Category Archives: Procurement Innovation

GlobalTrade Tackled Procurement 2024 Before McKinsey, But Their Suggestions Weren’t that Innovative, Part I

Except for one suggestion, and only if you interpreted it the right way. But let’s backup.

the doctor ignored this article over on GlobalTrade Magazine on 10 Innovative Approaches to Enhance Procurement Efficiency in 2024 because the approaches weren’t all that innovative, and the article, while professionally written, clearly wasn’t written by a Procurement Professional, as most of the recommendations were so basic even Chat-GPT could likely have produced something equally as good with high probability (gasp!).

However, since we covered and analyzed the McKinsey recommendations in great detail in a four-part series over the past two weeks, we will be fair and give GlobalTrade their due. In this two part article, we’ll quickly discuss each recommendation one-by-one to make it clear most of the suggestions really weren’t innovative. In fact, the one recommendation that is innovative wasn’t even described in the one way that makes it innovative. But since it did remind the doctor of one thing many of the recommendation articles were missing, this gives us another reason to cover it and use it as an example of why you need to seek out advice written by the experts, or at least people who live Procurement and/or Procurement Tech day-in-and-day-out.

1. Consolidate Various Supplier Lists.

Is this 1984? This was advice you’d expect to see when Jack Welch started revolutionizing Procurement at GE in the 80s, which gave rise to the first sourcing and procurement platforms in the 90s (like FreeMarkets Inc. that was started by Meakem in ’95 after leaving GE to productize what he learned). Today, the advice should be upgrade to a modern supplier management 360 platform that consolidates all of your suppliers and their associated information including, but not limited to, complete corporate profile, insurance and compliance, risk, sustainability/ESG/Scope 3, and any other information you need to do business with the supplier.

2. Conduct Frequent Educational Courses.

This is best practices 101 for any critical discipline within your organization, not just Procurement, and it’s relevant both for the team, and the people who need to interact with / depend on the team and / or use Procurement’s systems. Plus, overworked, and overstressed, professionals will learn better with frequent short courses (that they can put into practice) vs. a once a year cram session. The best advice here is to conduct frequent, specialized, courses on key systems and processes by role. And archive the materials online for easy access for refresh as needed.

3. Work on Supplier Relationships.

Supplier Relationship Management is Procurement 101 for strategic suppliers and has been for two decades. Nothing to learn here. Except make sure your modern Supplier Management 360 platform can support your supplier relationship management activities by tracking performance, agreed upon development plans, synchronous and asynchronous activities between all parties, etc.

4. Review Expectations with Suppliers.

Isn’t this part of supplier relationship management? Which, as we just discussed, is something you should have been doing since day 1. The advice here should be to make sure your modern Supplier Management 360 portal contains all of the agreements, milestones, orders, delivery dates, real-time performance data, development plans, and other elements that define supplier expectations.

5. Remain Open to Solutions of All Sizes.

While not very innovative, especially as written, this was the only other suggestion that Procurement departments need to hear. Consumer spending is flat or falling. Investment money has slowed to a trickle. Inflation is back with a vengeance, and budgets are being slashed to the bones. So you should be open to solutions of all sizes, especially when it comes to:

  • supplier management
  • process management
  • software / SaaS platforms
  • consulting

And especially SaaS platforms and consulting. If you haven’t looked for a solution to solve process / problem X since the last decade because it was too expensive, look again. When spend analysis first hit the market, it was a Million Dollar solution for software and services. A few years later, when BIQ hit the scene, you got more power and more value identified for 1/10 of the cost and low six figures bought you a full enterprise license and enough services to identify a year’s worth of opportunities. Then, a decade later, when Spendata hit the scene, a mid-market could get a full enterprise license for a core analytics team of 5 for $14,000 a a year, and for another $10,000, get enough training and guidance to use the software themselves to identify a year’s worth of opportunities from built-in templates and standard analyses. Same holds for any application you can think of — for any module you could want, someone has a SaaS mid-market solution for 2K to 3K a month. Not the 20K to 30K you would have paid a decade ago.

