Category Archives: rants

Have all the Big X fallen for Gen-AI? Or is this their new insidious plan to hook you for life?

McKinsey. Accenture. Cap Gemini. KPMG. Deloitte. Kearney. BCG. etc. etc. etc.

Every single one is putting “Gen-AI” adoption in their top 10 (or top 5) strategic imperatives for Procurement, and its future, and that it’s essential for analytics (gasp) and automation (WTF?!?). One of these firms even announced they are going to train 80,000 f6ckw@ds on this bullcr@p.

It’s absolutely insane. First of all there are almost no valid uses for Gen-AI in business (unless, of course, your corporation is owned by Dr. Evil), and even less valid uses for Gen-AI in Procurement.

Secondly, the “Gen” in “Gen” AI stands for “Generative” which literally means MAKE STUFF UP. It DOES NOT analyze anything. Furthermore, automation is about predictability and consistency, Gen-AI gives you neither! How the heck could you automate anything. You CAN NOT! Automation requires a completely different AI technology built on classical (and predictable) machine learning (where you can accurately calculate confidences and break/stop when the confidence falls below a threshold).

Which begs the question, are they complete idiots who have completely fallen for the marketing bullcr@p? Or is this their new insidious plan to get you on a never-ending work order? After all, when it inevitably fails a few days after implementation, they have their excuses ready to go (which are the same excuses being given by these companies spending tens of millions on marketing) which are the same excuses that have been given to us since Neural Nets were invented: “it just needs more content for training“, “it just needs better prompting“, “it just needs more integration with your internal data sources“, rinse, lather, and repeat … ad infinitum. And, every year it will get a few percentage points better, but if it gets only 2% better per year, and the best Gen-AI instance now is scoring (slightly) less than 34% on the SOTA scale, it will be (at least) 9 (NINE) years before you reach 40% accuracy. In comparison, if you had an intern who only performed a task acceptably 40% of the time, how long would he last? Maybe 3 weeks. But these Big X know that once you sink seven (7) figures on a license, implementation, integration, and custom training, you’re hooked and you will keep pumping in six to seven figures a year even though you should have dropped the smelly rotten hot potato the minute you saw the demo.

So, maybe they aren’t stupid when it comes to Gen-AI. Maybe they are just evil because it’s their biggest opportunity to hook you for life since McKinsey convinced you that you should outsource for “labour arbitrage” and “currency exchange” (and not materials / products you can’t get / make at home) and other bullsh!t arguments that no society in the history of the world EVER outsourced for. (EVER!) Because if you install this bullcr@p and get to the point of “sunk cost”, you will continue to sink money into it. And they know it.

(Yet another reason you should be very, very careful about selecting a Big X for something that is NOT their forte.)

Remember that AI, and Gen-AI in particular, is a fallacy.

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

As per Part 1, 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!). He’s only covering it because one recommendation had the potential to be the most innovative recommendation of the year (because no one is recommending it) had the author got it right (and approached it the right way).

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.

6. Use AI to Review Process.

Uhm, NO! Use analytics and automation, not AI! And use traditional process analysis tools to identify where you are spending the most (and possibly too much) time.

7. Try New Inventory Software.

And if everything written to this point wasn’t a dead giveaway this article wasn’t written by a Procurement Pro, this is. First of all, inventory is operation / supply chain & logistics, not Procurement. Secondly, it’s not new inventory software, it’s e-Procurement software that can integrate with the inventory management system to determine if a request should be (re)allocated from inventory or ordered from a nearby supplier (using a pre-approved catalog item). (Heck, the author couldn’t even get the market size increase right — it’s 4.9 Billion according to the linked study, not 4.9 million! And if you’re interested in the Procurement market, Technavio, owned by Infiniti Research, is NOT one of the leading analyst firms in the Procurement Market.)

8. Formalize the Procurement Process.

How non-innovative can you get? Are there any organizations still in business at this point who have Not formalized the process? It’s no longer formalize, it’s SaaS-back and automate as much as possible!

9. Strategize Market Analysis.

Would any Procurement department doing market analysis really be doing it off the cuff? Uhm, no! It’s not strategize, it’s automate — implement platforms that automatically collect, track, analyze, report on changes and provide predictions on costs, availability, risk, and other important pieces of information.

