Demand Control: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Redefinition and … Requisition Everything!

Part of good cost avoidance in Procurement is good demand management — reducing the consumption, and expenditure, on MRO, T&E, one-time buys for events, etc. We’ve covered the classic techniques in the past, which include:

Reduce: which can be accomplished by accurately predicting needs (and reducing waste) based on past use and current trends (and not maintaining volume levels on toner cartridges for a printer line being phased out)

Reuse: which can take the form of repurposing old equipment (as old developer workstations are probably just as powerful as the business user desktops used in the rest of the organization) or simply collecting unused/discarded collateral at an event and using it again next time

Recycle: where MRO inventory can be replenished by breaking down equipment (like workstations, production lines, etc.) that go out of service and harvesting still working parts that can be used in other equipment

Redefinition: where it’s not a need for more paper, but a need for second / bigger monitors so that people don’t need to print invoices / documents still submitted as (scans of) handwritten documents that can’t be OCR’d or that aren’t in a format the OCR recognizes or for tablets that allow executives to access their reports on the go

but a new type of demand management is popping up in the Procurement world, and it’s called:

Requisition Everything: where you have to literally submit a requisition to the procurement system so that all demand, and consumption, is tracked (and you can be visually guilted to control demand or utilization if you are consuming significantly more of a resource than your peer).

Now, this probably sounds very onerous to you and not worth it, but it all comes down to the implementation and user experience. At Coupa inspire, one company described an innovative method that they used to track and control demand on the factory floor (where workers would forget where they put their gloves, or realize they left them in the lunch room, and just go to the closest supply room or where workers would store extra tools or parts at their desks, just in case, leading to low stock signals and unnecessary ordering). They installed vending machines and when a worker needed something, they needed to go to the machine and punch in their id and slot number. Nothing was restricted (and no limits were placed), but every “requisition” was sent to the central Procurement system which not only updated MRO inventory but also tracked who used what, and allowed Procurement, and departments, to understand usage patterns better. This simple process reduced demand as it instilled the notion of cost consciousness and responsibility in the workers (who knew that their usage patterns could be analyzed and if they consumed considerably more than their peers, it would show), and didn’t really add any time or complexity to the process (as all the workers had to do was punch a few buttons) — especially since this process insured that the workers always knew where the stock was (which wouldn’t happen if it was moved around on the shelves).

Moreover, this technique is not limited to what fits in a vending machine — one could also use cheap RFID tags for larger items (of sufficient value) that would automatically be requisitioned when the tag left the store room (and be assigned to the right person using the employee record obtained from the entry control system when the person swipes their key card).

And, with micro-budgeting, it can be used to insure departments don’t go over their allotted new-hire budget unnoticed. New hire equipment can be kept in the secure storeroom, automatically tracked when retrieved, and automated re-orders made if stock gets too low. Plus, reusable equipment can be returned on employee departure, residual amortization amounts credited back to the micro-budget, and employees / departments who opt to use recycled equipment can be charged a deep discount against their micro-budget (and, more importantly, rewarded at annual recognition events as reuse stats can be tracked).

Now that almost everything can be automated, it might just be the time for Requisition Everything as the new method of employee-based demand management and cost control. Thoughts?

Buyer Beware! A Tax Efficient Supply Chain is Not a Tax Effective Supply Chain!

Many global consultancies with large tax practices and some supply chain capability like to preach tax efficient supply chains and how they can help you optimize your global supply chain to minimize the overall tax that you pay. As many multinationals know all too well, sometimes the biggest cost after the product cost is not the logistics cost, but the tax. Depending on where you are buying from, where you are storing your goods, and where you intend to sell the goods, you can end up paying a plethora of taxes that can add up real fast.

