Originally published on August 17, 2026 on Supply Chain Matters, your #1 source for supply chain insights!
Good Ol’ Products
For those of you of the older set who liked your old cars, your old appliances, and your old green screen software because they were better, you were right.
Good ol’ American made analog cars with no electronics that you could jack up and fix in your garage and keep on the road for a million miles. If you could get the parts they were better than modern electric with semi-autonomous driving that doesn’t work as advertised, with batteries that explode in intense heat, and doors that lock you in when the software auto-reboots for reasons beyond your control.
Good ol’ American made fridges, stoves, and washing machines that didn’t glitz out when they lost internet connectivity, break down regularly, and provide you with an unrepairable problem as only factory certified repair people not in your area could fix them.
Legacy Software
Most importantly, good ol’ green screen software that literally kept your supply chains working for decades without fail, compared to modern software suites that usually takes years to fully deploy and integrate. They don’t do half of what the vendor claims, and, by the time all the additional module upgrades, change orders, integrations, and service-based consulting engagements (as you try to figure out and get value from the software) are added up, fails to deliver on most of the promised value.
Before the rise of SaaS in the mid 2000s, big corporations often ran the same legacy MRP/ERP software for decades. They kept supply chains running smooth and rarely had the very-public supply chain disasters we’ve been seeing for the past 20 years.
Since most greybeards from that era have retired, few remember this.
We may not have had Procurement as a separate software category until FreeMarkets launched BidWare in ’95, but companies still did it with ERP/MRP software.
And up until they retired, many procurement and supply chain pros still preferred the old green screen software (and cried when they had to say bye, bye monochrome UIs because, while the new SaaS software was slick, the functionality was minimal, the integration was shoddy, and the process was disconnected).
This last point is the important one. This is why, for those of us who are Gen-X age (or older), everything new is fundamentally cr@p, even if it’s pretty good and we use it everyday.
When you create something to execute part of a process from a disconnected viewpoint, it never quite works.
It might work super well at its task, but when it typically does so at the expense of the rest of the process, it just makes everything worse for the organization overall.
Outsourcing to a low-cost country saves big on unit costs (due to currency exchange, low labour cost, etc.), but puts logistics costs through the roof as well as increasing disruption, reducing quality, and increasing management complexity. That lesson was really brought home during the global wide Covid pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
Optimizing network structure and re-allocating warehouses and shipping lanes to historical buys and then locking in long-term contracts reduces costs in the short term, but as the supply base evolves, lanes need to change, and carriers go out of business. It just greatly increases costs in the long run as warehouses sit half empty, volume is not met for FTL rates and discounts, and new warehouses need to be rented on different routes. And so on.
Your fully controlled supply chain goes from source to sink — from the source of the product you are buying to the customer you are delivering to, and the full supply chain for a product starts at the raw material and ends at the end consumer or business user. If you don’t at least consider your fully controlled supply chain end-to-end on every buy, you are making an ill-informed inferior decision.
That’s why, before this new age of fancy (Gen-AI) SaaS, companies did just fine on monochrome UI and old-style MRP and ERP. They didn’t have optimization, real-time visibility, or AI, but considering that forecasting algorithms haven’t improved much since the late 70s, they knew how to model costs and negotiate, and how to properly advise the organization on pricing consumers could pay and could keep them in business.
Back in the days of functional integration, everything worked … and there were few surprises.
Today, without it, everything works, but it doesn’t, and the supply chain doesn’t flow without expensive surprises that must be resolved daily.
The railroad barons had it right — if you want it to work, you need (vertical) integration. However, it doesn’t have to be real world vertical integration. You don’t need to own everything, form your own Zaibatsu, or even practice Keiretsu since that integration today can be on the virtual source-to-sink supply chain twin, and not the physical one.
You just need applications that can analyze the impact at least across your fully controlled supply chain before you make a decision and ensure the decision you make is the optimal one for the organization, not just any specific task or function. You must move beyond the business and supply chain functional siloes and consequent islands of data that did not have an overall process context.
And in our world, that means Procurement needs to fold back into supply chain end-to-end decision making, taking a leadership role — not stand apart and make bad decisions that logistics and operations need to deal with later.
If you want to know how that should happen, read our joint series on Direct Sourcing that Bob Ferrari and I penned here on how Standard Sourcing Solution’s Don’t Work for Direct.
And, for those who want good products again, this lack of functional integration is why today’s products are sub-optimal. Doug Smock made that clear in his classic Straight to the Bottom Line post here on Sourcing Innovation. Go back and have a read.