And for consulting, you don’t need a Big X where you have to hire a team at rates starting at 4K a day for the recent grad. You can hire an expert from a mid-market niche who is powered by the right tech who can do the work of an entire team for 6K a day — which is less than the Big X charges for the project manager who adds no value to your project.

We’ll tackle the next 5 in Part II.

MeRLIN Sourcing, A Platform With a Twist …

INTRODUCTION

When their founders were young men
they paced the fact’ry floors
from Vellore down to Chennai
they must have walked ’em all
cause they learned all of the problems
that plagued the Procurement side.
Those listen, look, and learn guys
sure made a lean platform.

The founders of MeRLIN, who started Rheinbrucke Consulting in 2013, started developing a stand-alone application for direct source-to-contract (and, for those who need it, source-to-pay) in 2018 using their decades of experience supporting direct manufacturing clients. MeRLIN was then frst released it to the market in 2022, after ensuring it actually solved the problems they were seeing and met the needs of the companies they were working with.

(While some companies might take it as a badge of honour to get a “minimally viable product” to market in a year, the reality is that when it comes to manufacturing enterprises, nothing you can develop in a year will actually solve more than a fraction of their problems, and unless what you deliver can integrate tightly into their existing enterprise software landscape, it won’t be adopted, or even bought. That’s why there are so many offerings in indirect [many of whom will succumb to the marketplace madness] and so few that offer true direct sourcing solutions, and fewer still that offer fully integrated source-to-contract / source-to-pay suites.)

PLATFORM SUMMARY

MeRLIN, which bills itself as a Source-to-Contract platform for Direct Material (primarily Discrete Manufacturing) Sourcing, is actually a Source-to-Pay platform where the Procure-to-Pay platform capabilities are baseline (and wouldn’t go head-to-head with best-in-class) and designed for the mid-market (and large enterprise) clients that don’t have a Procurement solution in place already (either through the ERP, AP, or a third party system). Since most larger enterprises have some form of decent P2P, MeRLIN decided to focus primarily on the critically underserved strategic sourcing marketplace in discrete manufacturing and direct sourcing and the capabilities all of the companies the founders worked with in manufacturing were universally missing.

MeRLIN was designed as a modular solution where

  • a client could license just the modules they wanted/needed,
  • common modules, and capabilities, were broken out into their own modules so their was no duplication of functionality, and
  • key modules could be augmented with additional value-added functionality not typically found in average products.

MeRLIN has all the standard modules you’d expect in a Source-to-Contract:

  • (Program &) BoM Management (Requirement for any Direct Solution)
  • Requisition Management (Intake)
  • Sourcing (Event) Management (Sourcing)
  • Supplier Management (SXM)
  • Contract Management & Contract Authoring (CLM)
  • Reports & Dashboard (Reporting & Analytics)

As well as basics for Procure-to-Pay:

  • Purchase Order Management
  • Invoice & Payment Management

But also has modules for:

  • Demand Management (Consolidation of Requirements from Requisitions, Manufacturing Programs, and MRPs)
  • Category Management (Part/BoM grouping & management)
  • Supply Chain Compliance (GSCA / LkSG)
  • Supply Management (Document & Shipment Management)

and the standard suite foundational modules of:

  • Master Data Management
  • Business Administration
  • Security Management
  • System Management

And even modules for:

  • Strategic Project Management (Project Management/Orchestration)
  • Finance Management (Budgets, Prices)

We’re not going to discuss all the modules and instead focus in on just the core Source-to-Contract modules, as they are the modules that are critical to direct sourcing and the modules that will allow you to understand the value, and potential, MeRLIN has for you.

Supplier Management

Supplier Management is designed to onboard, evaluate, approve, and manage suppliers, including their contacts, surveys, ratings, and documents. Qualification starts with a simple request based on supplier name, country, email, and unique (DUNS) identifier. Based on the supplier category, the next step will be to send the suppliers the qualification surveys and pull in the external risk information, send it to technical and risk reviewers, and if that passes, it will go off to compliance to ensure the supplier can comply with all necessary regulations the company is subject to and then, if that passes, the supplier will get a registration invite to provide all of the additional information necessary to do business with the company as well as details on additional products and services.

