Category Archives: Procurement Innovation

The Sourcing Innovation Source-to-Pay+ Cascading Mega Map! (2026 Edition)

(c) 2025-12-15

Still useless, but still slightly less useless than every other logo map that clogs your feed!

1. Every vendor offering verified as of 4 days ago!

2. Every vendor logo is clickable!

3. Every vendor is mapped to a meaningful category as of the last date of analyst investigation!

So what’s the point?

To again make it utterly clear you can’t select a vendor based on a random grouping of logos on a map, even if they are categorized!

Not even if the map categorizes the vendors by market size, industry, and/or geography. Those are just proxies for organizational spend, solution needs and cultural requirements. And not every mid-market manufacturing plant in the USA is the same.

The only way to select a good vendor is to follow a proper assisted process and engage an expert who understands what vendors are out there to identify the right vendors to invite to the RFP process once your true needs have been identified.

Especially considering the true number of vendors out there is many times more than what an average big analyst firm will tell you, especially when they restrict their recommendations to their paying clients in their maps, and multiples of what an average big consultancy will tell you, that only knows their partner solutions (that they need to maintain significant focus on to maintain their preferred partner status).

So let this be proof that there are a lot of logos and that, if you want logos, you got logos! 666 of them!

Please see the V2 Edition for the actual cascading Mega Map.

Cutting Edge Tech Is NOT Defined by the C-Suite, …

… Financiers, or the Marketers pushing hype (from the A.S.S.H.O.L.E.) at you 24/7.

Nor is it defined by the algorithms it uses, the software stacks it runs on, or the hardware stacks it makes use of.

Cutting edge tech is ANY and ALL tech that

  • solves one or more significant problems that not being solved by your tech today and
  • does it by automating at least 90% of the tactical data processes that can be automated

It can be based on the latest AI algorithm or twenty year old RPA. It doesn’t matter if it shines a light using a LAMP stack, if it is an edgy MEAN stack, an Austin Powers inspired Grails stack, or even a .NET stack (though the doctor personally shuddered typing those last three caps out). The entire point of enterprise software is to solve your problems.

The point of software is NOT to provide

  • an excuse for a C-Suite to cut his tech-bro buddy a fat check,
  • a new Tulip Market for greedy financiers who think they can score big and get out before the crash, or
  • marketers a platform to pump out pompous poop on a daily basis.

As Mr. Koray Köse penned in a recent piece on LinkedIn on how you are in need of cutting edge technology, the last thing you want to do is take your direction from the VC-pumped C-Levels who do nothing but repeat the marketing garbage they are fed, sometimes changing the baseline of the garbage mid-sentence!

You have to remember:

  • All the VCs and most of the PEs want to create the next unicorn and get rich quick overnight. So most of these VCs and PE firms are pumping huge amounts into companies with little to no product (to support their grand vision that even SAP and Oracle haven’t managed to achieve after 5 decades and trillions of dollars) and directing the majority of that to be spent on buzz-creating sales and marketing (and not real product development). After all, you don’t actually have to create anything beyond buzz to get rich — market crashes throughout history have proven that since Tulip Mania. (What was created there of value? Nothing. But hype made a few men rich and many men poor.)
  • Even though today’s LLMs are dumber than a doorknob (and demonstrate more than any previous generation of the tech that AI should stand for Artificial Idiocy), with performance degrading every iteration (because there is no more data to steal, and the AI engines are now training each other on regurgitated digital garbage), marketers are still taking storytelling to a whole new level (and we mean storytelling because ALL the claims are fake) with a spin that even the Spin Doctors of old would be envious of. (Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong now, right? They want to Make You A Believer so you hand over all your Money when you should Exit … Stage Left and Run To The Hills!)
  • This copy is being pushed onto the C-Suites of all of the other investments in their portfolio with assurances that it’s all true, and being similarly echoed to all of the CXOs that attend the conferences they speak at, the golf outings they are invited to, and the exclusive social gatherings they arrange.

Not one of these groups knows what you need, and two of these groups have absolutely no interest in giving it to you — their interest is all about getting your money, building the hype, inflating the value, and, hopefully, cashing out big before the next hype cycle and/or the inevitable market crash that’s coming.

The technology you need is the technology that is:

  • built with real world problems in mind,
  • tested on real world problems in real companies and proven to deliver, and
  • scalable and extendable to your operations and needs.

This type of tech is built over years and doesn’t use unreliable probabilistic AI at the core. (It runs on traditional, configurable, RPA that is 100% reliable and auditable. Now, this tech might employe AI to help with the configuration by analyzing your systems and processes and self-assessed gap analysis by recommending configurations for you to approve, and that’s okay, because it’s not randomly making decisions, its recommending options and letting you confirm or deny. It might also use SLMs for specific problems where they work a high percentage of the time to jump-start searches, documents, and processes for you, and as long as you retain full control and can accept, modify, or reject, that’s okay too. But everything is built on a solid core, with 100% dependable automation for all key data intake, processing, and pushes that is done without any manual intervention, appropriately calibrated to your business rules, processes, and goals.)

