Still Grumbling About DST?

It was 98 years ago today that the US Congress established time-zones and approved daylight savings time, two years after Germany and Austria-Hungary organized the first implementation, which began on April 30, 1916.

A good history of daylight savings time is over on Wikipedia. Interesting facts include it was first conceived by a New Zealander, used extensively during the world wars to conserve coal during daylight hours, and didn’t become common place until the 70’s as a result of the energy crisis.

And if you’d prefer to listen to a brief history, John Oliver did an interesting segment last year on Last Week Tonight.

LeanLinking: The Newest Contender in the SRM Arena

LeanLinking is a three year old Denmark company in the SRM space that you haven’t heard much about but should be aware of, especially if you are a smaller mid-market company, as this SaaS company has been rapidly developing their Best-of-Breed SRM solution since day one and it is now a very solid offering for a mid-market company desperate for supplier relationship management capability at a price-point they can afford (and this solution starts at a price point everyone can afford, but more on this later).

It’s certainly no competitor to HICX or State of Flux (both of which have been reviewed on this blog and both of which will soon see deep joint coverage by the doctor and the prophet over on Spend Matters Pro, more on this later) at this point, but when you compare it to the plethora of older-generation SIM solutions on the market, it’s the goose-that-laid-the-golden-egg for many smaller mid-market organizations that need something but have no real budget.

While the LeanLinking tool is essentially designed to help buyers build supplier report cards in preparation for supplier performance review, corrective action, and development meetings, monitor these scorecards over time, and track relevant aspects of supplier interaction, it’s built in such a way that encourages social interaction (which Generation Y likes and which the millennials like even more, which means it is something that is likely to get adopted). It also supports easy file-based data import (and can create complete data format descriptions for IT), which is very helpful to the mid-market, which keeps most of its data in Excel anyway (even though Excel is a damnation that should have already been exercised from the organization long ago). It also has a number of other basic capabilities you’d expect in a SRM system, including compliance tracking, contact management, and so on, but this is not the reason to take note of it.

The reason to take note of LeanLinking is that they realize that it’s hard for Procurement in most mid-size organizations to get any software budget (without a proven ROI, which, of course, can’t be proved until Procurement has the software — the never-ending catch-22) and have decided to bypass Finance (and IT) entirely by offering a consumer (buyer) subscription option starting at just £19 a month for a single buyer. This allows a buyer to expense the platform on his monthly expense report and bury the license cost until he has shown ROI (and then use that as an argument to get a department license, which will be a lot more valuable as the entire team will be able to share data, reduce duplication of effort, get funding to link in feeds from the ERP through the API, etc.).

It’s a novel concept and a novel platform. For more information, see the SM post by the doctor and the prophet as well as our in-depth Pro Analysis (membership required).

Have We Reached B2B 3.0 Yet? Part 7: Category Management Excellence

In the series so far we have:

  • defined the basics of B2B 1.0 in Part 1
  • defined the basics of B2B 2.0 in Part 2
  • defined the basics of B2B 3.0 in Part 3
  • defined the (basic) requirements for a B2B 3.0 Sourcing platform in Part 4
  • defined the (basic) requirements for a B2B 3.0 Procurement platform in Part 5
  • defined the (basic) requirements for a category management application in Part 6

in an attempt to determine whether or not we have reached B2B 3.0 yet. To that point, we haven’t reached a conclusion yet, stating that we needed to figure out just where we were in relation to where we should be and what B2B 3.0 really is. Plus, we’re still not ready to address this question because B2B 3.0 has to enable category management excellence, and this goes beyond just building the basic technical capability to support category management that was defined in our last post.

More specifically, while the requirements of:

  • multi-dimensional category taxonomies
  • global virtual “product” masters
  • centralized master data management
  • centralized risk (and compliance) management
  • supplier development and innovation program management
  • real-time on-line collaborative category plan creation

are necessary conditions for category management excellence, they are not in and of themselves sufficient conditions. Why? First of all, simply creating categories by lumping similar products into groups based on some arbitrary characteristic (such as proximity in the UNSPSC taxonomy) is not true category management, so it’s more than just taxonomy support – it’s the right taxonomy. Similarly, centralizing data in a global product master is pointless if that master cannot be used to accurately and informatively analyze category spend. Centralized risk and compliance management is good, but only if the right information gets back to the right systems that are used day-in-and-day-out by people in the field (that certainly aren’t using the Supply Management source-to-pay platform). Program management is good, but only if it is the right program being managed. And the plan has to be a strategic plan that generates value, not a tactical plan that just keeps the wheel turning.

As such, the platform also has to enable:

  • true category spend analysis
  • market analysis
  • forward-looking category requirements
  • linkages between the external customers, sourcing, and internal customers
  • deep workflow linkages with SRM and S2P

And it has to support the best practices that get result. For deep insight into what those are, we recommend the three-part series on Getting a Grip on Category Management by the doctor and the maverick over on Spend Matters+ (membership required).

Part 1: A History Lesson
Part 2: Some Basic Approaches
Part 3: Advanced Approaches

The Logistics Industry Talent Shortage Is Its Own Fault

For years we’ve been hearing about the logistics industry worker shortage which, over the years, has had the worker shortage projection increase from a little over 100K when the shortage was first reported as bad in the mid 2000s to 1.4M jobs in 2018 according to a 2014 Fortune article. Now, not all of this is a driver shortage — some of this is a shortage of talent in high tech, analytics, robotics, engineering, seasoned managers, marketers, data analysis, and even human resources — but a significant portion of this shortage *is* a driver shortage.

But why is there a driver shortage, especially when the “un”official U-6 unemployment rate in the US, which includes all unemployed persons as well as persons marginally attached to the labor force plus persons employed part time who would like to be employed full time, is still 9.9%? (If you do the math, that’s over 31M people looking for at least some work … should be easy enough to fill a few hundred thousand driver jobs, right?)

Wrong. The shortage keeps getting worse. But why?

The answer is multi-faceted but one of the big problems is the double-edged sword of perception. How the general populace outside of the logistics industry views logistics and how the workforce inside logistics views the general populace. We will discuss both of these.

The first problem is that, in the US in particular, truck driving is seen as an unglamorous blue-collar job for those who are average, lack drive, and live in a trailer park. It’s not a job for the middle class or those who are part of the respectable community. It’s hard to get truckers if you can’t even get applicants.

But this is only half the problem. The other half is that truckers believe that their brethren should be like them — middle-aged men who like to share crude jokes in old-school truck stops and who fit the stereotype of the trucking industry. If a young women were to apply for the job, she’d have to put up with funny looks and crude, disrespectful jokes, on a daily basis. This is a shame, because now that the job no longer requires brute strength, it can be done by anyone, including a woman — who probably has better time management skills, a calmer head during traffic jams, and less tarnishes on her record (which is a statistical fact).

But, as per this great article over on the BBC on why don’t women become truckers, no matter where you go in the world, it’s the same. A woman driving a lorry gets funny looks and has to listen to unfunny jokes and has to listen to things like wow, I didn’t know women could drive trucks. But a woman can like driving a truck just as much as a man. And a woman who needs a job can be just as willing to drive one as a man. Especially if it was to be again seen as a respectable profession (which first requires people in the industry to treat others with respect).

If the perception improves, the industry can attract more truckers. There might still be a worker shortage, but it would not be nearly as bad if the industry was attracting applicants of both sexes on a regular basis.