The Days of Black Box Marketing May Soon Be Over!

In what marketing will refer to as the good old days of the Source-to-Pay marketplace, when the space was just emerging and most analysts couldn’t see past the shiny UI to what features were, or more importantly, were NOT, lurking underneath, it was a wild-west, anything goes marketplace.

Marketers could make grandiose claims as to what the platform did and did not do, and if they could give a good (PowerPoint) presentation to the analysts, the analysts would buy it and spread the word, and the story would grow bigger and bigger until it should be seen as crazy and unrealistic, but instead was seen as the new gospel according to the power on high.

Big names would get bigger, pockets would get fatter, but customers would lose out when they needed advanced functionality or configurability that just was not there. On the road-map, maybe, but would it get implemented before the company got acquired by a bigger company, which would halt innovative development dead in its tracks?

But those days, which still exist for some vendors with long-standing relationships with the big name analyst firms, may soon be numbered. Why? Now that SpendMatters is doing SolutionMaps, which are deep dives into well defined functionality, a customer can know for sure whether or not a certain provider has a real solution in the area, how deep it goes, and how it compares to other providers. As a result, the depth of insight that will soon be expected by a customer has been taken up a couple of notches, and any analyst firm and consultancy that doesn’t up the bar, is going to be avoided, left behind.

Once (potential) customers realize the degree of information that is available, and should be available, they’ll never settle for less. And that’s a good thing. Because it means the days of black box marketing will soon be over. While North America may never be a Germany where accurate technical specs lead the way, at least accurate claims will. And every vendor will be pushed to do better.

A Great Day in American Automotive History …

Sixty years ago Today the Ford Motor Company produced it’s 50 millionth automobile the Thunderbird, and fifty years ago today General Motors produced it’s 100 millionth automobile, the Tornado, putting the automobile revolution in full swing and launching the Automotive industry to its height (before their downfall began in the 1970s and 1980s with a series of engineering, manufacturing, and marketing mishaps and disasters, a downfall which continued in the 1990s where the recession resulted in weak auto sales and operating losses). Up until the 1980s, the US was the largest automobile producer in the world until Japan overtook it.

Producing a million units of anything in the 50’s was a feat, especially for something as large and complex as an automobile, and the fact that American companies could do it … and do it well … means that they used to have great supply chain management. Remember, even local and vertically integrated supply chains are still supply chains and this goes to show the value of near-, and home-, sourcing and (deep) control over key aspects of your supply chain.

Significant (non optimization backed) cost savings always comes at a price, and that price is usually an increase in risk. Be careful. Or your company could meet the same fate of the US automotive manufacturers, many of whom had to enter into bankruptcy and receive big bailouts from the government just to stay alive.

Get Your Head Out of the Clouds!

SaaS is great, but is cloud delivery great?

Sure it’s convenient to not have to worry about where the servers are, where the backups are, and whether or not more CPUs have to be spun up, more memory needs to be added, or more bandwidth is needed and it’s time to lay more pipe.

However, sometimes this lack of worrying leads to an unexpectedly high invoice when your user base decided to adopt the solution as part of their daily job, spin up a large number of optimization and predictive analytics scenarios, and spike CPU usage from 2 server days to 30 server days, resulting in a 15-fold bill increase over night. (Whereas hosting on your own rack has a fixed, predictable, cost.)

But this isn’t the real problem. (You could always have set up alerts or limits and prevented this from happening had you thought ahead.) The real problem is regulatory compliance and the massive fines that could be headed your way if you don’t know where your data is and cannot confirm you are 100% in compliance with every regulation that impacts you.

For example, EU and Canada privacy regulations limit where data on their citizens can live and what security protocols must be in place. And even if this is a S2P system, which is focussed on corporations and not people, you still have contact data — which is data on people. Now, by virtue of their employment, these people agree to make their employment (contact) information available, so you’re okay … until they are not employed. Then, if any of that data was personal (such as cell phone or local delivery address), it may have to be removed.

But more importantly, with GDPR coming into effect May 25, you need to be able to provide any EU citizen, regardless of where they are in the world and where you are in the world, with any and all information you have on them — and do so in a reasonable timeframe. Failure to do so can result in a fine of up to €20 Million or 4% of global turnover. For ONE violation. And, if you no longer have a legal right to keep that data, you have to be able to delete all of the data — including all instances across all systems and all (backup) copies. If you don’t even know where the data is, how can you ensure this happens? The answer is, you can’t.

Plus, not every country will permit sensitive or secure data to be stored just anywhere. So, if you want a client that works as a defense contractor, even if your software passes the highest security standards tests, that doesn’t mean that the client you want can host in the cloud.

With all of the uncertainty and chaos, the SaaS of the future is going to be a blend of an (in-house) ASP and provider managed software offering where the application, and databases, are housed in racks in a location selected by the provider in a dedicated hardware environment, but the software, which is going to be managed by the vendor, is going to run in virtual machines and update via vendor “pushes”, where the vendor will have the capability to shut-down and restart the entire virtual machine if a reboot is necessary. This method will also permit the organization to have on-site QA of new release functionality if they like, as that’s just another VM.

Just like your OS can auto-update on schedule or reboot, your S2P application will auto-update in a similar fashion. It will register a new update, schedule it for the next, defined, update cycle. Prevent users from logging in 15 minutes prior. Force users to start log-off 5 minutes before. Shutdown. Install the updates. Reboot if necessary. Restart. And the new version will be ready to go. If there are any issues, an alert will be sent to the provider who will be able to log in to the instance, and even the VM, and fix it as appropriate.

