Category Archives: Technology

Exact Purchasing Helps You Define Your Tech Needs

In our last post we illuminated how Busch-Lamoureux Exact Purchasing required Category Intelligence (not just the Category Management most Procurement organizations aren’t yet doing) and, thus, ups your Procurement game in more ways than one. Many more ways than one, actually.

Only with Exact Purchasing can you figure out what you actually need from your Procurement technology, If you go back to our piece on assisted solution selection is a seven stair methodology, step 1 is understanding your needs. By breaking your procurement needs into categories you can specify to a high degree of detail, you get an understanding of what you really need to do in your Procurement organization.

In the seven stair methodology, step 2 is the holistic solution requirement — and this is what is embodied in Exact Purchasing! With exact purchasing, you are holistically evaluating a category from all key perspectives — complexity, risk, and organizational impact — and creating sourcing, procurement, supplier, and supply management plans that balance the requirements from a holistic requirement.

Step 3 is organizational maturity, and here’s what most Procurement organizations miss — the lack of a proper, formal, category management strategy that allows them to start on the journey to Procurement excellence through better processes, risk management, and intelligence is what holds them back. Exact Purchasing gives them a foundation to not only figure out where they are on their Procurement journey but where they need to go and what process improvements might get them there.

Step 4 is vendor pool selection, and here’s where exact purchasing really starts to help as it helps you identify what the tech has to do, which helps you (possibly with help from an expert analyst or consultant) identify what type of Procurement tech you really need, and then you can use an independent analyst or consultant (who doesn’t have to sycophantically cater to the bejeweled emerald software partner in order to maintain that bejeweled emerald status that sees a lot of integration work thrown his way as long as he maintains it) to identify the vendors most likely to be a great fit for you.

Step 5 is the vendor assessment process, which is itself a 7 step process — and Exact Purchasing helps you out end-to-end here.

Step 5a is RFI creation. With Exact Purchasing, you know what the critical functionality is, you can easily specify what it is, and then quickly eliminate any vendor that can’t meet 100% of the critical must-have for your organization before wasting any significant time on them.

Step 5b is collaborative RFI review. Once you’ve eliminated those that you’re certain won’t fit, if too many vendors survive the cut, the team is educated on both what is needed and what will make their lives easier and can holistically assess initial responses to narrow down to the providers that go beyond the basics in ways that might be helpful.

Step 5c is the qualifying demo. You can create a script that not only covers all the essentials, but should haves that will help illuminate where the key strengths and weaknesses are likely to be both in the given vendor’s application but the vendor pool over all and get the insight you need to ensure that you’re both on the right path and that the vendors you select for the RFP will be worth the next stage review.

Step 5d is the RFP creation. From here you can elaborate all the should have and nice to have functionality, double down on your key pain points that you would like solved (potentially in innovative ways), note what intelligence is critical, identify where you’d like services and support, and identify any must-have organizational requirements beyond Procurement that would be a deal-breaker. You’re able to focus on the what, instead of the typical 500 point feature list where half the features you might never use.

Step 5e is the RFP review, where again the team has the understanding on what to look for and can ensure that any vendor who wouldn’t make the cut doesn’t get invited to the full demo stage.

Step 6 is the full demo where each vendor provides a two-part demo against the basic deep dive should have script the RFP was based on and detailed requests based upon claims they made in the RFP against nice-to-haves, uniqueness, process improvements that will save you time and money beyond what peers can do, etc.

Step 7 is the decision, and you can make that against what the vendors offer relative to your category needs and organizational goals, not just a feature list you don’t understand (but copied from a Free RFP anyway because you needed to look competent).

In other words, Exact Purchasing gives you the understanding you need to go to market, and the understanding that not every solution may be appropriate for every category — and that’s okay. Sometimes two or three targeted BoB solutions are still less than half of the cost of a mega-suite that still only solves half of your problems.

The One Big Benefit Of NOT Going AI …

You don’t have to worry about your AI vendor going toes-up when power costs go through the roof and your AI vendor can no longer charge pennies for compute when its costs rapidly become dollars and it can’t pass them on due to contractual commitments to existing clients (or to new clients who won’t pay dollars for computations that might return hallucinations).