The country you are buying from likely imposes federal and state taxes on all sales, and might even impose municipal taxes as well (especially if there is a value-added service component). Then you have to get those goods to a port (air or sea), and guess what, there will be taxes on the transportation. Then the dock or carrier likely charges a loading service fee, which is, of course, taxed. And let’s not forget the export duties. Ka-ching! And then there’s the air or sea transportation tax (as the carrier is registered somewhere). And, of course, landing/docking unloading fees when you get back to land. And then, Free/Foreign Trade Zone be damned, when you (finally want to) import those goods, import duties! Ka-ching! Then you have local transportation costs, taxed, and local warehouse costs, taxed, and even final transportation costs to the store or consumer, taxed again. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. And if you have to pay all those taxes, you might as well just source from the closest factory because, regardless of how much more their unit cost is, we guarantee it will be cheaper.

However, if you have what the tax consultants call a tax efficient supply chain, then, because you are theoretically sourcing from countries you are not doing (much) business in (or selling in), then your organization is not responsible for most of these taxes, and the rest of the taxes, through clever classification and trade agreements, are minimized.

But just because you are not responsible for a tax doesn’t mean that you don’t have to pay the tax up front (and then file for reimbursement later). In many countries, unless you have an exemption id to provide the seller or [logistics, etc.] service provider (which may or may not exist or which might only be granted to non profits, etc.), the seller / service provider still has to collect the tax. And if it takes six, nine, or even twelve months to recover the tax, this is not exactly tax efficient.

First of all, your working capital is tied up, and there is a cost to having this tied up, which is the greater of what it costs you to borrow that working capital from your lender, the average early payment discount you are giving up, or the investment opportunity your Finance department has at its disposal (through factoring, short term GICs, etc.).

Secondly, there is a cost associated with the recovery of that tax. It will consist of at least the time required to submit the paperwork for recovery, and fees associated with submitting the paperwork for recovery, and, if the process is so involved or onerous that you really need a best-of-breed software solution to help you, the cost of that solution. (Note that you might need multiple such solutions, as many as one for each country you have to to through a submission process as some countries might only certify in-country vendors to connect to their e-document submission systems or accept, without [mandatory] audit, documents produced by an in-country provider.)

Third, and most important, the supply chain is not cost efficient if the cost of minimizing the tax ends up creating a considerably more dispersed supply chain that ends up significantly increasing the logistics cost, and, as an effect, the overall cost. Tax efficiency is supposed to minimize overall cost and cannot always be considered on its own.

In other words, unless the consultant creates a model that takes all of this into account (and many don’t due to the overall complexity of such a model), the “tax efficient” supply chain is not a “tax effective” supply chain and is not necessarily one you want to pursue.

How does the doctor evaluate a Sourcing Suite?

In our last post, we asked how do you evaluate a sourcing suite and pretty much said that you start with the Spend Matters Solution Map RFI whose creation is currently being led by the doctor in his role as Consulting Analyst for Advanced Supply Management Technologies. Which leaves the question, how does the doctor evaluate a Sourcing Suite?

The short answer is extensively and rigorously. The forthcoming solution map for Sourcing will evaluate vendors across the following categories of functionality:

  • Opportunity Identification and Management
  • Project Definition and Management
  • Supplier Portal Functionality
  • Spend Analysis
  • e-Negotiation: RFX and e-Auction
  • Optimization
  • Contract Management and Analytics
  • Execution Management across Performance, Risk, and Compliance
  • Core Technology Platform, Stack, and Delivery Methodology
  • Configurability and UX

In addition, vendors are also evaluated on:

  • company stability and growth capability
  • service capability
  • customer references [which will degrade in value 10% a quarter unless refreshed by the customer]

And the goal will be to flush out the true platform (and vendor) strengths and capabilities for you as a buyer to help you figure out what vendors should be on your shortlist when the time comes to acquire new, or upgraded, Sourcing functionality.

So, in short, the doctor evaluates sourcing suites against the full breadth of functionality required to maximize your value as a strategic buyer. No solution areas should be left unexplored in a good evaluation.

How Do You Evaluate a Sourcing Suite?