10. Reassess Cost Evaluation.

This is the ONE prediction that could have been the most innovative prediction this year if thought through and presented properly. The author noted that many companies are not looking at the total acquisition cost and indicated that buyers should look at this, as well as usage costs and even disposal costs, getting into total cost of ownership (TCO) territory — you know, the concept we’ve been talking about here on SI since we started in 2006!

However, in today’s economy, TCO is no longer enough, and you have to move onto the next generation of what we have been calling TVM: Total Value Management since 2007! The root of TVM was that total cost of ownership is not enough when the end goal of every product or service obtained is about value, and value goes beyond pure cost elements and includes bundled services, controlled and understood risk, and brand recognition.

So cost evaluation needs to factor that in as well, but often that’s not enough anymore either. It’s not just supply or stability risk, it’s regulatory compliance. It’s not just product cost, but carbon cost. It’s not just brand recognition, it’s brand risk if your suppliers are using slave labour, polluting the environment with carcinogens, or finding new and inventive ways to be truly evil. It’s also not just today’s price, it’s tomorrow’s price. If the product relies on a raw material currently getting scarcer by the day, can you find an alternative that doesn’t need that material, or needs less of it? And so on. Cost evaluation is not just cost alone anymore. And any organization that takes the next step here will be truly innovative.

Now, in all fairness, the doctor should point out that the article’s recommendations could be considered innovative if the organization didn’t have a Procurement department, but in today’s economic environment, unless it had a monopolistic stranglehold on a market, the doctor doesn’t see how a company of any size without a proper Procurement function could still be in operation.

Anyway, that’s all, folks!

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.

DEAR ENTERPRISE PROCUREMENT SOFTWARE BUYER: THERE ARE NO FREE RFPs!

This shouldn’t have to be said (again), but apparently it does since Zip has relaunched the FREE RFP madness in Source-to-Pay (that began in 2006 when Procuri first aggressively launched the Sourcing, Supplier Management, Contract Management, and Spend Analysis RFPs) with an RFP that is intake heavy, orchestrate light, process deficient, and, like many RFPs before, completely misses some of the key points when going to market for a technology solution. (Especially since there isn’t a single FREE RFP template from a vendor that isn’t intrinsically weighted towards the vendor’s solution, as it’s always written from the viewpoint of what the vendor believes is important.)

the doctor has extensively written about RFPs and the RFP process here on SI in the past, but, at a high level, a good RFP specifies:

  • your current state,
    it does NOT leave this out leaving the vendor to guess your technical and process maturity
  • what you need the solution to do
    NOT just a list of feature/functions
  • what ecosystem you need the solution to work in
    NOT just a list of protocols or APIs that must be supported
  • where the data will live
    and, if in the solution, how you will access it (for free) for exports and off-(vendor-)site backups, do NOT leave this out
  • what support you need from the vendor
    NOT just whether the vendor offers integration / implementation services and their hourly / project rate
  • any specific services you would like from the vendor
    NOT a list of all services you might want to buy someday
  • what the precise scope of the RFP is if it is part of a larger project
    NOT a blanket request for the vendor to “address what they can”
  • what regulations and laws you are subject to that the vendor must support
    NOT just an extensive list of every standard and protocol you can think of
  • what languages and geographies and time zones you need supported
  • any additional requirements the vendor will need to adhere to based on the regulations you or the vendor would be subject to and additional requirements your organization puts in place
    NOT endless forms of every question you can think of that might never be relevant
  • your goal state,
    it does NOT leave the vendor to guess what you are looking for (note that “goal” defines what you want to achieve, it is up to the vendor to define how they will help you achieve it)
  • what (management) processes you use to work with vendors — and —
  • what collaboration tools you make available to vendors and what your expectations are of them

And it is only created after a current state assessment, goal state specification, and key use-case identification so that it is relatively clear on organization needs and vendors have no excuse to provide a poor response.