Supplier Management captures all of the core company information, locations, accounts, questionnaires, risk information and scores, compliance reviews, scorecards, and approvals. For each of these there are standard fields, and as many additional fields can be added by the customer organization as needed.

Compliance Management

Collects and manages the organizational policies, supplier policy statements, compliance surveys, audits, risks, scorecards, and complaints. It can accept all documents, support custom surveys, import third party data from financial and environmental (and other) risk providers, provide you with compliance scorecards, and automatically extract and centralize all “risks” from the surveys based on scores and/or responses in a risk management view.

Moreover, in full compliance with the German Supply Chain Act (GSCA, known as the LkSG within Germany), MeRLIN provides the buying organization, each of their suppliers, and their entire employee base, a unique portal where they can register complaints. They have upgraded their platform to fully support the GSCA and can also support other supply chain acts as well (and future releases will encode more out-of-the-box support, even though it can already be custom figured on a client-by-client basis to support the majority of acts out there).

Requisition

Requisitions can be used as traditional requisitions for purchase orders against existing contracts for goods and services normally used by the company or as intake requests for sourcing. When they are used as intake requests, they go to a central management screen where the buyer can group them by material, bill of material, and/or category to identify sourcing event requirements and then create a sourcing event off of a bundle of them.

Sourcing

Sourcing is primarily RFX based, but auctions are supported as well off of base RFQs. A sourcing event can be kicked off from one or more requisitions, a category, a BoM, or an event template, which can consist of one or more RFIs, questionnaires, and line-items with custom price breakdowns in the RFQ. Associated with the RFQ can be the suppliers, addendums, budgets, stakeholders, terms and conditions, contract template, event schedule, and ongoing Q&A.

In addition to being able to review bids by total cost per unit and evaluation score (by the relevant stakeholders), the application also supports automatic award recommendation by criteria which can include target award by supplier, range of suppliers to split the award between, minimum and maximum shares, and preferred supplier status.

Contract “Authoring” & Management

The platform is primarily “signature” and “execution” management, as authoring is simply the packing up of contract templates, terms and conditions, specifications, and associated addendums for agreement by electronic signature. The electronic signature capability is compliant with USA regulations and most European regulations for private enterprise contracts. Once the contract is signed, the platform can manage the project timeline, stakeholders, documents, events, milestones, and obligations. In addition, the user can define alerts against any event, milestone, document, obligation or other entity on status change or due date.

Reporting & Dashboards

Reporting and Analysis in MeRLIN is through widget-based dashboards that summarize any data of interest in the system. Right now there are hundreds to select from in the reporting library, with more being added as needed. For each of the built in reports and dashboards (on suppliers, spend, process, etc.), the user can apply multiple filter options and save the configuration to their liking. There is no Do-It-Yourself (DiY) widget report builder yet, but more DiY analytics enhancement is on the roadmap.

Strategic Project Management

This is MeRLIN‘s built in project management capability where a user can define and instantiate RFX templates, supplier onboarding workflows, contracting processes from award specifications, procurement processes, and even entire Source-to-Procure projects which collect all of the necessary templates and workflows together. In addition, leadership is provided with a high level overview of sourcing projects.

Master Data Management

All of the system master data templates can be altered by the user including, but not limited to, currencies and conversions, items, locations, plants, prices, suppliers, contract metadata and milestones, and other key items. The customer can control it’s master data and master data identifiers.

Business Administration

All of the templates in the system can be managed and customized in the business administration section including, but not limited to supplier onboarding, qualification, evaluation, and audit questionnaires, product and item templates, requisitions, RFQs, purchase orders, contract terms, contracts, statements of work, email, and workflow templates.

Bill of Materials Manager

A key aspect of Direct Sourcing is managing the Bill of Materials. In the Merlin platform, that can be done through the BOM Manager, which unlike basic direct sourcing platforms, can maintain as many versions of a Bill Of Materials as the organization wants to maintain (for correlation with historical sourcing and procurement and cost estimates during new product design and/or product modification).

