In our last post we illuminated how Busch-Lamoureux Exact Purchasing required Category Intelligence (not just the Category Management most Procurement organizations aren’t yet doing) and, thus, ups your Procurement game in more ways than one. Many more ways than one, actually.

Only with Exact Purchasing can you figure out what you actually need from your Procurement technology, If you go back to our piece on assisted solution selection is a seven stair methodology, step 1 is understanding your needs. By breaking your procurement needs into categories you can specify to a high degree of detail, you get an understanding of what you really need to do in your Procurement organization.

In the seven stair methodology, step 2 is the holistic solution requirement — and this is what is embodied in Exact Purchasing! With exact purchasing, you are holistically evaluating a category from all key perspectives — complexity, risk, and organizational impact — and creating sourcing, procurement, supplier, and supply management plans that balance the requirements from a holistic requirement.

Step 3 is organizational maturity, and here’s what most Procurement organizations miss — the lack of a proper, formal, category management strategy that allows them to start on the journey to Procurement excellence through better processes, risk management, and intelligence is what holds them back. Exact Purchasing gives them a foundation to not only figure out where they are on their Procurement journey but where they need to go and what process improvements might get them there.

Step 4 is vendor pool selection, and here’s where exact purchasing really starts to help as it helps you identify what the tech has to do, which helps you (possibly with help from an expert analyst or consultant) identify what type of Procurement tech you really need, and then you can use an independent analyst or consultant (who doesn’t have to sycophantically cater to the bejeweled emerald software partner in order to maintain that bejeweled emerald status that sees a lot of integration work thrown his way as long as he maintains it) to identify the vendors most likely to be a great fit for you.

Step 5 is the vendor assessment process, which is itself a 7 step process — and Exact Purchasing helps you out end-to-end here.

Step 5a is RFI creation. With Exact Purchasing, you know what the critical functionality is, you can easily specify what it is, and then quickly eliminate any vendor that can’t meet 100% of the critical must-have for your organization before wasting any significant time on them.

Step 5b is collaborative RFI review. Once you’ve eliminated those that you’re certain won’t fit, if too many vendors survive the cut, the team is educated on both what is needed and what will make their lives easier and can holistically assess initial responses to narrow down to the providers that go beyond the basics in ways that might be helpful.

Step 5c is the qualifying demo. You can create a script that not only covers all the essentials, but should haves that will help illuminate where the key strengths and weaknesses are likely to be both in the given vendor’s application but the vendor pool over all and get the insight you need to ensure that you’re both on the right path and that the vendors you select for the RFP will be worth the next stage review.

Step 5d is the RFP creation. From here you can elaborate all the should have and nice to have functionality, double down on your key pain points that you would like solved (potentially in innovative ways), note what intelligence is critical, identify where you’d like services and support, and identify any must-have organizational requirements beyond Procurement that would be a deal-breaker. You’re able to focus on the what, instead of the typical 500 point feature list where half the features you might never use.

Step 5e is the RFP review, where again the team has the understanding on what to look for and can ensure that any vendor who wouldn’t make the cut doesn’t get invited to the full demo stage.

Step 6 is the full demo where each vendor provides a two-part demo against the basic deep dive should have script the RFP was based on and detailed requests based upon claims they made in the RFP against nice-to-haves, uniqueness, process improvements that will save you time and money beyond what peers can do, etc.

Step 7 is the decision, and you can make that against what the vendors offer relative to your category needs and organizational goals, not just a feature list you don’t understand (but copied from a Free RFP anyway because you needed to look competent).

In other words, Exact Purchasing gives you the understanding you need to go to market, and the understanding that not every solution may be appropriate for every category — and that’s okay. Sometimes two or three targeted BoB solutions are still less than half of the cost of a mega-suite that still only solves half of your problems.