Author Archives: thedoctor

Tealbook: Laying the Groundwork for the Supplier Data Foundations

It wasn’t that long ago that we asked you if you had a data foundation because a procurement management platform, should you be lucky enough to get one (which is much more than a suite), generally only supports the data it needs for Procurement to function and doesn’t support the rest of the organization. Furthermore, when you look across the Source-to-Pay and Supply Chain spectrums, there are a lot of different applications that support a lot of different processes that have a lot of different data requirements that need to be maintained as different data types in different encoding formats.

Furthermore, as we noted in the aforementioned post, it’s rare enough to find MDM capability that will even support procurement. This is because most suites are built on transactions, most supplier networks on relational supplier data records, and contracts on documents and simple, hierarchical, meta-data indexes. But you also need models, meta-models, semi-structured, unstructured, and media support. And more. The need is broad, and even if you restrict the need to supplier data, it’s quite broad.

As you will soon garner from our ongoing Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive series, in which we just started tackling Supplier Management in Part XV, the supplier data an organization needs is extremely varied and extensive. Given that Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP mash with ten (10) major areas of functionality, not counting broader enterprise needs around ESG, innovation, product design / manufacturing management, and other needs tied to operations management, engineering, and enterprise risk management, among other functions, it’s easy to see just how difficult even Supplier Master Data Management can be.

Considering not a single Supplier Management solution vendor (as you will come to understand as we progress through the Source-to-Pay is Extensive series) covers all of the basic functions we’re outlining, it’s obviously that not a single vendor can effectively do Supplier Master Data Management today. However, Tealbook, which has realized this since their exception, is aiming to be the first to fix this problem. As of the first release of their open API next month, they are transitioning to a Supplier Data Platform and will no longer focus on being just a supplier discovery platform or diversity data enrichment platform. (They will still offer those services, and will be upgrading them in Q4 with general release expected by the end of 2023, but their primary focus will be on the supplier data foundation that enables this.)

This is significant, and illustrates how far they’ve come in the nine (9) years since their founding when their original focus was on building a community supplier intelligence platform that was reliable, scalable, extensible, and appropriate for new supplier discovery (via a large database of verified suppliers with community reviews). From these humble beginnings, where they didn’t even have a million suppliers in their platform after their third year of existence, they grew into the largest supplier network with over 5 Million detailed supplier profiles that is integrated with the largest S2P suites out there (Ariba, GEP, Ivalua, Jaggaer, and Workday, to name a few) and powers some of the largest organizations on the planet. As part of this empowerment, they can take in an organization’s entire supplier data ecosystem, transform it into their standard formats, match to their records, verify or correct existing data, and then enrich the organization’s supplier records before sending them back. In addition, they integrate with a multitude of BI tools, databases / lakes / warehouses (including ERPs), digital platforms, and so on.

To summarize, that’s a ten fold increase in suppliers and an explosion in global utilization and usage. At the same time, the platform has been augmented with over 2.3M supplier certifications, global diversity data, and the ability to track an organization’s tier 2 supplier diversity data. Quite impressive.

And while this meets most of an organization’s discovery needs, Tealbook knew that it didn’t meet all of an organization’s supplier data needs, especially when you think about all of the regulatory, financial, compliance, performance, sustainability, risk, contract, product/service, relationship, quality, and enablement/innovation data an organization needs to maintain on a supplier. As a result, they have been aggressively working on two key pieces of functionality. An extended universal supplier profile and a fully open, extensible, API that an organization can use to do supplier master data management across their enterprise with the Tealbook Supplier Data Platform. An organization can use the Tealbook Supplier Data Platform to classify, cleanse, and enrich supplier records; augment those records with third party data for sustainability, compliance, and risk; find new suppliers in the network; and so on.

In short, Tealbook is on a mission to be the organization’s trusted supplier data source, and to constantly improve their data offering both with their own ML/AI enabled technology that monitors over 400M+ public websites for supplier-related data (supplier web sites, business registries, certification providers, supplier data providers, etc. etc. etc.), maintains data provenance (when was it last updated, by what/who, etc.), and provides trust scores (in their proprietary framework that indicates Tealbook’s confidence in accuracy and correctness).

The real mission begins next month when they release their new Open API that will allow an organization to integrate, and interact with, Tealbook the way it needs to across its enterprise applications. Congruent with this release, they will also start releasing their enrichment data-packs that will, within the next year, allow the organization to plug-and-play the data they need to confirm firmographics, contact channels and key information, diversity, supplier offerings, financials, certifications, and basic risk data (which Tealbook will offer through partnerships with specialty supplier data providers, giving an organization a one-stop shop vs. having to license with multiple providers separately to build its 360-degree supplier profile).