The new generation of AI tech — Gen-AI LLMs / AGI — requires way more compute power than the last generation, 100 to 10000 times more on average, for most requests. Grids are stretched and beginning to break. We’re at the point where only nuclear can power the data centre needed for a modern Gen-AI/AGI offering. And, as per Koray Köse’s recent article on AI leadership is about who controls the power, U.S. nuclear plants operated at 92.3% capacity last year. OUCH!

THERE IS NO ENERGY LEFT!

You can’t build a new nuclear plant overnight — if you can even build one at all anymore! Last year, DOGE’s Firing Fiasco at the NNSA stretched an already stretched organization even more. Many returned to work, but not all, but budget cuts likely left them without the capacity to even properly monitor existing aging nuclear infrastructure, yet alone approve more plants.

And it’s not even clear how much know-how is left in the US to build new plants. The Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia were the first units built from scratch in over three decades. The experience and expertise isn’t there to safely build these plants en-masse.

And the last thing the US wants to risk is another meltdown. Three Mile Island wasn’t a Chernobyl, but all it takes is a rushed private sector job with a lack of proper oversight and testing and one small mistake to trigger the next meltdown on US soil.

In other words, the power isn’t there for more AI.

So those organizations that can do without modern AI, that can use classic solutions with fit-for-purpose last generation AI that requires a fraction of the power and can run on already strained, non-nuclear, grids will be the big winners when the power squeeze hits and the Big AI players start dropping like flies.

AI is Exacerbating the Need for Global Data Centres NOT Controlled By US Firms!

A recent post by Joël Collin-Demers on why Your LLM Doesn’t Need a US Passport pointed out two very important facts that you’re probably not aware of but should be:

1. Your company is feeding sensitive data to US-based LLMs every single day.

2. The US CLOUD Act lets American authorities demand data from any US-based provider REGARDLESS of where their servers sit in the world!

In other words, you’re giving the USA full access to all of your proprietary and confidential data anytime they want it — in full breach of your data localization laws if you’re NOT in the US and in a country with such laws (and if you’re not in the US and don’t yet have data localization laws to adhere to you will soon have such laws to deal with as a result of the US global over-reach for your data to feed its AI).

This is not just an AI problem (which, if you think you really need, you have other non-US options if you are not a US company as per Joel’s extensive list), it’s an overall SaaS/SaS problem. If you’re not a US company, you need to make sure that not only your data, but all of your applications (including, but not limited to, AI) are hosted in non-US owned data centres off of US soil without safe harbour agreements.

This Should Be Obvious But Expert in the Loop …

… is Human in the Loop. Not another (AI) system in the loop, no matter how specialized that system is or how well it is trained!

The future is Augmented Intelligence, NOT Artificial Intelligence (which doesn’t exist and won’t exist any time soon until brilliant researchers come up with a few more insights that get us closer to understanding

  1. what intelligence actually is and
  2. modelling it.)

The algorithms might be getting more accurate in average use cases, but the illusion of intelligence, no matter how grand, is still NOT intelligence. (And, even worse, The Wizard of Oz has been replaced by a very poor digital facsimile.)

Done right, Augmented Intelligence will still let your organization reduce its non-value-add tactical workforce by 80% to 90% because the right tools will enable the strategic experts to be 3, 5, 7, and even 10 times as productive and oversee all the tactical work that needs to be done using an exception based approach where every instruction that is given forms a rule that allows the system to automatically deal with the same, and similar, exceptions should they arise again in the future in a predictable and repeatable fashion.

Instead of having to oversee a team of tactical grunts that just take up space (because they don’t have the education, experience, or raw capability required to make good strategic decisions, manage projects, and identify value), a strategic expert can instead focus her time on value-centric activities and training a protege or two who will be one that posses the right mix of EQ and TQ to grow into, and take over, her expert role (when she moves on and up).

In the near future, there will be no more bodies in seats just to push bits around, because that’s what software does best. Number crunching and thunking. NOT analyzing strategically and thinking. (I admit most humans don’t do that well either, especially these days, because they are too attracted to the principle of least action and/or enjoying the cognitive decline from ChatGPT, but those willing to practice strategic thinking daily still do it way better than a machine ever will based on our current approaches to AI). [And while there might be fewer of us each year that are willing to think, there are still enough of us to get the job done if you let us select tools that work. Not necessarily AI. Tools that work.]