SRM Case Studies Speak for Themselves

On Friday, we noted that State of Flux just released their eighth annual SRM survey, entitled “Digital SRM: Supplier Relationships in the New Technology Landscape”, and with it the surprising revelation that while leaders are taking steps forward, Procurement organizations as a whole might be stagnant or taking steps back! This, of course, is not a good thing because the best sourcing event in the world is useless if the plan (encapsulated in the contract) isn’t followed through and the expected savings or value never materializes. SRM is the key to realizing sourcing success, and too many companies overlook that (and wonder why 30% to 40% of identified savings never materialize).

We’ve written many posts over the years not only on the importance of SRM but how to implement it and support it with technology, so this time, instead of doing another multi-part series (which can be found in the archives), we’ll just skip to some of the case studies covered in the report and hope that maybe they are enough to convince you to get your SRM act in gear and go forward!

Telstra, a big name in Australian telecoms that is relatively unknown outside of Australia, implemented a SRM program that not only put more structure, process, and value around SRM but repositioned the perception of Procurement from a function that is only focussed on cost saving to one that works with suppliers and stakeholders toward the realization of business goals. As a result of this change in mind set, and more collaboration between different departments and suppliers, Telstra has met 10% of savings targets through increased revenues, showing that SRM can do more than save money, it can increase sales and revenues by finding ways to create new value that end customers will pay (more) for.

But that’s a small win compared to Ladbrokes who saved £18 M by taking the gamble out of SRM. Since beginning their SRM transformation in 2014, they hit a 3-year savings target of £ 18M a full year ahead of schedule, demonstrating the true savings potential of a well defined and well executed SRM project, which is huge in an industry where the majority of indirect spend has to go to a very small supplier base and where competitive bidding has little effect.

And the value of SRM has not been lost on the giants. For example, if Mars were a public company, it would be a Fortune 100 company as it regularly sells in excess of $ 33 Billion a year in food products (as it manufacturers more than just the iconic Mars bar). Even though it is a top procurement organization (that employs many leading supply management technologies and processes), it has recognized that SRM can help it get even bigger and better still, and that is part of the ambitious plan it has for SRM. While its initial SRM program is still in rollout, it’s starting to see a lot of enthusiasm from stakeholders and suppliers alike, which is a hard momentum to build in an organization of 77,000 employees with a dedicated commercial team of 1,200 individuals! Whereas most organizations might have a few dozen people on the commercial side, and maybe a few hundred, and can thus build enthusiasm for new initiatives and roll them out quickly, getting a thousand people on board is no easy feat. But the potential of SRM is such that even an entire organization can get behind an initiative that can cut costs, increase value, and even encourage innovation in the supply base.

In other words, there’s a lot of gold in them thar SRM hills, and any organization that doesn’t mine for it is leaving a lot of money and value on the table. To find out how much money and what kind of value might be left on the table, check out “Digital SRM: Supplier Relationships in the New Technology Landscape”. It’s worth your time.

Eighty Three Years Ago Today …

Edwin Armstrong, an American engineer, presented his paper A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation to the New York section of the Institute of Radio Engineers (which merged with the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1963 to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers), which described his 1933 invention of radio broadcasting using frequency modulation, now known as FM broadcasting, and LOLCats everywhere rejoiced!


I Love My FM Radio!

The US Federal Election is in 3 Days …

So, American LOLCat, who do you predict will win, given that just a few days ago the polls were so close, as per this Telegraph article that put the candidates neck-and-neck in a recent poll as a result of the resurfacing e-mail scandal? (Now, FiveThirtyEight.com still gave Hilary a 66% chance two days later, and, historically, Nate Silver is pretty accurate in his predictions, but will this election buck the trend?)


American? American? Iz Canadian Cat!

Well, I guess this explains the recent increase in the Canadian Cat population! 😉

It’s 2016! Welcome Back to the Industrial Age of SRM!