It’s also built slow, rolled out to a small group of beta customers or development partners, and hardened in the field before being rolled out en masse.

And, most importantly, it’s built by a company that is boot-strapped or frugally running on a shoe-string budget from minority SEED investors to get that first version up-and-running successfully in its first 10 customers before that company goes for any VC funding to scale up. A company that has the time to get it right before being under constant pressure to make demanding, if not impossible, sales targets.

Moreover, to have any chance of getting this software, you need to know three things:

  1. how to identify what you need that will form the heart and soul of the RFX,
  2. how to write a good technology RFX and analyze the responses, and
  3. how to identify the right companies to invite to the RFX.

What You Need

For Supply Chain, as Mr. Koray Köse points out, if you need help identifying your true needs and cutting through the noise, he can help you out with that with the eyes of a hawk, the skill of a surgeon, and the wit of a Williams (a Robin Williams). For Procurement, Joël Collin-Demers can slice through your organizational landscape like a hot knife through butter and let you know exactly what you need in priority order.

The Technology RFP

Every consultancy and their mascot claims they can help you here, but you need to be very, very careful.

  • many of their consultants are not technology experts and tend to prioritize features over functions, as that’s all they know
  • many of these firms have partnerships with the (mega) suite players, and you don’t maintain sycophant, sorry, Gold/Platinum/Diamond, status unless you direct a LOT of business their way each year, so they tend to try to fit everyone into one of these buckets
  • many follow the old consulting model of “give the client exactly what he thinks he wants” and don’t take the time to figure out what you actually need and educate you, leading to an RFP that is no better than what you would have written yourself, as they spend half their time questioning you, and the other half writing down your responses

For true success, you need someone who is simultaneously:

  • an expert in the domain,
  • an expert in technology, and
  • not incentivized to help any vendor whatsoever and, preferably
  • an expert in project assurance (but not always necessary)

If you need help writing that ProcureTech / Direct Sourcing/Supply Chain RFP, feel free to reach out. This is my expertise. And for some tips, feel free to start with our recent series on How Do You Write A Good RFP?

Vendor Selection

Very few analysts and consultants know more than a handful of vendors. The big firms focus on the big vendors who cut big cheques, which are the 20-ish same vendors you see in their maps year after year after year. They don’t know about the other 700. Only a few of us independent analysts go far and wide and actually know what is out there and how it can help you.

For ProcureTech, SI should be your first stop. It’s the site that gave you the mega map to open your eyes as to just how wide the playing field is. Moreover, if you need something really niche where the doctor doesn’t have the expertise, he’ll find the right expert to refer you to.

For SupplyChain, Mr. Köse knows a lot of the players. But don’t overlook Bob Ferrari of The Ferrari Group. As one of the original supply chain analysts, he knows all the players and what their platforms can and can’t do inside and out.

And if you reach out to the right experts and get the right help, maybe you can get true cutting edge tech that actually helps you!

The World Has Changed … Procurement Has Not!

In a recent post, that I hesitate to link to because it doesn’t help me stay in the obscurity you seek out only when you’re ready to learn, Joel tell us that Procurement Has Changed when, in fact, it really hasn’t.

It seems that I have to again argue that Procurement has NOT changed since the first book on Purchasing I know of was published 138 years ago. (The 1887 Handbook of Railway Supplies). The goal is still the same: assure supply at the lowest cost that minimizes risk to the business while creating the most overall value so the business can remain profitable and grow. NO CHANGE (or at least there shouldn’t be)!

It’s the world that’s changed. The business models we play in. The economic landscapes we trade in. The processes we’ve developed to deal with the complexity. The tools we use to do our jobs (and this is now the best of times and the worst of times: computational power to optimize global networks and Gen-AI LLMs to hallucinate answers so convincing, but yet so wrong, they could destroy your business).

It’s learning how to quickly adapt to changing business environments, changing economic models, and changing global landscapes, especially with dichotomies we haven’t seen before — a double down on sustainability by the EU and some countries as we hit year after year of record heatwaves, and an abandoning of all commitments and many recent legislations in the USA. Same for DEI. Then dealing with those changes that are coming orders of magnitude faster than in the past (the majority of tariffs would generally change only [semi-]annually when government bodies got around to it or a crisis happened, now you have them fluctuating sometimes daily).

It’s realizing that the STEM skills you need to navigate the technology to do this are far beyond what you would have received UNLESS you entered Procurement from a STEM field, and shoring up those skills, as well as your ability to use tools that help you with those skills. It is navigating fractured relationships caused by political bodies outside of the scope of your influence. And so on.