These versions can be uploaded from the ERP (or your PLM of choice with custom integration) or created in the BOM Manager, and this creation can be from scratch or from a previous BoM version which can be copied and modified as needed.

The best part of MeRLIN‘s BOM manager is its built-in ability to allow for easy should-cost analysis during NPD and BOM (re)design. Once a BOM has been uploaded or created, the user can click a button to “cost” and it will automatically find prices for every component in the BOM for which it has a price from a contract (first), catalog/commitment (second), or quote (third). Then, the user can push the remaining items to the Demand Management module for quick quote (or import into the internal catalog from a connected source) or simply create a place holder item (with an estimated cost). They can then return to the BOM Manager and re”cost” the BOM to get a complete cost estimate, which can be compared against the cost of all prior BoM versions (that were costed). This allows the organization to understand the costs associated with BOM changes over time (independent of supplier or distributor pricing changes). Gone are the days where you have to use a completely separate application to do BOM cost estimation.

Finally, the next update to the BOM Manager will allow for the user to enter a cost estimate directly in the BOM manager for materials/parts not yet quoted for even quicker price estimates, and those estimates will be clearly marked as internal estimates only.

Other Capabilities

We’re not going to discuss the procurement modules as they are not MeRLIN‘s focus (but we will assure you that they cover the foundations if you don’t have P2P and need it), demand management as you know what forecasting should do, category management (and category strategy management) as that is rather self explanatory, or finance management, as budget and price management is also straight forward.

The Full Picture

The platform is quite deep in all core areas and one could write pages about each module and its deep capabilities, but hopefully this is enough to convey the facts that

  • the MeRLIN platform was designed from the ground up to support direct and discrete sourcing,
  • has the capability to support these projects from inception to contract signing through the very last order against the award, and
  • goes beyond just raw sourcing capability to related capabilities of supplier risk, compliance, and execution (tracking the order to the delivery and qualification)

CONCLUSION

Given the relative lack of true direct and discrete sourcing platforms in the mid-market, MeRLIN is a platform you should definitely be aware of. If you’re in direct manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, and related industries, you might want to check them out today.


It’s for discrete wizards,
it’s a platform with a twist.
A discrete wizard
needs a tech assist …

Procurement Leaders Listen to Roxette!


How do you do (do you do) the things that you do?
No one I know could ever keep up with you
How do you do?
Did it ever make sense to you …

A recent article over on Procurement Leaders asks CPOs why do you do and notes that a recent exercise they’ve been carrying out has been to ask CPOs to share the value propositions they have in place for their function.

Procurement Leaders’ goal was to force extremely busy people to take a step back and think deeply about why they do what they do. What are the ultimate goals of those negotiations with suppliers? Why are they spending time building relationships with certain suppliers and not others? Where should scarce resources and investment dollars be spent? This is because while a value proposition for a Procurement department is not an easy thing to produce and even more challenging to agree and implement, the provocation can allow a Procurement Department to get back to strategy, think about how our decisions affect our stakeholders, suppliers and the communities we do business in.

And while a Procurement department should understand its value proposition, because it helps it focus and relay its value, getting everyone in the organization to agree can be a very extensive effort and extremely time consuming. Furthermore, when you consider the possibility that the “value proposition” ultimately agreed on could be such a mish-mash of different viewpoints and demands to the point that it adds absolutely no value whatsoever, just like a corporate “mission statement” when everyone gets to add their bit to it (and the end result is no different than what the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator used to generate).

However, if you look at the example questions Procurement Leaders’ quoted, you realize that while a vision might be a good goal, a better effort, or at least a better way to start, is to ask the C-Suite to outline it’s top goals for the year, and then for the Procurement organization to identify the best ways they can meet those goals. From there they can identify: which categories should be strategically sourced, which products or services are critical for them, which suppliers are likely critical, and then, for each project, define the value and the goal and not spend effort building relationships with suppliers who are supplying tactical products or services that can be just as easily obtained from the next three lowest bid suppliers and instead spend time developing relationships with suppliers who are critical, even if the overall spend is low. For example, control chips in cars and power regulation systems are extremely critical and often only (capable of) being produced by a few suppliers due to highly specific requirements or proprietary natures. Compared to the costs of the steel, the transmission, the engine and/or the batteries, and even the tires, the total spend might not even register when the chips are only a couple of dollars each — but if a supplier failure, logistics delay, or raw material shortage shuts down your entire production line because you didn’t see a shortfall coming and either work with your supplier to build up an inventory or work with the backup supplier to allow production to be ramped up quickly, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue could be at stake.

