How Many Platforms Do You Need? How Many Platforms Should You Need?

Sourcing is not simple. Finished goods. Made to order goods. MRO products and services. Services. Tail Spend. An average organization, if they need best of breed, might need an indirect, direct, MRO, services, and tail spend solution. Especially since most current platforms only support one such type of (strategic) sourcing project well.

Think about it. Especially in North America, the typical platform was built for indirect. Finished goods and cookie-cutter one-price services. The deep bill of materials (BoM) support required for direct sourcing or Statement of Work (SoW) for services sourcing is not present. And then MRO, which is mainly the re-ordering of parts and maintenance services to keep production lines or distribution humming. And, of course, the management of tactical tail spend as part of an overarching strategic initiative to never pay more than market for anything not worth strategically sourcing.

But an organization that ignores any of this spend is losing. Most organizations are not able to source more than 1/3rd of spend strategically a year, and if the organization only has an indirect or direct sourcing platform, that’s 1/3rd of product spend, or maybe 1/4th down to 1/5th of total spend. Even if you identify a savings of 10%, that’s only 2% to 3%, max, that can go straight to the bottom line.

Considering that, on average 30 to 40 cents of every negotiated dollar of savings does not get realized, that’s only 1% to 2% savings to the bottom line. That’s not enough. Procurement needs to be delivering 5% or more to justify it’s place as the undisputed value king of the organization. To do that, it needs to be identifying 7% to 8% savings, and to do that it needs to be sourcing not 1/5th to 1/3rd of spend, but 2/3rd to 3/4th of spend.

This means that if the solution it has only supports indirect, but it’s product spend is roughly evenly split between indirect and direct, then it also needs a direct platform. And then, depending on what the next biggest category of spend is, it will also need a platform for services spend or tail spend.

But should Sourcing need three different solutions to be the value king? That seems extreme! Especially when the sourcing process in all cases typically revolves around RFX, online bidding, optimization and analysis, award, and contract. It’s not like each type of spend uses completely different processes. The difference is just that direct uses a bill of material and extensive cost models, and services use detailed multi-line statements of work. Couldn’t one build a direct solution that could also do indirect by simply allowing the BoM to be a top line finished product? And couldn’t the grids, models, and analysis adapt to that lack of detail?

And when you think about a statement of work, isn’t that just a bill of materials for a service. Instead of raw materials, it’s individual task components. The grids are similar, it’s really just the realization of the abstraction.

So, we know how many sourcing platforms you typically need (at least three). But how many sourcing platforms should you need?

(Hint: The answer is ONE!)

Source-to-Pay UIX 2017 (Collected Links)

What Makes a Great U(I)X?

What Makes a Great e-Sourcing U(I)X?

What Makes a Great (Strategic Sourcing Decision) Optimization U(I)X?

What Makes a Great Spend Analysis U(I)X?

UX Epilogue

3-D Printing Will Bring Changes to Direct Sourcing

But not overnight, at least not for the changes being touted as the future of direct sourcing.

Print a part on demand? Not likely. Not soon.

Print a sample part on demand for evaluation — you could have that tomorrow.

What’s the difference?

First of all, today’s 3-D printers can only work with very specific plastics. Generally speaking, these plastics will not be suitable for the vast majority of parts the organization needs.

Secondly, most 3-D printers cannot mass produce parts fast enough to be useful to an organization that needs the parts in quantity.

Thirdly, the economics of 3-D printing today are not nearly where they need to be for mass production compared to current production techniques.

It will be a while before each of these criteria are met, and until they are, 3-D printing won’t be the future of direct sourcing.

But they do have their uses. Let’s say you are collaborating with a supplier halfway around the world in the design and development of a new part. If it requires regular review of a physical part, and getting that part on a regular basis requires global expedited shipments that cost hundreds of dollars a shipment and take up to a week to arrive, then the organization will be spending thousands of dollars on shipments and losing weeks, if not months, of production time while it waits for a part to arrive.

But with 3-D printing, an almost exact replica of the part, down to at least 2mm, even if it’s a metal part, can be printed locally from the CAD/CAM design files. And this can be done for a few dollars in a few hours. This is a significant contribution to the NPD process. And a considerable change to direct sourcing as life-cycles, and costs, can be considerably compressed and quality improved before the first part is delivered.

This simple change alone is significant, and we don’t need to wait for the future to get results. As long as we go in with an understanding of what those results will be.

UX is More Than a Functional Experience, It’s a Program Experience

This year we’ve attacked the UX in Sourcing and Procurement solutions, and for e-Auctions, e-RFX, Optimization, Spend Analytics, and Procure-to-Pay in particular. This was great, but if you really understand Sourcing and Procurement, you know that it’s more than just a set of (integrated) modules with a great user experience. It’s a plan, a process, and, most importantly, a program.

Those organizations that are reasonably advanced in their sourcing journey know that the best success often comes from a category management program that starts with category identification and opportunity assessment, proceeds through a sourcing plan, and then the sourcing process, which culminates in a contract, that then flips over to Procurement which issues a purchase order, receives one or more goods receipts and invoices, issues approvals, and, finally payments. This is all part of a program that works against a project plan and one or more category goals.

This project plan also needs to be managed. Hopefully within your S2P suite, but if not, in another tool that, hopefully, integrates with the S2P suite or, in some cases, the organization’s mix of best-of-breed Supply Management applications. But, as one might surprise by now, such a tool must be immensely usable and provide a great user experience if it is to be used.

However, this is easier said than done because simply slapping a great user experience on a traditional project management tool is not going to cut it. This is because the types of programs that revolve around Sourcing, SRM, Analytics, and P2P are considerably different and require functionalities considerably above and beyond a typical project management application. In other words, slapping a category management theme onto a project management or sourcing application won’t make the grade.

This is why the next UX series produced by the doctor will be on Program Management UX, with the P2P posts co-authored by the revolutionary. So keep a watchful eye out for this one — it might help you understand some of the key functionality that should be included in your S2P platform, which many platforms are still missing today.

One Hundred and Twenty Years Ago Today …

London licenses taxicabs. Just a few short months after electric battery-powered taxicabs became available on the streets of London in August the same year.

Just goes to show that once a government succumbs to the winds of change, they are fast to regulate and tax it.

In other words, if the North American government ever truly accepts not only e-Commerce but e-Procurement, you might see a model where all major transactions have to either flow though a government site or, more likely, be immediately reported to a government site and taxes paid immediately (so they don’t lose their share of the digital pie).