Category Archives: Cost Reduction

Now is NOT A Great Time to Buy (Part 3)

Standalone “Intake to Nowhere”, “Classic Onboarding and Supplier Management”, “Predictive” Analytics, “Contract” AI, “Agentic” AI or Classic Mega-Suites … until 2029

Yesterday we reminded you that while you need intake and orchestration, you need supplier intelligence, you need predictive analytics, you need AI-based contract analytics, and you need “Agentic” AI that executes (but does not make) decisions, you should not buy it standalone, at least not now, and you definitely shouldn’t buy a classic mega suite.

While all of the solutions we have tackled so far are currently over-priced, Agentic AI, which is the new hype, is the most over priced offering of them all, especially with the consistent over-promising by these new generation vendors that are promising BS “AI Employees” while delivering task automation that is reliable as a chocolate teapot where consistent, dependable, execution is concerned. Now, some of these vendors will figure out that you need constrained, double guard-railed, multi-agent systems with human monitoring and exception intervention and eventually deliver reliable augmented intelligence systems that make an average employee super human, and they will be worth it, most of these vendors will simply try to out-prompt each other through custom clod and chat, j’ai pété wrappers, cr@p out at about 80% to 95% reliability depending on the task, never be trust worthy, and never be worth it. Since these just started to hit the big time, with ridiculous over-funding, in the past year or two, it will be three more years before the dust truly settles and 2029 before you want to make any long term bets.

Plus, if you know the real history of AI, which is probably older than your grandfather FYI (with the first algorithm to be awarded the title developed 70 years ago), you know that it’s usually close to two decades before a new algorithm is mature enough, and understood enough, with real, solid, mathematical measures of reliability, for mass, unmonitored, industrial use. And typically at least a decade before it’s ready for leaders to apply it in industry for monitored, target, use. The first LLM hit the scene in 2018. That means 2029 is also the year it will finally start to be reliable for a certain (but small) set of tasks in certain (but a small set of) domains. It will still hallucinate more than an LSD loving dead-head, but by then we’ll have much better detection methodologies and confidence measurements and will actually be able to trust it when the results get through the multi-layered security gates that we’ll finally be able to build with more understanding.

And yes, as we’ve said twice already, you need this tech. But buying “best of breed” will only “bleed your cash in the best way possible” with little measurable return.

But don’t return to a “classic mega-suite”. These are now more over-priced than ever. First of all, as we’ve discussed many times on this site, unless you are a Fortune 1000/Global 3000 multi-national with extensive, and complex, source-to-pay needs, you don’t need to pay Millions of Dollars a year for a suite when an 80% mid-market solution for 250K a year will do the trick. (See our piece on how much should you outlay for ADVANCED Source to Pay.)

Not only do most organizations only have a few categories where advanced technologies are needed, and usually only in one or two of the modules the mega-suite sells, but most of their categories are so straightforward that even BoB mid-market solutions present not just an 80%+, but a 90%+, solution. Plus, modern ARPA and appropriately focussed Agentic solutions are allowing mid-sized organizations to cobble together “good enough” solutions from low-cost 80% point solutions for 10% of the cost of a mega suite that gets them started on their journey, allowing them to upgrade to better solutions as they need, and only as they need.

This is putting severe cost pressure on the mega-suites, which are going to have to admit that most of their solutions, workflow, and UIs are over a decade old and not worth the premium they once charged. For organizations that truly need these solutions, from vendors which aren’t aggressively updating their solutions (due to these vendors being purchased by PE firms at too high a valuation and, thus, being forced to cost cut to meet ridiculous sales targets), if they wait a year or two, these will soon be priced at what they’re worth, and you’ll get an annual license for less than half of what they are charging today and get all the functionality you need to boot!

So, at the end of the day, while you need a solid Procurement solution that comes with a modern intake front-end, has orchestration at the core, provides you supplier intelligence, integrates the analytics you need, helps you with your contracts and their processes (to the extent you actually need that help), and allows for adaptive robotic process automation for all your well defined tasks (and provides the data foundation for “Agentic” AI if you have valid applications where such technology will actually bring value), you don’t need to overpay for it. And you definitely don’t need to pay the double to quadruple price tags that current mega-suites are charging.