Furthermore, a good RFP does NOT contain:

  • requests for features/functions you don’t currently need (but you can ask for a roadmap)
  • specific requests for a certain type of AI/ML/Analytics/Optimization/etc. when you don’t even know what that tech actually does — let the vendor tell you, and then show you, how their tech solves their problem
    (after all, there are almost NO valid uses for Gen-AI in S2P)
  • specific requests on the technology stack, when it doesn’t matter if they use Java or Ruby, host on AWS or Azure, etc.
  • requests for audits (tech, environmental, social welfare, etc.) when you haven’t selected the vendor for an award, pending a successful negotiation
  • requests for service professional resumes when you haven’t selected the vendor for an award that includes professional service, pending a successful negotiation
  • requests for financials, when you haven’t selected the vendor for an award pending a successful negotiation
    (because these last three [3] will scare some vendors off and possibly prevent the best vendor for you from even acknowledging your RFP exists)

And, a good RFP, goes to the right providers! This means that you need to select providers with the right type of solution you need before you issue the RFP, and then only issue to providers that you know offer that type of solution. (You can use analyst reports here if you like to identify potential vendors, but remember these maps cannot be used for solution selection! You will then need to do some basic research to make sure the vendor appears to fit the criteria.)

And if there are a lot of potential providers, you may need to do a RFI — Request for Interest / Intent (to Bid) — where you specify at a high level what the RFP you intend to issue is for, and if you get a lot of positive responses, do an initial call with the providers to confirm not only interest but the solution offered is relevant to your organization. (After all, at the end of the day, as The Revelator is quick to point out, it’s as much about the people behind the technology as the technology itself if you expect to be served by the provider.)

And even if you don’t need to an RFI before the RFP, you should still reach out to the vendors you want to respond, let them know the RFP is coming, and let them know you’ve done your research, believe they are one of the top 5 vendors, and are looking forward to their response. (Otherwise, you might find you don’t get as many responses as you’d hope for as vendors prioritize RFPs that they believe they have a good shot at winning vs. random unexpected RFP requests from unknown companies.)

At the end of the day, if you don’t know:

  • what the main categories of S2P+ solutions are
  • what the typical capabilities of a solution type are, what’s below, average or above
  • who the vendors are
  • how to determine your current state of process maturity (and how that compares to the industry, market, and best-in-class) and what a solution could do for you
  • how to evaluate a vendor’s solution
  • how to evaluate a vendor overall
  • how to write a good RFP that balances core business, tech, and solution requirements to maximize your chances of finding a good vendor for you

and the reality is that you most likely don’t (as less than 10% of Procurement departments are world class, as per Hackett research going back to the 2000s where they also determined the typical journey for an organization to become best-in-class in Procurement was 8 years, and that’s the minimum requirement to write a world-class technology RFP), then you should engage help from an expert to help you craft that RFP, be it an independent consultant or firm that specializes in Procurement transformation.

It is also critically important that the firm you select to help you needs to be neutral (not aligned with one solution provider who refers implementations to them in return for potential customer referrals) and that the firm does not rely on analyst maps either!

If you want help, the doctor has relationships with leading, neutral, firms on both sides of the pond who can help you, and who he will work with to make sure the technology / solution component is precisely what you need to get the right responses from vendors. Simply contact the doctor (at) sourcinginnovation [dot] com if you would like help getting it right.

Simply put, getting help with your technology RFP is the best insurance money you can spend. When you considering that, all in, these solutions will cost seven (7) or eight (8) figures over just a few years, you should be willing to spend 5% to 10% of the initial contract value to make sure you get it right. (Especially when there isn’t a single Private Equity Firm that wouldn’t invest in a technology player without doing a six [6], if not seven [7] figure due diligence first … and sometimes the firm will do this and then walk away! At least in your case, when you work with someone who can identify multiple potential vendors, you’re certain to find one at the end of the day.)

Don’t Zip Through the Zip-sponsored Spend Matters authored Intake and Procurement Orchestration RFI, Part 4: Project/Process Management

… because, as we noted in Part 1, while it looks great on the surface, in our space, looks can be deceiving and what you get may NOT be what you want. (And you’ll have to read this full series to find out if it’s good, bad, both, or neither.)

In Part 1, we discussed how Zip issued a public challenge to check out their RFI (making it irresistible to the doctor who has been rallying against vendor RFIs since they first hit the scene big time with Procuri’s 2006 releases, how the doctor had doubts that this would be the first RFI to get it totally right, and how it was starting off with five strikes right off the bat (observable from a first quick read … but that we would review it in detail because there could be value in it if used and/or referenced appropriately (either for self-education and/or a foundation for a larger, wider evaluation effort) and only a fair, detailed review would surface that. So, this is what we are concluding g with the 14 Shared elements organized into the categories of “Configurability”, “Integrations”, and “Analytics”.