Then, over the next year, Tealbook will enhance the usability of their data platform by first rebuilding their diversity and discovery applications and then building out new applications around sustainability, risk, benchmarking, and other areas that their customers would rather a data platform handle for them.

For all I care, they can ban all the Social Media Platforms!

For those who haven’t heard, Montana is the first state to try and ban TikTok, presumably because it’s owned by China that is harvesting the data. Following that logic, shouldn’t they ban every platform that has Chinese investment?

… and then every social media platform that has a presence in China and, as such, must adhere to Chinese law?

Of course, if the real reason they want to ban Social Media platforms is because they realize the damage that social media platforms have been doing to us (and are using the Chinese ownership as an excuse), they can ban them all — including their home-grown American platforms. After all, Twitter made us dumber than a doornail and Facebook is a Toilet so please feel free to take them away too.

Remember, even if you overlook the fact that Facebook is primarily used for sharing conspiracy theories and information that is NOT fact-checked, seeking attention, cyber-stalking your favourite celebrities, and other uses besides the good, wholesome, community aspects they tirelessly promote, if you acted in real life like you acted on Facebook, as the image below suggests, you’d be the subject of multiple psychological assessments and suspicious individual #1 at your local precinct. (Credit to the original source, which I wish I knew!)

Don’t Cheat Yourself with Cheat Sheets, Kid Yourself with KPI Quick Lists, or Rip Yourself Off with Bad RFPs!

In an effort to quickly catch up on the parts of S2P the doctor hasn’t been covering as much in the past few years, when he was focussed primarily on Analytics, Optimization, Modelling, and advanced tech in S2P (inc. RPI, ML, “AI”, etc.), he’s been paying more attention to LinkedIn. Probably too much, even though he can (speed) read very fast and skim a semi-infinite scroll page in a minute. Why? Because a lot of what he’s been seeing is troubling him, and as per last Friday’s post, sometimes angering him when predatory sales-people and consultants are giving other sales-people and consultants bad advice (presumably to increase their follower count or coaching sales or whatever) that will not only hurt what could be a well-intentioned sales-person or consultant (they still exist, though sometimes it seems they are fewer by the year as more sales people bleed into our space from enterprise software, looking for the next hot software solution and the next big payday), but also the individuals, and companies, those influenced sales people sell to in the thoughtless, emotionless, uncaring aggressive style the predatory sales coaches are mandating. (Not to say that a sales person shouldn’t be aggressive about getting a sale, just that they should be focussed on the companies they can actually help and be focussed on getting the customer all the information and insight that customer needs to make the right choice, feel comfortable about it, and feel prepared to defend it. The aggression should be channeled into making sure their company does everything it can to properly educate the potential client before that client commits to a long term relationship.)

A few of the things that have been repeatedly troubling him is

  1. all the cheat sheets he’s been seeing for those looking to get a better grip on Procurement and how it integrates into the rest of the business, that supposedly summarize everything you need to know about accounting, finance, payments / accounts payable, etc. to help you make good choices about Procurement in general;
  2. all the 10/20/50 Procurement, Spend, Manufacturing, etc. KPIs that you need to keep tabs on your Procurement, cashflow plan, product lifecycle, etc.; and
  3. all the RFP outlines or guidances that are being made available, sometimes by leaving your email, to help buyers acquire a certain technology.

And it’s not because they’re bad. They’re not. Some of them are actually quite good. A few are even excellent. Some of the cheat sheets and KPI lists the doctor has seen are incredibly well thought out, incredibly clear, and incredibly useful to you. Some are so good that, as a buyer, likely with little support from your organization and even less of a training budget, you should be profusely thanking whomever was so kind to create this for you and give it away for free.

Nor is it because the doctor suspects any ill intent or malice behind the efforts (in the vast majority of the cases). Many of these people giving away the cheat sheets or the KPI lists are generally trying to help their fellow humans get better at the job and improve the profession overall. And when the RFP outline is coming from a former practitioner, it’s also the case that they are typically trying to help you out (and maybe sell their services as a consultant, but they are providing proof of value up-front).

So why has it been troubling the doctor so? It took a while and some thought to put his finger on it, and the answer is, surprisingly, one of the reasons [but not the obvious one] that the doctor hates software vendor RFPs and despises any vendor that gives you one.