Furthermore, no effort should be spent “strategically” sourcing a product or category where the payback isn’t at least 3X the cost of the manpower required to do so. If an automated multi-round RFX with automated feedback or a reverse auction will get you 99% of the savings and the last 1% won’t even pay for 3X the salary and overhead of the buyer, it’s just not worth it if this prevents the organization from sourcing a lower cost category with a 5% savings potential through better analysis and negotiation. Know the value, define the value, and only put effort in where there is real value to be gained. Otherwise, use appropriate automation or redefine categories and projects. (Definitely don’t go nuts and RFQ everything, because even the squirrels will know you’re nuts if you do. But maybe do some overarching sourcing or negotiation that you can just cut POs or one-time orders against for a year. Sometimes just negotiating for 20% off of lowest list price in a 30 day window [and carefully tracking and documenting those prices to prevent invoice overcharges] is enough to automate catalog orders.)

And similar logic applies to all Procurement (related) activities. While machines can’t replace procurement professionals, they can take over the tasks where their intervention doesn’t add value. That’s the point. So think before you act, and act appropriately.

BlueBean: Instant Coffee for Mid-Market “Tail”-Spend Procurement

Billing itself as a platform that lets you enjoy a consumer-like buying experience with enterprise-level controls on existing e-commerce websites, BlueBean is a new solution for easy, compliant, organizational Procurement that lets you control your budget and pay less right from your browser.

Billing itself as a “request-to-pay” solution, the goal of the BlueBean platform, and the founders, is to simplify end-user buying in an average mid-market organization in a Procurement-compliant way without the need for intake, orchestration, and/or a traditional tail-spend / expense management platform that expects an underlying e-Procurement platform when most of the spend in such an organization is driven by users (due to there only being a few categories where strategic procurement is worth while and/or an understaffed central Procurement department). Moreover, the goal is to deliver a completely browser-based SaaS solution that doesn’t require a buyer to learn a new platform to make a purchase from a vendor who has, or sells through, an existing on-line e-commerce site.

So what is BlueBean? For the end-user, it’s a consumer-like “coupon manager” app (implemented as a browser extension) that runs in the browser and allows them to quickly:

  • find preferred vendors for any product or service
  • identify the (discount) codes they use on the vendor’s site to ensure the organization receives their (GPO’s) pricing
  • request a virtual card for the product(s) or service(s)
  • instantly receive that virtual card if the purchase satisfies all defined organizational requirements
  • pay with that virtual card
  • … and capture the e-commerce receipt for automatic submission to the Procurement/AP department

In other words, for the average buyer, with the exception that they have to pull down the in-browser app to find the allowed/preferred vendors, request the virtual card, and then access and use the virtual card (when the request is approved), it’s a super minimally intrusive Procurement app that allows them to buy in the traditional e-commerce style they are used to without having to learn any new Procurement systems. Compare that to even the modern orchestration systems where these same users would have to log-in to the enterprise app, use the wizards, or, even worse, try to converse with the Gen-AI engine (that shows them the latest pair of Nikes when they want brake shoes to fix the delivery truck), and then jump to either the organizational catalog, or, if they are lucky, punch-out to the e-commerce site where they populate a cart they then have to pull back. In other words, BlueBean makes the average orchestration system look like overkill. (As orchestration was another app developed for Enterprise customers that needed a lot of Procurement modules and solutions, not mid-markets.)

The founders of BlueBean, who have built a number of enterprise Procurement systems, realized that while you need a Procurement system for large(r), strategic Procurements, also realized that for “tail” spend, traditional Procurement processes and systems are overkill, and this is why you have people avoiding them and/or being non-compliant.