State of Flux just released their 8th annual supplier relationship management research report entitled Digital SRM: Supplier Relationships in the New Technology Landscape and while it reveals the handful of leading supply chain organizations are, or are moving towards, digitization, it reveals the majority of organizations are not only stuck in the past, but moving back towards the industrial age in their supplier (relationship) management processes. Scary!

So scary in fact, that I hope that the purchasing wizard Pete Loughlin of Purchasing Insight does a follow up to his piece on how “we are now arriving in the digital economy – turn your watch back 40 years” entitled we are moving forward in the digital economy, turn your watch back another 40 years because some of the practices many global organizations are still practicing with respect to supplier relationship management could literally be straight out of Marshall Monroe Kirkman’s classic The handling of railway supplies. Their purchase and disposition.

And I’m not joking.

Many organizations are still doing nothing more than inviting bids by public advertisement for a year’s supply and taking the advice that the pulse of the market should be continually felt and, clearly, not thinking about the importance of managing relationships after the purchase order is cut.

And while it looked like we are making progress last year, the simple facts that:

  • the number of businesses failing to invest in any SRM-related training rose from 26% in 2015 to 39% in 2016
  • 80% of companies are not achieving on-going benefits from external spending (compared to what they could be)
  • 87% of companies are still using Excel (which is essentially just an electronic version of a general ledger at most companies) as their primary SRM tool

demonstrate that, for the majority of organizations, the digital age (which for the consumer has been here for almost two decades) is still decades away.

After all, why are Purchasing Manages still panicing when they receive the 2:00 am phone call from the CFO informing them that their primary supplier in China just filed for bankruptcy and the company needs to know ASAP what the impact will be. If they had modern supplier relationship management systems, it wouldn’t take them 48 sleepless hours pouring through accounting systems, ERP systems, and spreadsheets to figure out what products come from the supplier. With modern supply management best practices it wouldn’t take them weeks to identify a new supplier and months to switch. And with good supplier relations, they definitely wouldn’t have to absorb the price doubling mandated by the receivership for continued supply of the critical product lines.

With proper supplier relationship management, you know as much about the (financial) health status of your strategic supplier as you know about your own organization. With proper supplier relationship management, you know all the products that are being provided, in what volume, in what consumer product lines they are being used, and what the impact of a stockout or termination of the line will be. With proper supplier relationship management, a company knows which other suppliers it is using that could also produce the product, how long it would take to switch, and how much it would cost. And with good relations, the last thing the supplier personnel would be comfortable with is charging their best customers an unexpected, possibly contract violating, unmitigated price increase, and would fight any suggestions by the receivership management to increase prices to any degree.

And the sad thing is there is no shortage of basic SRM systems these days. Not all are industry leading like (and not all will deliver anywhere near the value of) State of Flux’s Statess solution, but there are so many ways for an organization to enter the digital age that it’s shocking just how hard they fight to stay in the industrial age.

Hopefully, now that the results have been demonstrated for eight years in a row, they’ll finally accept SRM is not a passing fad, its the foundation for a new reality, buy in, and go for it. At the very least, hopefully they’ll check out “Digital SRM: Supplier Relationships in the New Technology Landscape” and realize what could be.

Trade Extensions is Redefining Sourcing, Part VII

In Part I, we not only told you that Trade Extensions unveiled the upcoming version of their optimization-backed sourcing platform at their recent user conference in Stockholm, recently covered by the public defender over on Spend Matters UK, but we also told you that, with it, Trade Extensions are redefining the sourcing platform.

Then, after discussing a brief history of sourcing platforms, and common limitations with most of the platforms on the market, we dived into many of the advancements Trade Extensions, despite already having one of the few third-generation sourcing platforms on the market, is making to take sourcing to the next level. Numerous usability enhancements, composable workflows, centralized fact sheets with even more powerful processing, easy repeat events, and better user and collaborator management. We also noted TESS 6 is coming with a whole new approach to in-platform analytics, but held back because we first need to provide a history of spend analytics (in Parts IV and V) and its shortcomings.

