The Lost Art of Service Management

In the age of Services-as-Software, Agentic AI, and BS AI Employees, service management has officially become a lost art!

By definition, a service is an act or work performed by a person or group that benefits another. The key word is “person“. Not software. Not machines. Not fake AI. People with Human Intelligence (HI!).

Since service management is the systematic practice of creating, designing, delivering, supporting, and managing the lifecycle of services an organization provides to its customers, that means that the art of service management is using Human Intelligence (HI!) to appropriately design, create, deliver/perform, and support the outcome of the services the organization offers to its customers. Human Intelligence (HI!), NOT AI.

More importantly, it’s the art of:

creating services that will provide value
designing delivery methods that will be efficient and effective for the provider and the customer in the delivery of the value
delivering the services with a human touch
supporting the customer through the delivery when they need help fulfilling their end of the service (such as providing data, organizing meetings, making decisions, opening up systems, etc.)

And, generally, delighting the customer with the service by actually providing value. Something that can only be done by an intelligent human that understands what the customer actually values. And that’s a return on their money. It’s not just a strategy in a powerpoint deck (and certainly not one created by hallucinatory Gen-AI), a GPO that takes 10% off of insignificant tail spend, or a flip the switch system integration with no training, ongoing monitoring, or project assurance.

It’s a step-by-step strategy with implementation support at each step; a self-serve Procurement process setup and managed by the GPO in a manner that doesn’t require Procurement to need them on a day-to-day basis; and on-going onboarding training, adoption monitoring, and support process to ensure the system is used, tested, and improved by the daily users as soon as key functions come online.

Service management is becoming a lost art just as art itself is becoming lost in the age of unintelligent Gen-AI. Like art, service management requires humanity to get it right. By definition, humanity is something systems do not have!

It’s Time To Put An End to Business Spend Management!

Coupa may have built their Billion dollar business on it, but the time for Business Spend Management (BSM) is at an end!

Spend Management may have been the business strategy and philosophy that leaders practice and followers fail to understand according to THE PROPHET (who penned it two decades ago), but that was then, and this is now.

While spend management wasn’t supposed to be just cost management, but instead an incremental change that represents a new type of thinking, a way of taking integrated approaches to not just procurement, but all aspects of non-revenue generating operations and a way of thinking about your global supply chain strategy that would reduce costs, improve processes, and increase profits, that’s not what it became.

Spend Management became a fancy term for cost reduction (and, for the most part, that didn’t include cost avoidance), and even when optimization was used, the objective was always price. The majority of analytics focussed on spend, and even when process analytics were run, they were always framed in terms of cost and savings if automation was increased and/or process time decreased. Even multi-objective RFPs were primarily weighted on price, if they were weighted on anything else at all once basic supplier, product, and/or service requirements were met.

And now, in the age of AI (hype), all of the agentic / BS AI Employee offerings are focussed on offering you solutions to your Procurement problems that will reduce overall cost (base cost, human cost, processing cost, etc.). Cost, cost, cost.

But, for as long as it has existed, that’s never what Procurement was about. The goal might be to keep costs down, but the point of Procurement is the acquisition of a good or service. Supply, NOT Spend. Now, it’s true that the spend has to be less than what an individual would pay on his or her own to acquire the product or service or, as per Coase, there’s no reason for the business to exist, but if the business can’t acquire any products or service to allow them to offer a product or service for sale, the spend doesn’t matter.

That’s why BSM (where the “B” doesn’t necessarily mean “Business”) needs to end. It’s time to return to supply management, with guarantee of supply (not minimization of spend) at the forefront. This means a focus on risk minimization, production management, logistics management, trade management, and other variables that contribute to assurance of supply (and prevention of disruption). Costs can only be optimized once all of these other factors are taken care of.

This is the only way to procure in today’s volatile times, and, moreover, the only way to control cost. Real spend management is not just minimizing unit costs, transportation costs, and other purchase prices, but reducing operational costs across the board. You’re not reducing costs if the organization has to buy 30% off of contract because of delays, disruptions, and defects. And you’re definitely not reducing costs if you have to constantly expedite shipments, buy from alternate sources of supply at higher prices, or lose considerable revenue due to stock outs while paying for warehouse space / retail space.

It’s optimizing human intelligence against dumb automation to make sure processes are optimized, exceptions are quickly processed, risks mitigated to the extent possible, and disruptions detected and addressed as soon as they arise.

It’s Supply Management. (Not Spend Management.)

The New and improved Triple Lucky Sourcing Innovation Cascading Mega-Map … Now With 33% More Vendors!

7EB V1 Edition ^{(c) 2026-09-27}

Still totally useless, but still slightly less useless than every other logo map that clogs your feed!

1. Every vendor url still valid and active as of 3 days ago! (w.r.t. posting date)

2. Every vendor logo is clickable and takes you to a live site (as of 3 days ago w.r.t. posting date)!

3. Every vendor is mapped to a meaningful category as of the last date of analyst investigation!^*

So what’s the point? Click here for the full explanation that has been moved to the end of the post (as it’s the same as last time).

In summary, let this be proof that there are a lot of logos in our ProcureTech+ space and that, if you want logos, you got logos!

888 of them!

Enjoy!

