We’re continuing our foray into the top barriers to success that we outlined in our top barriers post that chronicles the barriers that keep coming up over and over again in every Procurement survey in our effort to ensure that you don’t have to read another state of procurement study for the next 5 years. Now it’s the barrier of organizational support and, specifically, technical support. (Most organizations just don’t have the IT Crowd they need!)

A Brief History …

As we discussed with the top barrier to success, siloed ways of working, with each successive innovation, business, and process improvement, became more complex and required more education and experience to perform. As a result, with each successive innovation, the available talent pool shrinks. Moreover, with the average large organization having eight (8) or more departments (Finance, Ops, HR, Legal, Sales, Marketing, IT, R&D, Manufacturing, Procurement, Supply Chain, Logistics, Risk Management, etc.), each department is always stretched and needs more organizational support. Plus, the number of IT systems both available and implemented in an average organization has skyrocketed from a handful (an accounting system, a MRP, and basic word processing) to, according to a recent Zylo survey, 660+ SaaS applications (on top of dozens of installed systems). (That’s average. Some organizations have more than 1,000 SaaS applications!) Despite this scary fact, there’s still only one understaffed IT department.

The Problem

In a nutshell, due to the proliferation of complex processes and their component tasks as well as the combinatorial explosion of systems and software to implement and, theoretically, support those tasks, there has been a similar, combinatorial, growth in the need for organizational and IT/Tech execution support in each enterprise department.

The Necessary Realization

The answer here is not easy. It’s not even easy to explain all of the factors you need to understand. But we will try.

First of all, as per an upcoming barrier to success, there is a talent gap in many areas. This is true even if there isn’t a shortage of available talent in the market since organizations have fixed budgets and can’t always hire all of the talent the organization could use, so there could still be a talent gap internally.

Secondly, even if the organization has talent capable of dealing with every support requirement, there’s only so many hours in a day and only so many individual support calls that an overworked (IT) support employee can take.

Thirdly, despite promises that technology would solve everything since the introduction of the first MRP (over 60 years ago), it hasn’t, and the technology project failure rates, which have never dropped below 66%, have been rapidly rising for the past 5 years or so and recently reached an all-time high of 88% (with some informal and formal indications, including a recent MIT study, that AI technology project failure rates are now as high as 95%). (See our article on two and a half decades of project failure.)

As a result, there is no perfect or simple solution to this one. However, there is a simply stated solution, and it is this:

Identify all of the tasks and processes that can be automated and automate them. (And, as per many, many articles on this site — this does NOT mean [Gen]-AI!)

However, this is easier said than done. It requires the classic people – process – technology approach which involves your best people identifying and documenting the right process, along with all of the exceptions, then figuring out what can be automated with technology, and finally taking the time to identify the right technology, define the implementation plan, oversee the implementation, do the testing and validation, and train all of the stakeholders who have to interact with it how to do so appropriately. In other words, as SI likes to say, it’s the modernized talent – transition – technology approach.

This has to be done for each process individually, and the time and effort required will vary. Especially when it comes time to identifying the right technology which, the majority of the time, will not be the tech-du-jour in the latest hype cycle. Sometimes it will be a 60 year old algorithm wrapped in 20 year old RPA. It’s not the tech, it’s the outcome … and whatever gets you there as quickly, efficiently, and free of unnecessary human effort as possible. (Remember, machines are great at thunking, as they can do trillions of calculations in the time it takes us to do 10, which is something we are not good at; but they are not great at thinking, as they are not intelligent, but that is something we are good at — but yet we spend 80%+ of our time doing tactical data processing best left to machines when we should be more focused on strategic decisions and the human element of business.)

It will take a lot of time, but if the organization as a whole follows the 80/20 rule, and focusses in on the processes that are taking the most time and deals with those first, one by one, and doesn’t fall for the vendor and consultancy hype and get misled down the wrong path, within a few years, they will start to make significant progress and within a decade will have all of the time consuming processes under control. (After all, the average journey to best in class by a committed organization is eight (8) years, as determined by the Hackett group in the 2000s.) In fact, within a couple of years of just automating one process at a time, you’ll will suddenly realize that you have made significant strides well beyond what the big consultancies will promise, but never deliver with big-bang AI projects that never end.)

The Technological Requirements

The technological requirements are considerable and require supply chain aware sourcing and sourcing aware supply chain and expertise from source to sink and back again on both sides.

A continuing reminder that if you want guidance in the short term, hope that your favourite provider reaches out to Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters or the doctor and enables us to focus on writing the series (or in-depth e-book) explaining what modern Procurement and Supply Chain Tech needs to look like (and how it needs to be implemented) to address the challenges, reduce the risks, and address the priorities versus just dripping out tidbits as free time permits.