But if you can find what you need, at a fair price tag, and you buy that, you buy real value that will appreciate with time because it will do what you need it to do, at a fair price, and that’s the only way you save time and money with ProcureTech. Getting what you need, when you need it, at a fair price point. You know, classic Procurement!

Remember that.

Now is NOT A Great Time to Buy (Part 2)

Standalone “Intake to Nowhere”, “Classic Onboarding and Supplier Management”, “Predictive” Analytics, “Contract” AI, “Agentic” AI or Classic Mega-Suites … until 2029

Yesterday we told you that while you need intake and orchestration, you need supplier intelligence, you need predictive analytics, you need AI-based contract analytics, and you need “Agentic” AI that executes (but does not make) decisions, you should not buy it standalone, at least not now, and you definitely shouldn’t buy a classic mega-suite.

While analytics platforms have been traditionally scarce, they’ve been popping up faster than bluebonnets in spring, faster than the weeds in unplanted fields, and faster than Starbucks on an empty corner in Y2K. This is creating severe downward price pressure as well as diluting the average actual functionality as many of these are built on third party white-labelled platforms and, even worse, wrappers on third-party LLMs that are great at conversation, not so great at analytics, and entirely dependent on these third party platforms where accuracy can change overnight on the same prompt, models can change with zero notice, and token pricing can skyrocket with no notice.

Even worse, some of these don’t work reliably because they depend on experimental LLM/AGI models, which are horrendously unreliable at math, and they will inevitably fail. That’s why you should be careful with what you buy from the “new standalone analytics startup” category — many have no real functionality (and won’t last very long because of it) and those with only average run-of-the-mill functionality will soon be available for dimes relative to the dollars they are trying to bill you for today. If you need a solution, get one that was available on the market by 2022 at the latest, as the current generation of LLM/AGI/wrapper solutions started to spring up about 3 years ago.

With regards to contract AI, this has been emerging for quite some time, but the current generation of LLM-powered plays that have been multiplying faster than cane toads in Australia started spiralling out of control about 2 years ago when the proclamations started to be made that your corporate future would be human lawyer free.

After all, clod and chat, j’ai pété can review a contract, spit out a summary, and (purportedly) tell you if any clauses are missing in a matter of seconds. Also, if you give it enough (historical) contracts and a few instructions, it can also draft a contract for you in seconds, even if you need a hundred page monstrosity. Who needs a lawyer?

Well, you. These are not infallible, and they make mistakes all the time. Often, they are minor, and easily fixed by a contract or legal expert with a quick review, but sometimes they aren’t so minor. Sometimes the omissions or clause errors are so major that it takes a lawyer longer to rewrite than if they just had their paralegal assemble the draft by hand and they dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.

In other words, since you get results that are just as good using your own low-cost LLM subscription, it’s not worth a large price tag for a “Contract AI” that just wraps someone else’s tech. Especially when it’s going to get a lot cheaper and have no value unless embedded in the sourcing and supplier management applications you use everyday where all of the embedded supplier and agreement data need to complete the contract is embedded in the application. Wait a year or two and you’ll get it for a dime on today’s dollar.

To be continued …

Now is NOT A Great Time to Buy (Part 1)

Standalone “Intake to Nowhere”, “Classic Onboarding and Supplier Management”, “Predictive” Analytics, “Contract” AI, “Agentic” AI or Classic Mega-Suites … until 2029

Yes you need intake and orchestration.

Yes you need supplier management.

Yes you need predictive analytics.

Yes you need AI-based contract analytics.

And, yes, you definitely need “Agentic” AI that executes (but does not make) decisions.

And if you’re a (mid) mid-market or larger, you need a suite.

But you should not buy any of these products, at least not now.

Why?