			Source-to-Pay
Souce-to-Contract			Procure-to-Pay				Intake-to-Orchestrate
Sourcing + SXM + CLM	Sourcing + Analytics	SXM + Analytics	e-Procurement	Invoice-to-Pay / AP	Expenses	Payments (& P-Cards)	Training
Sourcing + SXM	Sourcing + CLM	SXM + CLM		Sourcing	SXM	CLM	Analytics
Direct Supply Chain	Cyber Monitoring	ESG / Carbon	Marketplaces	Legal	Marketing	SaaS	Intelligence
	(3^rd Party) Risk Mangement	Contingent Workforce Management	Hospitality	(e-)Document Exchange	AI Procurement Offerings	AI Frameworks (Generic)

Source to Pay

Source to Contract

Sourcing + SXM + CLM

SXM + CLM

Sourcing + CLM

Sourcing + SXM

Sourcing & Analytics

SXM & Analytics

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Sourcing

Supplier Management (SXM)

Analytics

Procure-to-Pay (P2P)

eProcurement

Invoice-to-Pay (I2P) / Accounts Payable (AP)

EXPENSE

PAYMENTS & V/P-CARDS

Intake-Manage-Orchestrate

ESG/Carbon Scope 3

Cyber Monitoring

Direct Supply Chain

Legal

Marketing

SaaS

Training

MarketPlaces

Intelligence

Risk

Contingent Workforce Management

Hospitality

OOCument eXchange

AI Procurement Offerings

AI Frameworks (Generic)

To again make it utterly clear you can’t select a vendor based on a random grouping of logos on a map, even if they are categorized! (And especially if the solution has not been human reviewed and verified!)

Not even if the map categorizes the vendors by market size, industry, and/or geography. Those are just proxies for organizational spend, solution needs and cultural requirements. Not every mid-market manufacturing plant in the USA is the same.

The only way to select a good vendor is to follow a proper assisted process and engage an expert who understands what vendors are out there to identify the right vendors to invite to the RFP process once your true needs have been identified.

Especially considering the true number of vendors out there is many times more than what an average big analyst firm will tell you, especially when they restrict their recommendations to their paying clients in their maps, and multiples of what an average big consultancy will tell you, especially when that consultancy only knows their partner solutions (that they need to maintain significant focus on to maintain their preferred partner status).

So, what’s the value?

As we explain in detail in the real value of the sourcing innovation mega map, it shows you

why you need proper proper assisted solution selection (and we can’t stress this enough)
how dynamic the space is:
- 2 more companies are gone in just 8 months
- 8+ companies have been acquired or renamed
- there are just too many options for an average buyer to make sense of
quite a few vendors ARE NOT GOOD (for you at least) by statistics alone

P.S. Generally, logo size means nothing — logos were scaled to be readable. However, in this 7EB V1 preliminary version of the 2027 Mega Map, new vendor logos are 25% larger. (These new vendor logos will be scaled back in size 25%, or all the other logos scaled up 25%, in the final version, likely released in January after the annual culling when walking dead vendors typically go into liquidation or shutdown or acquired vendors get full absorbed into the acquiring company.)

^* Some vendors haven’t been reviewed in a few years, so offerings may be more extensive than what was originally offered, or may have changed focus. (One analyst can only review so many vendors a year!)

Your ProcureTech Initiative Will Fail

Preamble: The Procurement Knowledge Devolution

So, What Makes A Procurement Pro?

There are many articles on this issue across all Procurement sites, social media sites where Procurement Pros gather, and even major FinTech publications. And have been for years.

If you search for the skill sets that make a Procurement Pro, you’ll likely find a list that contains ten or more of the following 30 (thirty) skills:

strategy
tactics
supply management
negotiation
contract management
great listening
convincing speech
teamwork / team management / team motivation / team spirit
problem solving
spend and process analysis
big picture planning and delegation skills
supply chain and cross-functional awareness
leadership
high EQ (emotional quotient)
high TQ (technical quotient)
process management
should-cost modelling and price analysis
supplier selection
supplier management
relationship management
market research
risk management
stakeholder management
collaboration
strategic sourcing
regulatory knowledge
demand planning
customer service orientation
sustainability
decision making

And while classically this was a pretty good foundation, in this unstable world full of marketing hype, some new skills are needed and some old skills need upgrading. The following five in particular come to mind:

lie detector and hype buster: every vendor lies, and your ability to detect the extent of their lies is key — what’s the quality on the delivered goods vs the sample, how much can they actually produce in a given window, how long will delivery actually take, can they really afford to maintain the quality at the price they bid; and when it comes to software vendors — how many of their claims are really in production, how long will implementation and integration really take, and how responsive will their support actually be; and when it comes to AI marketing, they cut through the hype to what the tech can really do, which is a fraction of what the vendor claims
foundational mastery: a true Procurement Pro is one that understands the function and core processes at the core and can execute them all with nothing more than a pencil, paper, and telephone; in a world dependent on tech, a true tech master is one that understands how to get by without the tech; only that person can master the use of the tech in their daily job as well as keep moving forward when the tech inevitably fails; for all its power, a single EMP or massive grid failure can take down a data center and all your tech with it (and a massive solar flare, which happens every few hundred years can manage that)
crisis predictor: it’s not just risk management, it’s global situation monitoring and crisis prediction — will escalating political tensions result in conflict, war, or border closings; will severe weather or drought conditions limit or cut off trade routes; will rapidly rising oil prices or insurance rates result in a number of critical carrier bankruptcies; etc.
change master: the core of Procurement never changes; it’s purpose today is the same purpose it was when formal trade first began thousands of years ago; but the processes, mechanisms, and technologies that are used to conduct it are in constant flux; as are the availability of sources, partners, channels, and customers as many economic and geopolitical factors are in constant flux; a Procurement Pro needs to be able to constantly adapt and regularly do so mid-process
terminator: every business and department is great at starting things, but no one ever wants to end things — sometimes the best thing you can do is end things that are taking up too much time, energy, or money compared to the value they are delivering

In other words, the classic skills are a good start, but the modern world, and the business environment that has evolved, demands another layer on top of those classical skills to thrive.

Is your Procurement Leader ready?

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Aug
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

7EB V1 Edition (c) 2026-09-27

7EB V1 Edition ^{(c) 2026-09-27}