Eved: Events Demystified

Eved, an event commerce company, was started to fill one of the holes in big organization spend management — event spend management. In many organizations, including those that use Ariba, event spend management can be a Million-dollar black hole — per event! For example, all most sourcing platforms can do is cut an all-inclusive PO to the event management vendor and process an all inclusive invoice, which could just be an invoice for venue, food, and services. Not much visibility or control into event spend management!

Without good expense management, companies are missing out on opportunities to impact millions of dollars of meeting and event spend because of disparate, disconnected systems and manual processes. This results in, among other inefficiencies, missed sourcing opportunities, extreme workflow inefficiencies, budget overage and spend leakage, and compliance (policy) risk.

However, with the Eved platform, the organization’s sourcing platform can cut a PO to be managed by the Eved platform, which can give fine-grained spend visibility into all event costs, track, and limit them, to a budget. The Eved platform has evolved over time to meet the needs of end-to-end event spend management including, but not limited to, budget management, program management, schedules, purchase orders, services, invoices, receiving, and other event-related requirements.

It also supports the full event sourcing process including, but not limited to, sourcing, supplier management, award, contract, change orders, invoices, reconciliation, and payment — capturing all of the necessary data for analytics and tax management. It also handles registration, attendee management, and related activities. The expense reconciliation is in real time, budget updates are real time, purchasing policies can be created and enforced, and the platform can be integrated with your accounts payable processes.

Both the sourcing process and the scheduling process can be governed using calendar-based program management. Just like good sourcing requires a good project plan with milestones, good event management also requires a solid timeline, with dates that often cannot slip in order to ensure a successful event. The platform allows milestones, tasks, and change orders to be tied to calendar dates to ensure that events get finished on time and that an event manager can see what is due to today and what is coming up. In addition, the integrated user-assigned color coding allows the event manager to see what types of tasks are (coming) due.

There are also strengths in collaborator management, statements of work, analytics, Ariba integration, and payment (including EvedPay that, through a Merchant partnership, allows event managers to use pre-paid debit cards that can be tracked through the platform using a p-Card type system). For more details on these strengths, and some of the unique Eved platform offerings, check out the recent Pro series by the doctor and the prophet over on Spend Matters Pro (membership required) [Part I]. The insights provided in this piece, particularly those straight from the prophet, are worth the long multi-part series read.

Technological Sustentation 81: Social Media

While there may be a dirty dozen of risk categories that we need to address in order to adequately address the Procurement Damnations we have willingly placed ourselves in as we try to collectively forge a new frontier, the largest category of risk that we need to address is that of Technology. Almost one fifth of all damnations that plague us fall into the technology category. This is the latest technology damnation that we are going to address. Even though it’s difficult.

As we mentioned when we penned the original damnation series, social media might be the most damning of them all. Besides the obvious facts that we collectively as a society waste enough time on a single video to double the size of Wikipedia (Source), that social media is literally making us stupid (Source), and that every marketer and their dog is doing their best to convince you that your company has to be on every social network in existence (including the dozen that are literally here today and gone tomorrow as Facebook and Twitter have pretty much won the social media war in the English speaking world for the time being), there is the simple fact that social media takes more than it gives.

So how do we survive? How do we deal with the fact that despite the fact that social media was designed for people to be social with each other, and not for businesses to sell wares to consumers, and certainly not for businesses to sell goods to each other, we are constantly bombarded by social media firms that tell us we can use social media to conduct important, strategic, operations.

And if having to deal with the outside pressure isn’t enough, you are constantly bombarded with requests from marketing for information about your supply chain efficiency, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, or other operations and practices that can be used to boost corporate image, brand reputation, or product differentiation on these outlets. You’re working hard to define and implement proper category management techniques on dozens of strategic and high-value categories but all marketing cares about is which supplier will get the organization the most free press, whether the “in vogue” corporate social responsibility practice of the day is getting enough attention, or if the new product being sourced will have enough bell-and-whistle features to allow for one dozen unique messages for each social media channel of interest. It’s inane, insane, and both.

And then, to make matters worse, rather than use your supplier portal, your suppliers want to message you on the social network they are signed into 24/7, your partners are checking the never updated Facebook company page instead of the official contact directory, and eliminated vendors keep messaging your organization’s Facebook and Twitter accounts asking marketing why they are no longer being considered, rather than read the detailed explanation in the vendor management portal you provided them.

So What Can You Do?

1. Refuse to answer meaningless marketing inquiries and instead change the conversation.

When marketing asks if the new product being sourced will have lots of features to wrap messaging around, simply state that the product is being sourced to corporate specifications, and that full details will be provided.

When they ask about CSR practices, simply inform them that you have vetted all suppliers using a third party and that they should read the appropriate reports.

And when they ask if you use twitter, simply point out that is their job. Don’t get distracted.

2. Adopt Procurement tools with integrated messaging, message boards, and social media like features in the communication portal.