The founders of BlueBean also realized that in order for an organization to have proper spend management, even Tail Spend needs to be managed, and, more importantly, it needs to be captured. So they created an app that allowed for Procurement to manage this tail spend without requiring organizational users, who just have to use the browser extension, to learn new tools or processes, which distracts these users from the job they need to do.

So they built a simple enterprise e-Commerce platform that is like a punch-out catalog management, p-card management, tail-spend procurement, budget-management, and a paypal/stripe platform all rolled into one — which also simplifies the process and technology landscape for overworked and under-staffed Mid-Market Procurement teams who need to roll out something to manage the majority of enterprise transactions that doesn’t fall under the strategic procurement spend they barely have time to manage (when you include all the OT they likely have to work).

Right now, the just-launched BlueBean platform contains the following capabilities:

  • Company Profile: the company profile (with subscription details)
  • My Profile: the Procurement user’s profile and access details
  • Account Details: the company’s expense account details — available and pending funding and linked bank accounts
  • Virtual Cards: the virtual cards that have been issued, and the users / teams they have been assigned to
  • Transactions: all transactions that have been put through the BlueBean platform (for the prescribed time-frame) (with receipt attachments)
  • Spending Limits: by person or team (or category, as a team can be setup per category)
  • User Management: the platform users (with their details, limits, etc.)
  • Savings MarketPlace: the sites that have been approved for organizational buying by the organization (from the BlueBean marketplace or the organization’s GPO marketplace), organized by category, broken down by savings plan (to keep track of each GPO, department, etc.)
  • Preferred Stores: the e-commerce sites that the organization has marked as preferred
  • Statements: monthly P-Card-like statements that can be downloaded or exported to your accounting system
  • Reports: simple, on-line, dynamic spend breakdowns by category, time-period, team/user, etc.
  • Security: security configuration

And, as noted, BlueBean allows for direct export of all transactional data, with receipts, into the accounting platform for full spend tracking and classification (by vendor and default category), which allows more organizational spend to be (at least minimally) under management.

It’s a very neat solution for a mid-market organization that needs to get tail-spend / end-user spend under management and under control, but doesn’t have a large Procurement team, the resources to train organizational users, or the time to impose full Procurement processes on organizational users who just need to get a job done. So, if this sounds like something your organization needs, even though they are the new kid (on the block), the doctor would recommend checking out BlueBean and giving your organization the caffeine-rush it desperately needs. It’s serving a niche that hasn’t been effectively served yet (as most existing Tail-Spend solutions were defined for larger organizations and most orchestration platforms require one or more Procurement solutions to already be in place, and a mid-market Procurement team doesn’t have the manpower, budget, or time to manage more platforms than absolutely necessary). The minimal imposition will make your end users happy (and that leads to adoption).

the doctor dislikes logo maps! So why did he create one?

To demonstrate how, to date, they have all been completely useless, with some to the point of being actually harmful, but now that the gauntlet has been cast, he expects the next version of at least one of these maps to only be mostly useless (and maybe even only moderately useless) and mostly harmless. It’s the same reason he developed the initial versions of Solution Map*, because he found all of the big analyst firm maps mostly useless, and completely useless for tech selection.

(On the tech map front, how can you compare the technical capabilities of a solution where the axis are each on subjective classifications such as “strength and “strategy” or “execution” and “vision”, and, furthermore, where each of these nebulous concepts is made up of half a dozen subjective ratings meshed into one. While not perfect, at least Solution Map gave you an apples-to-apples pure objective technology rating (as each question had a defined rating scale based on technical maturity) against an unbiased pure customer opinion. So you at least knew whether or not

  1. the vendor actually offers a readily available solution of that type
  2. how it compares to the market average of vendors with actual available solutions of that type)

Thus, if you insisted on using logo maps, he at least wanted to make sure there was at least some redeeming qualities.  However, as he has already stated, his map is mostly useless and while a few flaws were corrected on release, some are inherently not addressable.  The problem with these maps in general is that, in addition to all the weaknesses the doctor addressed in his release post, namely:

  • Some vendors/solutions no longer existed as of release date (which was addressed)
  • Many of the categories are meaningless and not actual solution modules (which he corrected, but this means the fit varies across vendors in a category)
  • Vendor logos were not clickable, and not even footnoted when all you got was some strange symbol that looks like it should be carved on a 3000 year old ruin (which is the primary improvement, all logos are clickable and take you to the vendor site as of the release date).

