Forget Lean Sourcing, It’s Time for Mean Sourcing!

While it sounds like lean sourcing, which can be defined as a strategic purchasing approach focused on maximizing value and minimizing waste, should be the ultimate solution to strategic sourcing, especially when you consider some of the core activities in Procurement:

Value Addition: Identifying exactly what the end customer values and eliminating products, features, services, or luxury materials that do not contribute to it. (Supports Value Definition and Value Stream Mapping)
Process Standardization: Simplifying workflows to reduce bottlenecks, speed up purchasing cycles, and lay the foundations for automation. (Supports Flow)
Strategic Partnerships: Cultivating close, long-term relationships with a compact, reliable supplier base rather than continually chasing the lowest bidder to streamline the supplier network. (Supports Pull)
Continuous Improvement: Cultivating a culture where buyers regularly refine practices and reduce inventory. (Supports Pursuit Perfection)

it should be the perfect solution. But it’s not. The problem is that Lean was born out of manufacturing, not supply chain, and not sourcing and procurement. Here are the problems with Lean in Sourcing/Supply Chain:

Myopic focus: Taken to extremes, not only results in a company minimizing not only product lines, and the components used, but their focus on the product lines that consumers want. This is profitable and successful in the short term, but consumer preferences for products change over time, and if you don’t keep up with shifting consumer trends, you’ll be too late to capitalize on major opportunities. (Just like Blockbuster missed out on Netflix, Kodax on digital cameras, and Xerox on the personal computer.) And if you don’t keep an eye out on new developments, you’ll miss opportunities for new integrated components and working with engineering to save money.
Automation First Philosophy: the whole point of process standardization was to allow for consistency, transparency, productivity, error reduction, and resource optimization, not necessarily automation — but the interpretation has been to automate everything without any thought as to whether or not humans can do it better or Human Intelligence (HI!) is needed
Long Term Agreements: a long term agreement is not a partnership, it’s just a long term contract; most Procurement organizations have failed to grasp what a strategic partnership is! (Japan gets it with keiretsu, but that’s about it.)
JIT: you want JIT in terms of factory production, especially since factories have limited space so you don’t want to pull from the warehouse too fast, but it’s one thing to JIT from a local warehouse, it’s another thing to try to JIT across global supply chains filled with fragility and unpredictability and constant disruptions

In other words, in order to succeed from lean, you have to modernize Lean for Procurement and the modern world. And get a little mean while you’re at it.

while the primary focus is optimizing costs against the value stream, the secondary focus is pushing strategic partners for new designs and products that will change both the value of the customer offering as well as the cost of production and service; in other words, you’re only happy with the status quo today, you expect proposals for improvement tomorrow
constantly push for process redesign where you can reliably use unintelligent automation (with rules-based deterministic certainty and adaptive exception management) and not hallucinatory agentic / Gen-AI for true efficiency improvements; it also keeps platform/cloud costs way down even as throughput scales by orders of magnitude
shift from cost focus in agreements to co-development focus — that’s the way you form true partnerships
migrate to balanced inventory management where you keep extra stock on hand of critical/scarce/hard-to-get materials and components sufficient to cover at least the average delay time when a disruption occurs — it can also optimize logistics costs and production costs at a different economy of scale, making up for the slightly increased inventory costs (which only need to be a fraction of their traditional inventory-cost based percentage with smart inventory management)

In each of these cases you are forcing more than just the process (which your team and suppliers will think is mean), putting cost second (which the C-Suite will think is self-centered because it’s all supposed to be savings to please the board members), and putting more burden on your internal networks (which your team will think is really mean, considering your operations and consultants have spent decades shifting to suppliers).

It might seem mean, but modernizing your practices in a resilient and collaborative fashion is what it will take to thrive in today’s global landscape.

Have We Lost The Economy of Information?

Twenty years ago, we were forming GPOs and Purchasing Consortiums to take advantage of Economies of Information. Ten years ago, we were not only rolling out suites that focussed heavily on consolidating spend (and performance) data globally (with the likes of Coupa and Sievo boasting about how much spend they had managed and normalized) to take advantage of the economy of information global spend data gave us, but building best in class analytics solutions to take advantage of all of the data they (could) gather(ed).

In the age of (predictive) analytics, which preceded the current age of AI Hype, the importance of data finally started to become recognized and you had a number of startups hit the scene providing next-gen data feeds. (Near) Real-time commodity indices, market price data, risk data, company financial data, carbon data, energy rates, water rates, regional overheads, average process time, average GPO and transaction rates, average performance data, etc. Any organization that wanted to build a best-in-class should cost model, best in class performance model, etc. The information was available, there was an economy for information, and the economy of information was right around the corner.

Let’s step back and define what we meant by this. On economies of information, twenty years ago we wrote:

The consortium of the future offers the benefit of expertise more so than it offers the benefit of scale. Eventually, especially with constantly rising raw material prices, the best practices employed by a competent consortium will squeeze all of the fat out of the supplier’s margins and the best price will be obtained. Once this occurs, the consortium will use its expertise to assist its members in advancing purchasing technology, reducing wasteful consumption, and improving the application of the goods and services they purchase. Since a consortium has access to all of the knowledge of its members, it can tap this knowledge to identify the best potential suppliers with the best potential products and services to meet member needs. Furthermore, this gives it a much better chance of identifying and qualifying low risk suppliers.

In other words, with a fact-based outlook on reality, consortiums could help take Procurement to the next level. Then, when the data-stream startups made all of that same information easily available as plug and play data feeds into your suite through standard APIs, the true economy of information hit Procurement for those who wanted it and Procurement could make insight-based and fact-based decisions and get better.

But now that we’re a few years into the age of AI Hype, I believe we’ve lost the economy of information. There a few reasons for this:

we’ve replaced data feeds with LLM chatbots like clod and chat, j’ai pété and assume they have access to the same data, and, most importantly, the same ability to run predictive analytics on that data
despite claims to the contrary, the LLMs are getting worse by the day … now that the majority of data on the internet is AI generated slop, being cross fed into other LLMs, regurgitated with compounding errors, we are not only losing the core data in the tsunami of slop but the meaning of that data as well
with LLMs being cheaper than data feeds, the data feeds have been ignored, a number have went out of business, and the rest are floundering

There’s no information without actual, verified, facts and intelligent interpretation, and the majority of that has been lost in the age of AI hype.

If too many real data providers, as well as applications that deterministically and intelligently integrate and analyze real data and real facts, go out of business, there will be no solid foundations for real information, and, thus, no solid foundations for economies of information — and then we’ll be back to the Procurement dark ages.

Technology has never advanced Procurement. Only facts, data, process and decision improvement based on intelligent interpretation has.

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!)

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

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