont’ make the investment to get ready for them.)

Focus on identifying the risks around supplier and supply, and you’ll be leagues ahead of your peers.