Category Archives: Decision Optimization

Optimization, Do You Know What Comes Next?

Admit it. You don’t. You have no clue. You’re still struggling with the basics of model building, data collection, constraint definition, scenario comparison, and, most importantly, when you should use optimization (always, but not necessarily to make the award decision). It’s math, it’s hard, you weren’t trained, and you’re already struggling to keep up with the increasing demands placed upon your Supply Management organization by the C-Suite, stakeholders, and suppliers.

But you should. Costs, including labour and energy, are rising across the board. Inflation is about to make its way back with a vengeance. Markets are uncertain and in some places unstable. It’s getting to the point where all optimization on a category optimized in the last three years is going to do is limit cost increases to inflation. Unless the model is expanded, the category is redefined, or an innovative approach is taken — there will be no more savings to be found.

As a result, you have to take your optimization to the next level. You have to go from T-CAP (Cost of Acquisition and Production/Utilization/Distribution) to true TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) as you work your way to TVM (Total Value Management). You have to learn how to take your modelling and analysis skills to the next level. And you have to be innovative in your application of optimization.

And what does that innovation look like? To find out, download Sourcing Innovation’s new Illumination white-paper on Optimization, What Comes Next (registration required). Sponsored by Trade Extensions, this white paper presents six ways you can merge big data, analysis, and optimization to take strategic sourcing decision optimization (SSDO) to the next level and find savings and cost avoidance opportunities you would never have imagined even a year ago.

The reality is that even if you’re Hackett Group top 8%, regularly applying SSDO to high-dollar and/or strategic categories, and building nine, and even ten, figure sourcing events on optimization, you’ve barely mastered the basics of optimization 2.0. Since the doctor regularly interacts (and sometimes works) with five of the seven providers of SSDO technology (and the two e-CHAOS hold-outs have not upgraded their platforms substantially in years), including the true market leaders, he knows the extent of the projects they have supported and knows that even the most advanced organizations are just scratching the surface of optimization 2.0. But these providers are now taking their products to the next level and have started releasing the foundations of 3.0 capability, with lots more to come over the next few years. The organizations that adopt, and master, these 3.0 capabilities first will be decades ahead of their peers in supply mastery. Decades.

So, if you want to be one of this decade’s Supply Management leaders, download Sourcing Innovation’s new white-paper on Optimization, What Comes Next (registration required) and start preparing for the future of optimization today. It will be worth your while and when you start applying these techniques, you won’t be disappointed.

When it Comes to an Event, How Big is Too Big?

1 Category?
5 Categories?
25 Categories?

10 Commodities?
50 Commodities?
100 Commodities?

50 Lanes?
500 Lanes?
5000 Lanes?

It depends. How much can you handle at one time?

If you’re sourcing with optimization, the bigger the better. Tackle as many categories at a time that overlap with at least one other category, especially if you are dealing with physical goods that are coming from common locations. The way you save on logistics costs is to minimize the number of trucks, which occurs when you can combine as many shipments as possible as to minimize the number of LTL shipments.

Or if you are dealing with multiple service categories that can sometimes be provided by the same contract or temporary labour agencies. For example, engineers and software developers are often offered by the same specialist agencies; warehouse, janitorial, security and other unskilled labour are often obtainable from the same agency; and certain others specialize in legal, accounting, and similar trade professions.

Tackling them all as one mega-project doesn’t mean that you have to negotiate with them all simultaneously or that you have to create massive RFXs, Auctions, or bid-sheets. There’s nothing stopping you from organizing your sourcing events so that each category is being sourced simultaneously by a different team member, co-ordinated so that all of the bids come in simultaneously for a round of global optimizations to determine if there is any overlap in transportation or supply base that would suggest a (temporary) combination of categories or a splitting of transportation into a separate project.

Optimization isn’t just doing the best job you can on the event, it’s defining the right event in the first place. Sometimes the best way to do this is to look at a number of categories simultaneously when they are each in the middle of a sourcing project and see if the definition and split really is the right one. If the mega-optimization suggests something different, re-define the categories and events and continue the right way.

Just make sure that, when the event notice goes out, that you inform suppliers / carriers that the bids will be multi-round and that the scope of the transportation requirements might be increased or decreased after initial bid analysis and further category definition; or, in the services case, that this is a preliminary request for information and rate cards and that the suppliers should inform you of other services they can offer and standard rates for those as you may, if the option exists, expand your requests during the final RFQ / negotiation phase (as you want to be above board during the entire process).