The majority of intake and orchestration platforms, and especially the ones that have raised nine figure VC (i.e. 100M or more), are overpriced and under featured. Modern intake and orchestration that modernizes interfaces, simplifies workflows, optimizes clicks, and makes process adherence easier than doing it any other way is valuable, but not that valuable. It’s essentially better middleware 3.0 for the web, and very easy to replicate. There might only be a few players now, relatively speaking, but you’re about to see a slew of these players who literally do nothing but put very nice lipstick on a big fat prize-winning pig (who’s not happy about it), which is a lot easier to do than raising the prize-winning pig from a piglet to a prize winner. At the end of the day, you need actual functionality, and that’s where the real value lies. (And today, that means shilling out for a classic mega-suite to layer the fancy new intake platform on top of, which costs you more, not less.)

As competition heats up, and technology advances, this will be the easiest, cheapest, play and you’ll soon find out that what the big players claim is worth 1M is only worth 100K to 250K, and you still need to go spend that 1M+ on traditional platforms that have deep functionality. So either buy a platform with real functionality with orchestration built in, or wait another year or two. It’s gonna get cheaper and better for standalone I2O. The market has not yet been zipped up.

Supplier Management is very important, but the vast majority of the one hundred plus (yes, that’s 100+) solutions on the market — be they best-of-breed, suite-modules, or hybrid data/contract/content management solutions with a supplier focus — are no longer up to the task. As per our recent post on supplier management must be continuous and proactive throughout the supply chain, these classic point-in-time solutions are no longer up to the challenge of modern supplier management as they can’t even detect changes in supplier behaviour in real-time that are indicative of emerging risks, yet alone supply chain events that are going to seriously impact supplier behaviour in short order.

As a result, they aren’t worth very much. Moreover, if you look at what classic onboarding applications do, they collect data that they force the supplier to enter during the onboarding process — data that, for the most part, is publicly available on the supplier’s web site, third party registries, and other (internal) enterprise systems — data that could easily be consolidated and pre-filled by modern RPA / Agentic applications that would not only allow a supplier to “onboard” in a fraction of the time by pre-gathering all of the fields. In other words, modern (A)RPA and Agentic data gathering applications do the work of classic onboarding, and with their prolific propagation, do it cheaper and put serious downward cost pressure on these classic applications. Moreover, these next generation solutions, which are dropping in price as well as they are becoming a dime a dozen, can continuously monitor these data sources, detect data changes, and (queue) update(s) in real time. Plus, they can accept feeds from supply chain systems and correlate events that might be meaningful.

So, if you’re still in the situation that can survive off of a last generation solution, wait a year or so, and get it for pennies on today’s dollar. But if you can’t wait, make sure you get a modern solution that can monitor supplier and related supply chain changes — it won’t cost more, and if you don’t lock into a long-term subscription, you’ll be able to keep costs way down on renewal (or easily switch to another platform with the same functionality for a lower cost in a year or two).

To be continued …

We Need Exact Purchasing … But It’s NOT a New Matrix!

We all know the Kraljic matrix is broken, and that it has been broken for a while. As Jason Busch starts off in his article on how Supply Management Must Become Exact Purchasing, Kraljic was right at the time, but it’s time to come back to where we started. And, more importantly, recognize that the Kraljic Matrix was designed as a starting point for supply management to think critically — and Supply Management was supposed to evolve from there. But it never really did.

Sure we got the Purchasing Chessboard by Kearney to supplement a host of seven step methodologies, procurement game plans, new techniques for managing indirect spend, lean supply management, and a slew of techniques from every niche consultancy to enhance your supply, and category management, strategies, but almost all of these are based on the classic 2 * 2 Kraljic matrix with refinement.

In his post, Jason, who rightfully says that procurement at scale is not one-size-fits-all tells us that answer is Exact Purchasing, or more specifically, The Exact Purchasing Quadrant, where he tries to map cost influence vs contract-and-supply complexity because Kraljic told you what a category is when he mapped profit impact vs. risk / complexity, but he didn’t tell you what to do with it. According to Jason, if you have:

  • low cost influence and low complexity, you transaction capture
  • low cost influence and high complexity, you govern the relationship
  • high cost influence and low complexity, you manage market risk
  • high cost influence and high complexity, you architect the cost

And Jason’s mostly right. Depending on the category in question, you’re generally going to apply one of those approaches.