In our last post, we noted that the first thing Trade Extensions has done is to create a whole new analytics rule language which makes the definition of cleansing rules, enrichment rules, and the application of existing mappings and mapping rules a breeze. A single natural language rule with a single cleaning, enrichment, or mapping sheet can process an entire file of millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of transactions (as long as you don’t expect to view more than a million at a time). A few rules can link purchase orders, invoices, goods receipts, and payments and make it easy to see where the missing records are. Even a junior analyst can do it with ease.

But this isn’t the only significant advance that TE has made. Realizing that the hard part is the creation of an initial set of mapping rules for a new or not yet analyzed data source, they’ve created a new approach to mapping. Getting the message that, as per yesterday’s post, the traditional secret sauce isn’t always enough and a more generic recipe is needed, they’ve adopted the generic recipe outlined by the doctor and taken it to the next level. (At Trade Extensions, all amps go to 11.)

Often, when p-card data or invoice stores are the only data that is available, all the user has is a vendor (short) name and an associated receipt with abbreviated line item info or a vendor name and line item detail. And all the mappings have to be on the product description field. In this case, rules need to be built up as mappings on single words or phrases, with double word or phrase overrides for more complex mappings with further triple word or phrase overrides for sub (sub) categories, and so on. In this case the user will define a key phrase (or regular expression on a key phrase), look at the mappings, create a modification for special cases, and then move on in an attempt to identify another key phrase (that will trap a large number of transactions).

This works, but it’s a slow and cumbersome process. The small sample a user selects to try and manually identify keywords through a quick scan might not be representative, and the user might pick relatively low frequency words or phrases for the first few dozen, or hundred, rules and get nowhere fast*. So what’s the solution? AI? Definitely not. If there’s not enough data for you to always make a good decision, why would you blindly trust an algorithm (that may have been tuned on completely different data sets)?

The solution is AR (Automated Reasoning) and guided rule construction. In TESS 6, during the creation of an initial mapping file, the buyer can select a text column and the system will identify the most common words and phrases, in descending order, and guide the user through the selection and creation of appropriate mapping rules. The user will see, in a transaction file with a lot of office supplies, that “file”, “paper”, “pens”, and “boxes”, appear frequently; “copy paper”, “ballpoint pens”, and “file boxes” appear less frequently; and “xerox paper copier”, “bull pens”, and “junction boxes” appear even less frequently. Each time a general rule is created, the user can drill into the (potentially) affected transactions, see the next most common set of (sub) words and phrases, and, if necessary, easily define an override rule of higher priority, and then either drill in further, or back up to the unmapped set. The user can, very quickly, map the transactions until 90% to 99% are mapped … to an acceptable accuracy.

And, moreover, the rules are always run on a file in order of the least number of affected transactions. Since each override rule is designed to apply to a smaller set of transactions, running the defined rules in order of the least number of affected transactions means all the (super) special cases are defined first. It also means that if a rule defined first would fire first, that the initial rule was not defined as generic as the user believes it was or the nature of the data has evolved over time (and the appropriate mapping rules should be evolved as well). In addition, these mappings can be created in conjunction with one or more classification columns, such as vendor (if two different vendors use the same language to described what are two different products to the buyer) or some other categorization code (from the accounting system or the ERP).

Since many words and phrases are common, the reality is that even a million records can often be mapped 95%+ rather accurately (on a first pass) with only a few thousand rules. This can be done, by hand, in a few days, and be considerably more accurate than even the tenth pass over the data by a current generation automated mapping solution which has to be trained and corrected for weeks by the offshore data centre until enough accuracy is obtained that you could even consider looking at a spend report.

The rule language is easy. The interface is even easier. And the guided manual mapping capability puts analytics into the hands of every buyer. And since it’s all fact sheet based, the data can come from anywhere, anytime, be analyzed on the spot, and pushed anywhere it’s needed. It can come from the procurement system, be analyzed, and a subset used in an optimization scenario, or a set of award scenarios can be combined, analyzed and reported on. Data can flow back and forth with ease, and be classified and manipulated with ease.

It’s what analytics in a sourcing platform should look like. And it’s only in TESS 6.

* which is not a desirable state of affairs for spend analysis