Monthly Archives: September 2017

BIQ: Alive and Well in the Opera House! Part I

Fourteen years ago, in the sleepy little town of Southborough, Massachusetts, a tiny start up called BIQ was created. It’s mission was to give business analysts the powerful transactional data analysis tool that they needed to do their own analysis and get their own insight. Less than two years later, it released that tool, called BIQ, and it totally changed the spend analysis market. For the first time, power analysts could do everything themselves in a market where spend analysis was primarily offered as a service, and they could do it at a price point that was at least an order of magnitude less than what the big providers were charging them. With licenses starting at 36K a year, an analyst could do the same analysis that he was paying a suite provider 360K for and a best of breed provider 1M for. Now, it required a lot of knowledge, aesthetic blindness, elbow grease, and overtime, but it could be done.

And when we say everything, we mean everything. You could load any flat files you want in a standard format (such as csv) in the data loader. You could combine them into any cubes you wanted by defining the overlapping dimensions. You could define ranged and derived dimensions using simple formula or built in definitions. You could drill down in real time, filter on what you wanted, and export subsets of records. You could define any categorization you wanted against any schema, any mapping rules you wanted, they were organized into priority groups, given a priority order, and run most specific to least specific so you never got a collision or random mapping like you might in a tool where you just defined non-prioritized rules that went in a database and often got applied in random order. You could define supplier families that could be reused. You could build your own cross-tab reports. It was the swiss army knife of analytics, at a price every organization could afford.

This quickly made BIQ a favourite not just among mid-market companies that couldn’t afford, and big companies that didn’t want to afford, high priced services, but also niche consultancies that could now do power-house analytics projects on their own, including firms like Lexington Analytics and Power Advocate. This, along with some really smart marketing, pushed BIQ into the mainstream of spend analytics providers, making it a de-factor shortlist candidate for any company wanting do-it-yourself spend analysis. This, of course, got the attention of many providers, who were afraid of the threat, in awe of the technology, or both.

One of these providers was Opera Solutions, who acquired BIQ in 2012, and shortly after, Lexington Analytics. Once the two providers were merged, Opera Solutions instantly had a complete spend analysis software and services solution for the indirect space. And they have steadily improved this offering since its acquisition. The new version comes packed with some big enhancements, including one capability that is not only market leading, but unique among all the spend analysis providers we have covered to date.

What is that? Come back tomorrow!

Fifty Years Ago Today …

Sweden entered the modern age of transportation when Dagen H occurred and traffic changed from driving on the left to driving on the right … literally overnight! (Those Swedes are masters of efficiency.)

Now if only the UK (and it’s former colony now known as Australia) could get with the times and join the rest of the world. However, given how long it took them to accept the modern calendar, it will probably be another hundred years. But it would make the creation of true global routing software so much easier …

Two Hundred and Sixty Five Years ago today …

Great Britain finally adopts the Gregorian Calendar, nearly two centuries later than most of Western Europe, and begins its entry into the modern age. Considering the influence of Britain, and the number of colonies (now CommonWealth countries) it had by 1752, by 1852, and by 1952, could you imagine if it, and its (former) colonies, were still on the Julian calendar.

We (and especially we Canadians) all know the importance of standardized time (especially since it it typically credited to Sir Sandford Fleming, a Canadian who eventually settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia that attracts great Canadian minds even to this day) when trying to do global business, but imagine if we didn’t even have standardized dates! Two o’clock on the 7th would be different days! And if Great Britain didn’t come in line when it did, Sir Sandford Fleming would have had a much harder time …

Is There an Objective Reality to Procurement?

Recently, the public defender penned a post that asked “should Procurement be more specific?” where he asked if we have an ‘objective reality’ of how procurement works. Are we like scientists; trying to develop more understanding, willing to be challenged, looking for objective ways of proving what works and what doesn’t? Or are we more like the journalists and politicos who express a point of view and get upset if anyone argues strongly and objectively against us?

We think, for the most part, the answer is, unfortunately, a sad no. Why do we think this? Is it because we agree with the public defender in his observations that you never hear “I don’t agree with you” or “I don’t think that’s the best way of doing that” when you go to Procurement event and that you never see an academic paper that objectively measures the success of a particular procurement approach, strategy, or process. No. It’s because, as pointed out in yesterday’s post, there’s still too much magical thinking in Procurement, born in arrogance and self-conceit. Too many people who think that just because they’ve been doing it for 20 years, they’ve been doing it right and all they need is a few more resources and a little more time.

As a result, we wholeheartedly agree with the public defender when he says:

Procurement is THE least scientific of all major business disciplines.

— and that this is the result of —

the lack of clear and objective understanding and
the lack of clear metrics that measure the success of procurement.

As the public defender points out savings are pretty much impossible to measure, and most of the “true” savings is just cost avoidance anyway, and any reduction in cost that was spend above market average can never be counted as savings. If you were paying 10% more than you would in a spot buy, a reduction to market average is not even true cost avoidance that comes from demand management or product redesign, it’s just spending what you should have been in the first place. And other common metrics are equally abhorrent.

And we are still trying to get most organizations from landed cost (which is just one step up from unit cost) to total cost of ownership, which is not the right metric — it should be total value management — the cost relative to the performance (or profit if you want to be so narrow minded) of the buy.

So, no, in the average organization, there is no objective reality to Procurement. And, as it stands now, only the true leaders (the Hackett Group 8%) are even close to getting there (or at least trying). However, like the public defender, we will continue to educate you to the best of our ability so that someday, there may be an objective reality. (But not necessarily the one that will allow a senior buyer to be replaced by a bot. Assisted by, but not replaced.)