In other words, a project is only too big when it exceeds the ability of your current team to manage it simultaneously. If the numbers involved makes someone fidgety, then it’s time they shape up or you find someone with a stronger backbone. If the tool you are using says it’s too big, then it’s time to get a new tool. It’s not too big if it doesn’t exceed your current potential, which for many leading sourcing organizations is well beyond what they think it is (as a result of sourcing providers with limited skill sets assuming that just because they can’t handle it that their client can’t handle it). There are teams out there that can handle Billion Dollar sourcing projects and tools that supper them. That’s about as big as it gets.

So, as Big Data Promoters like to say, Think Big!

Optimize, don’t Compromise!

Continuing on our theme of analysis and optimization, every e-Sourcing suite on the market will support your organization in its sourcing activities, but not every product will allow your organization to optimize it’s sourcing activities.

Optimization requires advanced sourcing capability, and advanced sourcing requires the ability to analyze data, not just collect and report on data.

This means, that at the very least, you will require:

  • true spend analysis,
  • true category analysis,
  • true cost-based bidding, and/or
  • true bid optimization.

Without at least one of these capabilities, you’ll never optimize your spend. So don’t even both to try without them.

Why Bidding Flexibility Is Important to e-Auction Success

Regardless of what you want to call it — expressive bidding, lotting, market baskets, informed sourcing, etc. — the ability to let a supplier bid the way they can give you the best price is very important to e-Auction success. If all you can support is simple auctions on an item by item basis, and quotes on an item by item basis, you are not going to get the best deal.

This is rather easily illustrated. For example, let’s say your business is clone computer assembly for mid-sized businesses who don’t want the Dell or HP premium. Let’s also say that you buy six different components for these computer assemblies: cases, power supplies, motherboards (with on-board everything to keep it simple), memory, hard drives, and cable packs.

If you are forcing a supplier into separate bids by item, and the level of detail they can quote is price per unit, shipping per unit, and extended warranty per unit, you’re probably going to end up with quotes looking like this:

Supplier 1 Supplier 2 Supplier 3
Component Unit Freight EW Unit Freight EW Unit Freight EW
Case 20 5 1 22 4 1 18 6 0
Power Supply 40 3 6 36 4 3 38 4 2
Motherboard 199 5 24 195 5 19 189 5 30
Paired Memory Pack 49 2 4 47 3 6 51 3 4
Hard Drive 78 4 12 74 3 8 81 4 7
Cable Pack 22 4 0 24 3 1 19 5 0
Total 49 2 4 305 12 30 37 11 0
Grand Total 450

Not bad for a clone server, but if you bid out the basket and allow the supplier to bid on just the components they want and do so as a bundle, you might find that you get this result:

Case Power
Supply		 Mother-board Memory Hard
Drive		 Cables Freight Warranty
S-1 B-1   19   38   20   8   5
S-1 B-2   45   71   5   8
S-2 B-1   20   33   6   2
S-2 B-2   195   14   5   10
S-3 B-1   45   72   5   9
S-3 B-2   185   14   7   30
Grand Total 414

An 8% savings by allowing a supplier to bundle bids according to their operational efficiencies!

Get it now?

If I Succeed in Destroying Dashboards and Razing Report Writers, What Next?

In yesterday’s post, where I responded to the smart alecks, I noted that, once dashboards are destroyed and report writers are razed, there was about a half-dozen next logical steps that could be taken to improve today’s spend analysis solutions, even if that solution was BIQ.

Should cost modelling, award optimization based on historical data and business rules, and federation across related data sets for deeper dives are pretty obvious. Are there somewhat less obvious advancements we should also be thinking of?

Of course. One rung up the ladder, three of them are:

Predictive Modelling

Once you have should-cost modelling, the next logical step is predictive modelling. Use historical data to extract pricing trends and predict likely future prices for the commodity. Use this to determine not only the best time to (re) source the category as well as using deep-dive analysis to determine the best strategy.

Optimize Supplier Relationships

Once you have optimized all of the awards based on historical data and business rules, you also have the optimal allocation by supplier. Once you have the optimized set of awards for each supplier, you can optimize the re-order schedule, shipping arrangements, and even production and sourcing schedules on behalf of the suppliers and take costs out one level down in the supplier chain. Helping your suppliers help you goes a long way to building good supplier relationships and increasing supplier performance.

Simultaneous Drill Across Multiple Data Sets

Once you have true federation, you want to split the screen and update the views to only contain the relevant data in each data set as you drill down through the data. Going back to our previous example, you start in the Payment cube drilling into the goods receipts associated with the wonky widgets, then switch to the Order History cube to find the initial requisitions, but when you drill on the user in the second cube, the first cube is updated to contain only those goods receipts associated with the user. The user can drill through either cube to find the data she wants, whichever is easiest, and both cubes update. She doesn’t have to go back and forth.

These are just a few more things that can be done, and all would simplify the life of an analyst. More to come at a later time but first, this time I’m going to insist that you tell me what you would do. :-;