Jason doesn’t stop there. He tells you that the thread that ties all four of these together is data at the core. And he’s right. Without a data-based (not necessarily database) approach, you’ll never effectively manage, and thus never effectively purchase, a category. Moreover, Jason does a great job at telling you what the core data is, where it resides, and where it could sit in your next generation enterprise Supply Management Solution (SMS). But he falls short when dictates the velocity, because that depends on the criticality. And even worse, the depth of data required depends on the criticality — which can also change the quadrant a category falls in!

For example, while packaging, print & marketing, and NPD are definitely strategic (Kraljic) cost architecture (Busch) categories for some companies (i.e. CPG, Advertising Agencies, and Manufacturers), they are tail-spend for other companies (i.e. Retail Store, Luxury Brands, and a Services Consultancy).

Jason’s improved approach still fails because it suffers from the same fallacy as the original Kraljic matrix — that complexity and risk are a single dimension. They’re not. Complexity is a factor of the product or service that you design and is an internal dimension that you have complete control over. Risk is a factor of the external environment that impacts your ability to create and deliver the product or service and depends on the financial stability of your supplier, the geopolitical situation in which it operates, the trade routes that exist between your supplier and your location, your supplier’s supply chain, and everything else in between — these are all factors you can’t control. Furthermore, it’s not profit impact (Kraljic) [which is short term] or cost influence (Busch) [which depends on spend], but criticality, which is measured in value impact [and what happens if the buy is unprofitable, of poor quality, or unavailable]. A category with zero savings potential can risk a 100M product line if your products can’t be completed without it (and we’ve seen this many times over the last two decades as critical sensors or single-sourced components shut down automotive lines or lack of RAM [from the decennial plant fires] or custom control chips [from trade slow-downs or insufficient production] greatly impacted personal computer / laptop or game system production — costing major brands hundreds of millions of dollars).

The reality is that Supply Management / Exact Purchasing / Get My Stuff (and Git-r-Done) is NOT a 2 * 2 matrix. It’s a(t least a) 2 * 2 * 2 pocket cube (and a 3 * 3 * 3 cube in large Enterprises) that is different for every organization where you take into account:

  1. complexity – low (med) or high
  2. market risk – low (med) or high
  3. criticality – low (med) or high

And as you progress from the lower left of the cube (where all dimensions are low) to the upper right of the cube (where all dimensions are high), you’re simultaneously following a three-dimensional path down a bi-furcating decision tree that takes you from non-critical items where you are simply managing as transactions to highly strategic items that you are cost architecting to the best of your ability, monitoring at least weekly, and alerting the category manager to on every major market event. In the middle, you will deal with your leverage and bottleneck items using well-timed market events to mitigate risk and managed relationships to ensure smooth supply, with the depth, and velocity, of the data correlated to the criticality of the item to your operation.

You do that, and you’ll finally be on the road to Exact Purchasing.

And I’ll leave it to Jason to work out the details of the starting cubic, as he’s so intent on fixing Purchasing (now that he’s semi-retired and can pontificate on the philosophical of purchasing).

(And once Jason does that, I’ll tell you how execution differs between small, medium, and large enterprises because “strategic” doesn’t mean the same thing at different levels, there is no one-size-fits-all platform, and, after a lack of operational readiness [which THE REVELATOR will happily fill you in on], this is likely the second biggest reason new technology acquisition projects fail in our space.)

Outcomes is a Dirty Word! Part II

And you shouldn’t have to hear it!

The word of the day is still outcomes, and, no matter where it’s used, it’s still a dirty word.