If your Procurement portal gives the suppliers what they want, then they won’t be constantly asking to message you on Facebook, Twitter, or the platform de jour.

3. Help Marketing select the right CRM and social media monitoring platform.

Even though it’s the last platform you should touch, it is marketing’s livelihood – so it’s critical to make sure that if they are going to be using such a platform, that they are at least using the best one available. And if you can find one that meets all of their needs, maybe they will spend all of their time on it instead of bothering you.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it will at least allow you to survive, if you are strong enough. (Because only the strong survive.)

Organizational Sustentation 60: Human Resources

In our damnation series, we noted how an overly process driven human resources department free of logic and common sense, can ruin the best and worst of plans and inspire your best talent to run to the hills and run for their lives.

Why do human resources (HR) often bring damnation to Procurement? Simply put,

  • They exacerbate talent tightness. (Societal Damnation 51)
  • They drive talent away. (Societal Damnation 50)
  • They think they know what Sourcing is.

HR will insist on owning the talent recruitment process. Now, it’s true that, in most organizations, HR should own the process because most departments wouldn’t know how to go to market for talent if the market came to them and bit them on the thigh like a boghog of NowWhat, but a good Procurement organization knows how to go to market for talent. In fact, a good Procurement organization knows how to go to market for everything the organization needs, and, more importantly a good Procurement organization knows what defines talent to the organization. So a HR department that keeps a Procurement organization at bay that can help is not a good thing.

Especially since the way that many non-best in class HR organizations go about the talent hunt. They blast a poorly written advertisement with a list of requirements no living or dead human can meet across multiple channels, collect hundreds, if not thousands of resumes, and then go through a last-man standing vetting process. They create a ridiculous checklist, a set of arbitrary rules for checking the boxes (because they don’t understand what the boxes are), and then eliminate every resume that doesn’t check every box. They then interview the last men, or women, standing, eliminate those that they feel won’t be a good organizational fit (based on gut instinct), and pass you the candidates that remain. A process guaranteed to eliminate a large number of good candidates, if not all of them.

So what can you do?

1. Define what you really need, as general as possible.

Example. In IT, you need five years doing object oriented software development, with good knowledge of Java, not five years of pure Java. In logistics, it’s big rig training and two years of heavy machinery experience, not two years of commercial sector. Military is just fine. Etc. Don’t make it impossible for the best candidates to even qualify.

2. Help in the selection of resume evaluation technology.

You don’t want dumb “check the box” forms and dumber exact phrase matching technology. If resumes have to be automatically evaluated, you want modern semantic technology that understands coder, developer, and programmer are the same thing and driver and big rig operator are the same thing. You want advanced profile match calculations and not dumb guesstimations.

3. Look at the big picture

Look at references and connections. Yes, references from employees are good, but some are going to recommend everyone who will give them a name just for a chance to get that referral bonus. Connections are even better. If someone is applying for a developer job, how many developer connections are in their business networks, and how many recommend them — even if they work for a competitor. It’s what they know, who can confirm it, and what they want. Do they just want a job, or do they want to make a difference. And if you want someone who will make a difference, that is the person you want. HR probably doesn’t care about any of this, but you do, so stand your ground.

Millions Saved. Pennies Spent. Why Won’t They Learn?

Trade Extensions recently released a new set of case studies chronicling just half a dozen sourcing projects it did over the last couple of years for its fortune 500 clients that chronicled, on average, savings of 10% or more which ranged from 500K on a 5.5M category to 28M on a 200M category. All of these companies saved tens of millions (or more) and only spent in the six figure range for the Trade Extensions solution, which means for every penny it saved a dollar.

It is not just the magnitude of the savings that is significant though – it is the breadth of the impact. The air freight example not only identified a savings potential of 42%, with a realized savings of 21% (when the company took risk, performance, and preferred vendors into account), but also identified a scenario which improved service levels and reduced risks while delivering 21% savings.

The compliance reporting example helped an organization that, due to the scale of it’s operations, took five days to analyze the output of its Transportation Management System (TMS), reduce its retrospective analysis time to a proactive operations step that automatically executed in 30 minutes or less, and allowed the organization to, for the first time, ensure its product movements were consistent with the awarded contract scenario.

In the full truck load and global packaging examples, the companies were able to rationalize the supply bases by 25% to 40% while reducing cost and at least maintaining service levels and risk (if not increasing service and decreasing risk).

But yet these examples are rare. Every year many organizations as large, or larger, than these continue to spend close to, if not, seven figures on their first generation sourcing or source to pay platforms while generating savings that, instead of being in the 10% or more range, are in the 2% to 3% range, which means that the organization is essentially spending dollars to save dollars — which does not make good ecnoomic sense. Especially when a modern optimization (backed sourcing) platform can always be run along side existing supply management system and used as appropriate to generate 3X to 5X the savings and value than the organization would otherwise obtain.

So while the leaders have learned, why won’t the laggards learn?