It may feel like Procurement has changed, but the reality is that it hasn’t! It’s everything around it that has changed.

In ProcureTech, Stop Caring What Gartner, Forrester, or IDC Thinks!

I shouldn’t have to address this again, but every year multiple vendors reach out and ask how to get on these vendors maps because they believe it’s the only way to get more market visibility and/or be selected by certain customers, including you. It’s not the only way to get visibility and if a vendor can’t convince a potential customer from thinking that only map companies are good, I’ll tell them this right now — that’s not a customer they want (because that vendor will be out on the renewal with whatever vendor overtakes them in the map when the CPO changes in 3 years, because companies without vision to look beyond a meaningless map don’t keep real talent, and only real talent will identify and select the best solution and ensure that solution is kept over time).

But I digress — this post is about you, the potential customer, and why you need to STOP caring what Gartner, Forrester, or IDC thinks.

First of all, we’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: It’s NOT the Analyst Firm. It’s the Analyst!.

In addition to all of the skillsets and education that an analyst needs to have to get it right, which we covered in detail in that post, the analyst needs a lot of relevant experience, and history in the ProcureTech space, to make sense of the ProcureTech world today. Ask yourself: how many of the analysts with the right education have at least 10 years in our space? The answer is very few. How many have 20 years in (independent) analyst roles? You can count them on your fingers. I know of myself, Jon Hansen, Pierre Mitchell, and Chris Sawchuk with 20 years of (independent) analyst experience in our space and a deep technical (STEM) education. Everyone else who started covering this space day in, day out two decades ago has moved on or retired. Now, of these analysts, how many have also built actual solutions in the ProcureTech space, connecting the dots between the education, theory, and practice? Two of us — myself and Jon Hansen. (But we should note that Pierre and Chris spent part of their careers on solution advisory consulting and implementation guidance, and have deep knowledge about the implementation and integration requirements, which is also very unique and useful in technology selection.)

Now remember the second point: Vendors Have Lured Big Analyst Firms Astray and that you’re not getting a map of the best solutions, but the best solutions from the analyst firm’s pool of vendor sponsors and research subscribers, where the reality is that only the big, established, cash-rich companies can afford the high-priced subscriptions that keep them in front of the overworked analysts who have to spend over half of their time taking inquiries or keeping high paying subscription customers happy. (Whereas analysts at smaller firms or independents get to focus on studying and understanding the solutions, not general inquiries or whether or not the contract [or pricing model] is good.)

This means that these big firm analysts are not spending a lot of time, if any, looking at the up-and-coming mid-sized companies that have not only been around long enough to develop mature enterprise solutions, but solutions that are more modern, more powerful, more usable, and more intelligent (with embedded analytics, RPA, and the right AI for the task at hand), and possibly (much) better for you. Moreover, if the enterprise is a mid-market company, or able to go with a best-of-breed as a bolt-on to their enterprise ProcureTech platform, they’ll never know about the majority of these solutions (as only the overfunded startups will have the money to get the big analyst firm attention, and these vendors often have more financial stability problems than the smaller vendors who are bootstrapping or taking minimal funding and actually have stable, happy, paying customers keeping them afloat).

Third, and most important, it’s not the best rated solution, it’s the best solution for your organization. Not only is it the case that this solution is very likely not on a map of only 20 companies (when there might be 100 companies that offer that solution), but it might also be the case that it is the lowest ranked solution on those maps — especially when these maps tend to rate solutions on a lot of subjective factors that match what the analyst thinks are the most relevant for an average organization, whereas you are a specific organization which has a specific set of relevant factors that you care about, with specific requirements for those factors. The more divergence between your factors and the analysts’, and your scale and theirs, the worse the map is for your needs, and the worse the solution you select will be.

The only maps you should care about are those that rank solutions solely on the tech capabilities and/or the customer rankings. But only so far as potential solution identification, not selection. Maps that concentrate on pure tech (like Spend Matters Solution Map) allow you to identify vendors that have the tech foundations, giving you a starting pool, but don’t allow you to identify vendors that have a solution — because a solution is tech and appropriate process support and integration capability and support and culture and whatever else transforms another piece of potential shelfware into a solution that will be used daily by your employees.

Note that we used the word “potential” for a reason. No map (including Spend Matters) is complete, so you will need to look at multiple sources (like ProcurementSoftware.site and the upcoming Art of Procurement ProcureTech 100) to put together a complete list of vendors to consider. Then you will have to cross reference with real analyst vendor write-ups (which can include the hundreds of write-ups here on this site if one or more of your potential finalists are included) to whittle down that list to the best starting set for your best practice technology RFP (of which we have a lot of advice on how to write that on this site as well).

At the end of the day, it’s about what solution will work for you, not about which solution is on which map!