In Part 2, we tackled Intake: the strengths, the weaknesses, and the not so-obvious weaknesses.

In Part 3, we tackled (core) Orchestrate: the strengths, the weaknesses, and the not so-obvious weaknesses.

Before we begin our discussion of the Project/Process Management capabilities that are needed to take the offering beyond a pay per view of YOUR data and more solution sprawl (not less), since you don’t want to be asking where’s the beef after adopting a solution, we will remind you that there are some fundamental capabilities that are necessary that were specifically called out in part 35 and part 38 of our 39 Steps … err Clues … err Part Series on Source to Pay.

Sadly, there aren’t any in this RFI. There are only shared capabilities that cross between intake-and orchestrate in the configurability, integrations, and analytics sections. This means that there is no coverage at all of:

  • project management beyond task and workflow management — there should be extensive support for phases, milestones, obligations, and distributed management of hierarchical projects in construction, commissioning, and other projects that require multiple projects to be synched between multiple service providers
  • KPIs — critical for project and process management requires that there be native support
  • project and process templates — to allow workflows to be preconfigured through system drag-and-drop
  • dynamic project and process shifting — if the situation changes, the type of sourcing / procurement / contract / etc. project might need to change; and it should be a seamless transition, with all appropriate data, settings, etc. automatically transferred into the new structure

With respect to what is covered for shared requirements in the RFI, the following are quite weak:

  • configurability beyond workflow — it’s not just the workflow, it’s the data model as well, for example
  • data type data feed integrations — the platform should understand the different types of data it will be processing and support unknown integrations
  • m-way integrations — as indicated above, processes are not always simple and restricted to two systems
  • real analytics — pre-configured simple out-of-the-box reports are NOT analytics; the power of multi-system multi-source data integration and orchestration is the insightful analytics it can power

However, the following are some strengths of the RFI.

  • workflow configurability — mentions parallel approval support, escalation paths, conditional logic, and no-code editing
  • multiple workflows — and automatic assignment on procession initiation
  • in-flight workflow adjustments — workflows should be capable of being upgraded or reconfigured at any time (without breaking anything)
  • ERP integrations — ERP is never going away, and even if it’s not used for any core procurement processes, it is still used to support the supply chain and the true power of intake-to-orchestrate is beyond S2P
  • collaboration — S2P is about collaboration — through whatever platforms the organization uses, including Slack, Teams, etc. in addition to the S2P tools the organization tools
  • integration monitoring — the platform should monitor integration status, including the last access/synch with every data source, the synch schedule, and system response time

Overall, the overlap is ok, but the support for project and process management assessment is almost nonexistent in the RFI. As per our last post, it is clear the focus of the RFI was intake, not orchestrate, and a whole section needs to be added on project and process management — especially when the true value of intake to orchestrate is going beyond just taking requests and managing S2P solutions to support end-to-end project and process management beyond S2P and upstream into the supply chain and through finance downstream to sales.

SUMMARY

At the end of the day, it’s a good foundation to educate yourself on what intake solutions in S2P should functionally do and how to compare them in a consistent manner, but it’s not nearly enough to evaluate intake-to-orchestrate solutions.

It’s also a good foundation upon which Spend Matters could build an intake-project/process management-orchestrate Solution Map if they addressed all of the points in the last three articles, fleshed out the necessary capabilities more, and refined the scale.

However, it’s certainly not enough to evaluate a provider’s suitability for your organization, as partially pointed out in Part 1. First of all, it doesn’t address all of the capabilities that you are likely to need in a solution. Secondly, as hinted in part 1, it’s not just the functionality, it’s the capability of the platform to support your processes — that’s not just functionality. Thirdly, once you confirm the tech meets baseline (and trust the doctor when he says that multiple platforms will), you have to go beyond the tech to whether or not they will enable YOUR organization with the processes YOUR organization needs with the systems YOUR organizations uses with interfaces appropriate for YOUR people and whether or not they custom integrate new solutions on an ongoing basis for you, be available on your working hours, support the languages of the third parties you need to work with, or culturally be a good fit for your organization. And that’s just the baseline requirements for a good solution RFI — which will always need to be customized to your business.