Now, the primary reason the doctor despises those RFPs, which became popular when Procuri started doing it en-masse in the mid-to-late 2000s (before being acquired by Ariba and quietly sunsetted as the integration never finished by the time Ariba sold to SAP, for those of you who remember the APE circus), is that these RFIPs are always written to be entirely one sided and ensure the vendor giving them away ALWAYS comes out on top. The feature list is exactly what the vendor offers, the weightings correspond exactly to the vendor core strengths, etc. etc. etc. And don’t tell me you can start with a vendor RFP and alter it to suit other vendors, because you can’t. You’d have to know all the features as the vendor focussed on point features, not integrated functions, and you, as a buyer who’s never used a modern system, have no knowledge of how to equate features (when vendor specific terminology is used), or how to determine if one feature is more advanced than another. (That was the reason the doctor co-developed Solution Map, to help rate and evaluate technology, which is the one thing most buying organizations can’t do well. Not the things they can do well, and better than most analyst firms, like rate the appropriateness of services to them, assess whether or not the vendor has a culture that will be a good fit, define their business needs and goals, etc.)

But the primary reason doesn’t apply here. So what’s the secondary reason? When an average, overworked, underpaid, and overstressed buyer got their hands on one of these free vendor RFPs, especially when the RFP was thick, heavy, and professionally edited and prepared to look polished and ready for use, and was more detailed than what the buyer could do, they thought they had their answer and could run with it. They thought it was all they needed to know, for now, and that they could send it out, collect the responses, and get back to fire-fighting. They were lulled into a false sense of security.

And that’s why these cheat sheets and KPI guides and former buyer/consultant RFPs are so troubling. When you’ve been struggling without even the basics, and these are so good that they teach you all the basics, and more, it seems like they have all the answers you need and that when you learn those basics, encapsulate them in the tool, and start running your business against them, things will be better. Then you configure your tool to respect the basics, encode the KPIs, and things are better. Significantly better, and for once processes start going smoothly. And then you believe you know everything you need to in that area (that’s not your primary area) to interface with those functions and that those KPIs will be enough to keep you on the Procurement track and let you know if there are any issues to be addressed. And you start operating like that’s the case. But it’s not.

And that’s the problem — these cheat sheet, guides, and templates, which are much better than what you’d get in the past, can make such a drastic difference when you first learn and implement them that they instill a false sense of security. You get complacent with your integrations, reports, and KPI monitors, not recognizing that they only capture and catch what they were encoded to capture and catch. However, real world conditions are constantly changing, the supply base is constantly changing, and external events such as natural disasters, political squabbles, and endemics are coming fast and furious. If the risk metric doesn’t take into account external events, real-time slips in OTD (as it is based on risk profiles upon onboarding, and updates upon contract completion), or past regulatory compliance violations (as an indicator of potential violations in the future), the organization could be blindsided by a disruption the buyer thought the KPI would prevent. Similarly, the wrong cash-flow related KPIS can give a false sense of liquidity and financial security and the wrong inventory metrics can lead to the wrong forecasts in outlier categories (very fast moving, very slow moving, or recently promoted).

In other words, by giving you the answers, without the rationale behind them, or deep insight into how appropriate those answers are to your situation, you will cheat yourself, kid yourself, or, even worse, rip yourself off. And that’s worrisome. So please, please, please remember what these are — learning aids and starting points only — not the end result. (Especially if it’s an RFP template.)

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P15) … And So Is Supplier Management! It’s a CORNED QUIP!

That’s right, Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP! And we’ll explain what we mean shortly, but first … how did we get here?

When we started this series back in Part 1, we noted that Source-to-Pay is extensive, your organization needed all of it, but your organization couldn’t implement it all at once. So we needed to give you advice on where to start, which, after a careful analysis, needed to be e-Procurement. Next came spend analysis because, in the hands of the right analyst, if your organization wasn’t sure what module was the next most valuable, spend analysis would help the organization identify which modules would likely bring the most (relative) value (based upon the opportunities spend analysis identified). Often, there will be a clear winner, and your organization will know what module to start implementing tomorrow, but sometimes there won’t be. So what’s the answer then? When you are dependent on suppliers, there is no value beyond the supplier. Thus, in this situation, Supplier Management comes next.