While it’s not the one-instance (with segregated databases) SaaS utopia, it’s the real-world solution for a changing regulatory and compliance landscape, which will also comfort security freaks and control freaks. So, head in the cloud vendors, get ready. It’s coming.

How Many Billions Are Lost Each Year to Dumb Sourcing?

Today I saw an article entitled E-Sourcing is Dead, Long Live Intelligent Sourcing Systems and all I could say is what parallel world did this article materialize from? Given that we’ve had Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization with multi-line item support, freight brackets, and carrier support for 17 years, advanced analytics algorithms with smart trend projection and outlier analysis for just as long, and easy access to pretty much all market and public sector buy data in e-friendly countries for over a decade, this should be the case. But it’s not.

We’re not even in a position to say half of mid-size or larger organizations even have anything resembling a modern e-Sourcing solution, and only a small fraction of those have embedded optimization capability, and only a small fraction of their customers actually use it. In reality, e-Sourcing is barely alive and just coming into it’s own. After all, the oompa-loompa empire is only valued at about Two point Five Billion … and in software terms, that’s pretty puny when you consider the market valuations of companies like SAP (approx 107B) and Oracle (approx 220B) … either of these companies could easily buy out the oompa-loompas and put them back in the chocolate factory on a whim! (Which would be a shame since they make great coders.)

But regular readers will know this to be the case, as it’s been SI’s core lament for a decade now — and the market still doesn’t look poised to change. Even though, as SI has stated over and over (and over) again, the average year-over-year savings from the proper application of optimization backed sourcing is 10% across the board. That means if you’re sourcing 105M, that’s 10.5M in savings that could be yours, as soon as you can attack all 100M of spend. If it takes an average of 3 years to get through all spend, that’s 3.5M a year for easy taking. But you’re probably sourcing closer to 1.05 Billion, which means you’re overspending by an average of 105 million, or 35 Million each year. That’s a lot of money, but obviously not enough to take notice.

So obviously we need bigger numbers. How much money is lost in the economy overall each year due to the lack of application of advanced, optimization backed, sourcing? While it’s pretty hard to get a firm grasp on OPEX in the US, and how much of that is addressable by optimization-backed sourcing (as payroll can’t be optimized, only outsourced services, and taxes are taxes), the US Census keeps good data on CAPEX, and in 2015, CAPEX was 1.65 Trillion! Ten Percent of that is 165 Billion. If, and this is an overly aggressive estimate, 10% of that was optimized, that still leaves 149 Billion on the table in the US alone. The US is about one forth of the global market, and assuming CAPEX / OPEX ratios are about equal, this says, globally, that’s about 600 Billion from CAPEX alone left on the table each year because companies aren’t optimizing spend. SIX HUNDRED BILLION. And that’s a lower, lower bound estimate. Is that number big enough for you???

Don’t Get Sucked in By Impressive Words!

It’s conference season, and that means marketing overload for many vendors. And there’s a few words the doctor is hearing a bit too much and he’s NOT impressed! So what are these words?

Digitization

Digital. Digital Procurement. Digitized. Digitized Procurement. Digitization. Ugh. They’ve been using variations of the same word for almost 20 years — and despite claims to the contrary, the meaning hasn’t really changed. You’re analog, or you’re digital. There’s no degrees to digital.

Look at the dictionary definition for crying out loud! Of, relating to, or using data in the form of numerical digits. What’s new, or even enticing, about this? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

Internet of Things

The internet has ALWAYS been an internet of things. Computers are not people. They are computers. The only difference today is that we are sticking computers in more things to collect and transmit sensor data automatically rather than reading it, and entering it into the computer. It’s not the big whoop most companies are making it out to be as most companies haven’t developed much that uses that near real-time in a truly useful way.

Cognitive

It’s not artificially intelligent. It’s cognitive. And the bull crap has reached a whole new level. Let’s look at the definition.

Of or relating to the mental process of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning.

Yes computers can perceive through sensors, store data in memory, use algorithms to assign, or judge, and use very advanced automated algorithms to reason, but we’re overlooking one key word here. Mental. Computers don’t have a mind, and they are not intelligent. The implication here is that which is cognitive is intelligent, and they are not intelligent.

We haven’t even reached true AI yet in any field and we are supposed to believe that a little Sourcing or Procurement vendor has reached the next, cognitive level of AI development? While a best in class vendor may have a few algorithms that are almost cognitive for a few, select, situations, considering the billions going into AI research and the limited progress most specialist vendors are making, you know we’re not ready to be throwing this term around.

And, an honorable mention (because, while not common in our space yet, it’s coming):

Postmodern

the doctor‘s been seeing this word a lot on social media in marketing and commentary, and, unfortunately, it seems like it’s starting to creep into our space. For those of us that actually went to a real University and have a sound (classical) education, we know that Postmodernism is a rather broad intellectual movement across the arts and fields with applied arts (like architecture and archaeology) based on a philosophy that takes us from the literary-influenced philosophy of modernism to a post-modern way of thinking that developed in the middle of the last century and reached wide acceptance in the 1980s, when it was a Land of Confusion.

This was the time of the MRPs (and not the ERPs). Do we really want to be associating our new and innovative solutions with that era?

So please, please, please don’t get sucked in by the the impressive words. Instead look for impressive, time-saving, value-adding functions (and forget the feature lists). (But that’s another rant.)