Good question, and one that both customers and vendors are going to have to answer very, very soon. As per our post on What Makes a Sourcing Suite, a decade ago, it was pretty simple. If you had decent e-Negotiation support with some document management and reporting, you could claim a Sourcing suite. It might have been a bit of a stretch, but that was the accepted baseline. If you had contract management and some basic spend analysis, then you were best-of-breed. If you had basic project management or category guidance, you were awesome. And if you had optimization, you were a true market leader and way ahead of the pack (as even the majority of The Famed Hackett 8% weren’t there yet).

But that was then, and this is now. These days, if you are a vendor and you don’t have basic Source-to-Contract [S2C], which consists of decent spend analysis, extensive e-Negotiation (customizable RFX and e-Auction), and Contract Management, jacked up with Supplier Information Management, you’re not even a contender (and shouldn’t even get in the ring). Plus, given that many providers offer some project/workflow management, expert driven category guidance, bill of materials support for direct sourcing, [deep] contract analytics [which is not the same as contract management], deep SRM (Supplier Relationship Management, which goes far beyond 1st generation SIM and 2nd generation SPM), Contract/Award Performance Management, Compliance Management, Risk Evaluation and Management, and even true Optimization (as well as other non-core S2C related offerings that they expect to bring them market share), you need more than just a core to compete.

So how do you, as a customer, evaluate an offering? The answer is, on each and every product component that should be there, across every core and supplementary feature that is required and/or adds value. And yes, that’s a lot. But fortunately for you, Spend Matters and Sourcing Innovation have teamed up to help you. As you may know, with the departure of the anarchist (who has since ended up at Coupa as Thought Leader), the doctor took over Sourcing and Supplier Management as Consulting Analyst. But now that the medic is on-board and handling standard sourcing and supplier management as well as business / market analysis, the doctor is now Consulting Analyst for Advanced Supply Management Technologies, including Advanced Sourcing, and putting his PhD (in computer science) and technical chops to good use (putting vendors through the wringer on a regular basis — and, to this end, has co-authored 45 deep dive vendor reviews over the past year, which, if you’re counting, puts most analysts at the big boy firms to shame).

As part of this new Consulting Analyst role, the doctor will be leading the Solution Map efforts for Sourcing and Spend Analysis and co-leading the Solution Map efforts for Supplier Management (with the prophet) and Contract Management and Analytics (with the maverick), as these collectively cover advanced sourcing, advanced analytics of a traditional kind, advanced metrics and process management, and advanced analytics of a semantic kind. Sourcing Innovation and Spend Matters are in the process of finalizing the RFIs now, which will go out over the next week to leading vendors in these categories, and in July you’ll see multi-persona analyses of all the major vendors.

As with the Procurement Solution Maps, the core of the RFIs and the evaluation criteria will be made fully public, as well as the high-level analysis of each vendor across all relevant categories and functions for each of the covered areas. And you will have a robust, completely vendor independent, baseline to evaluate perspective vendors for inclusion in your technology RFIs going forward. And unlike the vendor created RFI templates that used to proliferate and give certain vendors an unfair advantage (as those vendors would always score high on their own feature-rich templates, whether or not the majority of the market needed those features), no vendor is going to have an edge here. First of all, no vendor does everything. Secondly, any vendor that rates themselves higher than a 3 (on a 5-point scale) on any function is gonna have some serious ‘splaining to do as a vendor can only truly innovate in a few areas (and deserve a 4), and there is only one best-in-class vendor against any function, and, thus, only one best-in-class vendor that can actually win business on that function alone (and deserve a 5). Since the doctor is known for being [the] ruthless [honey badger* of the space], these RFIs have been designed so that an average best-in-class vendor will score a 3 [rounded up]. The idea is to fairly evaluate each vendor and push the market forward. And while a slight majority of vendors will likely have been Spend Matters customers over the past year, the number of vendors that have had a relationship with SI over the past year will be around the 10% mark if all of the invited vendors participate, so there should be no doubt in your mind that these will be objective and independent weightings that you should be able to trust and use as a foundation for your evaluations.