But why is Supplier Management a CORNED QUIP? A good solution preserves and maintains the data, like a good cure, but the marketing from most of the vendors with these solutions is more entertaining than enlightening (as they seem to prefer wit to wisdom). This, of course, is not at all helpful when there are literally ten (10) different types, or at least aspects, of supplier management solutions on the marketplace, no one vendor addresses all of the aspects in their solution, and, in many cases, doesn’t even address more than a couple of these aspects. Furthermore, depending on your organizational needs and the platforms your organization currently has in place, some capabilities will be much more important to your organization than other capabilities. Moreover, sometimes certain capabilities in a supplier management solution, already present in solutions already implemented by the organization, will be downright useless as these aspects will, thus, be completely redundant. So, if a vendor is just selling “Supplier Management” or “Supplier Lifecycle Management”, which theoretically includes every core type of capability (even though not a single solution on the market today comes close to materializing all the capabilities), how do you know what they are selling?

Just what might that vendor be selling when they are trying to sell you Supplier Management? One or more management aspects of the CORNED QUIP (but likely not all of those aspects, as every cure is different, and every message witty in its own way, but not exactly enlightening).

What are these ten (10), core, aspects of modern supplier management? (Which dictate the core capabilities that such a solution should offer.)

  • C: Compliance (+ Government + Regulatory)
  • O: Orchestration (or Onboarding + Multi-Tier/Multi-Supplier capability)
  • R: Relationship
  • N: Network
  • E: Enablement (+ Engagement)
  • D: Discovery
  • Q: Quality
  • U: Uncertainty (+ Risk)
  • I: Information
  • P: Performance

Now, before we continue, we know you’re saying “what about ESG” and “what about diversity“? Well, at least as of today, most of these providers are data services that you use to augment your central supplier records (in your Supplier Master Data Management [SMDM] Solution, which could be your SXM or could be the ERP that the SXM extracts data from), and not standalone SXM products, so we will tackle those separately at some point in the future (especially since diversity is literally just data enrichment on a supplier record in any current solution).

Thus, now that we know what we are implementing, our next step is to decide how to evaluate the solution. Thus, in our next post, we’ll begin to break down the ten core aspects of the CORNED QUIP and define not only what they mean, but what capabilities are critical to the cure.

On to the A-Side in Part 16.

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P14) … So Do Not Stop at Spend Analysis!

As we discussed in Part 8, once you have your eProcurement baseline, that’s just the beginning. The very beginning. Even though not all modules are equal, and not all modules will return equal results, you, and your organization, will need all of Source-to-Pay eventually. However, since you can’t implement it all at once, you take it one module at a time.

After eProcurement, if you aren’t 100% sure where the most value will come from, you go on to spend analysis and use it to help you identify the best opportunities, and those opportunities may indicate the next best module to implement (for your organization at the current time). After that, you may have a clear answer, or, you may not. Sometimes the analysis indicates almost equal opportunity between sourcing and contracting, between contracting and supplier management, or between sourcing and supplier management. (Or, you might not have the manpower or expertise to do the analysis you need to get the right answer.)

So if it’s unclear as to which solution to choose next, it’s back to arguments and logic in an effort to determine which of the three aforementioned solutions to choose.

How about Strategic Sourcing? It’s the one technology proclaimed to identify the most savings and deliver the best results. The truth is that while it almost always identifies the most savings, it doesn’t actually deliver those savings, or even guarantee them. The savings are guaranteed by the contract, delivered by the (new) supplier, and captured by the eProcurement system.

So how about a Contract Management System? In order to guarantee the cost reductions, you need the contract. Or it’s just a quote that’s given today, denied tomorrow. But, as we indicated in a prior post, you don’t need a contract management system for a contract. You need (e-)paper, (e-)ink, and a pair of (e-)signatures. The right contract management system makes it easy to author, negotiate, manage, track, and enforce a contract. But the contract itself is up to people, and if they don’t agree, there’s no contract, and, thus, no need for a contract management system.

This just leaves Supplier Management. But is this where we start? If we think about the value sourcing identifies, it’s generated by the supplier. So it’s critical that the supplier perform. If we have a good supplier management solution, it will track the supplier’s progress, alert us to issues, and assist us in managing the relationship if intervention is required. It will enable performance management, which is critical because if the supplier doesn’t perform and/or doesn’t adhere to the contract, then it doesn’t matter how great the sourcing event was or how good the contract inked was.

And so, because suppliers, and relationships with them, are key, when all things are about equal, or when it’s hard to identify where to go next, we go with supplier management.

Start the dive in Part 15.