4. They are nowhere near complete.
Most of these maps are in the 100 to 150 logo range. As the doctor has clearly demonstrated that’s only 1/7 to 1/10 of the number of vendors in the core space. Furthermore, even though the doctor does a full database update at least annually, he will guarantee that not even his map is close to complete. While he’d wager he has 90% of the vendors actively selling in North America and Western Europe in the core Source-to-Pay buckets, that percentage goes down as you venture out into the periphery. Plus, in some areas, like ESG/Carbon, he tracks only those focussed on carbon/scope 3 accounting with supplier management / sourcing integration capability, and ignores the remaining ESG/Sustainability/Climate vendors, of which there is likely 10 times as many right now (although we’ll see a lot get swallowed up or die off as the space matures). Most of the supply chain risk vendors are missing unless they offer core supplier management capabilities, or integrate with supplier management modules, as well. And so on.

5. The landscape changes daily.
the doctor did a full database review last year when he did his 39 steps … err … 39 clues … err … 39 part Source-to-Pay+ series, and since then, over half a dozen vendors/offerings are completely gone and over a dozen acquired and swallowed into larger vendors. One, acquired in 2022 that was still offered as a standalone solution late March disappeared by the final link checks that began on April 13. So, while these maps are distributed by their creators for months, and sometimes a year, they are only valid as of the last date where the creator actually re-verified every single vendor.

6. The vendors are only comparable at the baseline, IF they are comparable at all.
If no two (2) vendors are created equal, imagine how different twenty (20) are, or one hundred (100)! If you refer back to our previously referenced 39 part Source-to-Pay+ series,

  • sourcing vendors break down into RFX, Auction, optimization and may/not contain (best-practice) templates or category expertise
  • contract management generally breaks down into negotiation support, (post-signing) lifecycle (execution) management and tracking, and analytics
  • spend analysis is similar, but differs on DIY vs. services led, load/classification support vs. self load/(re)class, out of the box report templates, autonomous analysis and opportunity identification, etc.
  • supplier management was broken down into the 10-segment CORNED QUIP mash, which expressly excluded DEI, because most application thereof is definitely NOT equitable (as the biggest promoters clearly never looked up what the words actually mean in a dictionary)
  • eProcurement, while it revolves around a PO (and, hopefully, a no PO, no pay policy), may or may not have punchout/internal/managed catalog support, may or may not support receiving, may or may not support price tiers and discounts, etc.
  • I2P, while it revolves around the invoice, it may or may not support anything beyond internal PO flip or XML, may or may not support m-way match, may or may not integrate with a payment system, etc.
  • and the same variation exists across every other category

This is assuming that the creator actually understood what every vendor offered and classified according to what the vendor’s product actually did vs. what language the vendor chose to use to describe their product.

7. Even all the vendors with comparable solutions are NOT relevant for you.

When you are considering a vendor, at the very least you have to consider

  • the verticals/industries their solution was designed on, and designed for
  • the organizational size they were developed for

and a host of other considerations based on your industry, your organizational size, and the hole you are trying to fill.

This is why so many Source-to-Pay+ selection projects end up not (fully) delivering and why most big consultancies just keep recommending the same-old same-old five (5) (big) vendors regardless of what your needs are, because they don’t know any different and at least those vendors will be around tomorrow. And this leads into a bigger discussion of why these logo maps, like most analyst maps, are NOT appropriate for transformation projects. Which we’ll take up in our next article / rant.

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* and the doctor would like to make it very clear he had NOTHING to do with the current interface and presentation of Solution Map; it’s likely many of the questions are still his, but to be valuable, SolutionMap has to be properly scored and the ratings properly compared and applied relative to a number of factors not explicitly captured in the map