Monthly Archives: October 2026

If You Can’t Do The Job Without Tech …

Then you can’t do the job with tech.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you can’t do the job without tech, then you can’t do the job with tech.

All tech does is automate tasks and workflow processes and allow you to speed them up by a factor of 10 to 1,000,000 plus (depending on the tasks and workflow processes).

It doesn’t make tasks or processes better or worse (unless you Gen-AI, which typically makes it worse) — just faster (unless, of course, you change the process when you implement the tech and make the task or process better or worse).

Now, you’re probably asking why it’s not enough to design the process and simply install the tech. That’s because there’s a difference between designing a process and executing a process. Anyone can design a process at a high level given a highly set of requirements. Not anyone can execute. Among those, even less can execute it effectively.

Only those who can execute it effectively are fit to do the job, regardless of what tech the organization has or does not have. That’s because, if you don’t know how to do the job without tech (and certainly without AI), you don’t understand what the job really is. Business was conducted for thousands of years without modern tech, and computers only became generally available in big business in the 80s and mid-size businesses in the 90s and small businesses in the 2000s. That means everything you do today with modern tech was once done without modern tech (and, 150 years ago, without any tech that we would consider modern at all).

That understanding means you understand the core of the function. You know what has to be done, how, where the time suck is, what can be automated, how, and why. You also know how to verify correct automations has been implemented, and where the results require human interpretation, review, and decisions — and, if necessary, make those interpretations, review, and decisions.

Without that understanding, you can’t properly make use of tech and you definitely can’t make use of AI. Sure some tasks might be 10 to 1,000,000 times slower (and sourcing optimization will be out of the question, just a few bid comparisons), and you shouldn’t do them by hand unless necessary, but the point is you need to be able to — otherwise, you can never judge what the system does. Iin the age of hyper-fast LLM hallucinations, only good human decisions will allow your organization to succeed.

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.