So please encourage your potential vendors to participate when they get the RFIs and maybe even go so far as to tell them that you expect them to participate if they want to be considered in further technology buys from you. Because if they truly are a BoB solution, or approaching a BoB solution, if they vendor is not included in the first round, they will definitely be included in the second round.

*Youtube it. (Best video NSFW.)

Supply Management Technical Difficulty … Part VI

In this post we conclude our initial 7 part (that’s right, 7, because Part IV was so involved, we had to do 2 posts) series on supply management technical difficulty, focussing on the source to pay lifecycle. We did this because many vendors, with last generation technology, have been touting their own horn with a “market leading” offering that was market leading a decade ago, but, due to lack of innovation on their part, is now only average. Moreover, much of what used to be challenging in this space is now, in the words of the spend master, so easy a high school student with an Access database could do it, and that ain’t far from the truth. Unless the platform comes with an amazing user experience (and the reality is most don’t), a lot of basic functionality can be accomplished using open source technology and an Access database.

So far, we’ve covered the basics of sourcing, the basics of procurement, supplier management, spend analysis, and (invoice to) payment, and while each have their challenges, the true technical challenges are few and far between comparatively speaking. Today we are rounding out the series with the true, hidden, technical challenges that you don’t see. And there aren’t many of those either, but they are doozies.

Technical Challenge: Large-Scale Scalability

If you’re selling an application that is only going to be used, by a few dozen, and maybe a few hundred, users, scalability isn’t an issue. An average low-end server with eight cores, 64 GB of RAM, and a few TB of solid state storage should be more than enough to support this user base even if the application is shoddily coded by junior developers who cobbled most of it together cutting and pasting code from SourceForge.

But if we are talking about a true e-Procurement system that is going to be rolled out to everyone across a Global 3000 organization with the authority to make a requisition or spot buy, this will be tens of thousands of users, serviced by hundreds of Procurement professionals doing daily spot buys and MRO inventory management and dozens of strategic buyers and analysts looking for opportunities and conducting complex events using optimization and deep data mining, an average high end server is not going to do the trick. Multiple server instances are going to be needed, but they are all going to have to work off of the same data store, and a significant amount of this data is going to need to be accessed and updated in real time, so it’s not just a matter of replicating the database and allowing the users to go to town. While some data can be replicated for analysis, MRO data has to always be updated in real time to insure requisitions are filled from on-site inventory or warehouse inventory first. This requires a complex data management scheme, fifth degree normalized design, real-time clustering, and so on and so on and so on on the data side as well as intelligent request routing on the application side as you can’t route all requests evenly (as 10 inventory look up requests are a lot less processor intensive then the creation of 10 detailed category reports).

Technical Challenge: User Experience

While the creation of just about any modern user interface component is a piece of cake using modern language libraries, there’s a big difference between user interface and user experience. And the most slick user interface in the world is useless if the process it forces the user through is kludgy and cumbersome and takes three times as long to accomplish a simple task as it should. A great user experience is one that requests minimal input, involves minimal steps, and, most importantly, involves minimal time and effort on behalf of the user. It takes context into account, known information into account, organizational processes and (approval) rules into account, etc. and makes it so that a user only has to do as little as possible and is in and out of the application as fast as possible so that she can focus on her primary task. If she’s not a strategic buyer or a spend analyst, she shouldn’t be spending her days in the tool — she should be spending her days doing her job. This is what many applications miss. A truly good software tool is elegant. In our space, even today, many aren’t.

So, hopefully by now you have a good understanding of what is truly difficult and what you should be looking for when evaluating a tool. There is still an intense amount of complexity that needs to be overcome in a modern application, but any application that does not tackle the complexity outlined in this series is not truly modern. Keep this in mind and you’ll make great selections going forward.