Yesterday we gave you many examples of where outcome-based pricing has become the norm which includes, but is not limited to:

  • GPOs
  • Recovery Audit Firms
  • AI-first services-as-software
  • Big Consultancy projects

and where every single situation the entire point of the “outcome”-based sales pitch was just a ploy to convince you to pay more for less because

  • suppliers will happily match GPO prices for reasonable commitments as they have to pay the GPO a 1.5% to 3.0%+ administrative fee to get that business, and, moreover, at the head of the tail you can always get as good, if not better, prices using a tail-spend sourcing solution that automates 3-bids-and-a-buy RFQs and auctions (in a standard format that allows suppliers to automate bids) … and this solution often costs a fraction of what you will pay the GPO based on transaction fees (and then the additional savings from being able to quote every category at the head of the tail and not just what the GPO offers adds up to a greater savings)
  • proper retail-centric e-Procurment augmented with supplier and product management could prevent 90%+ of overpayments to begin with (and Lavante, Inc. proved that over a decade ago — why else would PRGX have acquired it and taken it off the market)
  • for every reliable AI-first services-as-software solution (as we all know that hallucinatory Gen-AI enables and amplifies fraud, security risks, bad decisions, etc.), there is a traditional SaaS alternative for a fraction of the price that does the same thing if you can do without the natural language chatbot interface and a slick UX
  • once a consultancy gets you on outcome-pricing, they are going to focus on projects where they know you are doing particularly poorly, employ junior grunts with five year old playbooks guaranteed to increase efficiency and reduce costs (because you are way above market average cost or way below market average efficiency), and use AI to generate their reports and strategy presentations (and hope the junior grunts both do their job and catch all the hallucinations in the prepared documents)

But, as we said in our last post, that’s not the worst of it.

The worst part of all these “outcome”-based pricing offers is that they are masquerading the grift that keeps on taking! (Which is something any American reading this should be quite familiar with by now!)

It’s not the overcharging that is the most insidious part of “outcome”-based pricing models, it’s what’s behind them.

  • GPOs want you to turn over more and more and more of your procurement to them because, the more you turnover, the more you reduce staff, and the more dependent you become … locking you in for years to come as your fees skyrocket to the point where you’re paying more to them then it would cost you to buy a modern sourcing to settle solution (that supports regular and semi-automated tail procurement and a couple of buyers [who will simply review any tail-spend awards that are new or out of bounds compared to past awards and select the suppliers for regular sourcing events, which the platform will automate until award time])
  • recovery audit firms want you believe only they can keep millions in your pockets and software will never solve the rampant overspend the suppliers siphon out of you, will do anything they can to further the narrative that you’re going to lose millions without them, that you shouldn’t even try to improve your procurement processes, and it’s best to just turn more spend over to them … again locking you in for years and years when you could be taking steps towards reducing your overspend to almost 0 with the right technology, processes, and senior category managers preventing that overspend from ever happening
  • AI-first service-as-software firms want you to go all-in on their service, fire your buyers, and believe that only their tech can get stellar results before compute costs go through the roof, the AI bubble bursts, and/or everyone realizes that the whole thing is being orchestrated by the Wizard of New Oz, it’s a bigger circus than anything P.T. Barnum ever managed to assemble, and when the curtain closes, all you’ll be left with is empty pockets (and, when you’re not looking, just like the auto-classifiers of old, they will throw as many Another Intern at the problem as required to ensure you succeed)
  • the consultancies don’t want you do anything yourself because once you realize that, if you hire qualified people and installed modern systems, you can do it just as good yourself, do it for less, and save a lot of money … so they will try to keep up the savings and strategy show as long as they can

In other words, the whole goal of “outcome”-based pricing is to take away your self-sufficiency, capability, and even knowledge and ensure your entire existence is 100% dependent on them. That way, they stay super profitable at your expense with the grift that keeps on taking!

At the end of the day, the only vendor who won’t price on outcomes is one that knows they can’t actually deliver any, even with fakery, because any vendor who can will find a way to use this trend to inflate prices and grift your hard earned gains!

P.S. You shouldn’t be surprised. It’s the same old story with a new name. It’s been going on since the first modern Procurement solution hit the market.