Category Archives: Decision Optimization

If I Succeeded in Destroying Dashboards, How Else Would I Improve Spend Analysis.

The smart alecks are correct — technically destroying dashboards is not adding anything to spend analysis so I didn’t actually provide a way to improve spend analysis technology, just the results you get from using it.

So if I succeeded and dashboards bit the dust, what would I do? (Besides banning integration points for report writers for all OLAP-based spend analysis products?*) Good question. Especially since there’s about a half dozen logical next steps.

Three things that would be useful if you had a true spend analysis product like Opera’s BIQ would be to:

  • Integrate Easy Should-Cost Modelling CapabilityThis way you can define a cost breakdown for a product or service you are looking to source and have the tool automatically generate an expected cost based upon current data, as well as a price-range, with confidence, based upon low, average, and high prices paid for the raw materials, energy, labour, etc. (provided that the should-cost model permitted base-cost definitions for any cost components you weren’t buying that were bought entirely by your supplier)
  • Optimized Awards Based on Historical Data and Business RulesYou don’t have to send out an RFX to get base market pricing if you are already buying a product, it’s in your transaction store. Nor do you have to run a complex event to determine the lowest cost providers for a market basket. Moreover, if you are buying commodity products and services with list prices, and all your suppliers do is give you a discount of X% for a guaranteed award, you don’t really need optimization to determine the lowest cost as it’s just a simple formula against current pricing. And if your only business rule is 2 or 3 way split, it’s just the 2 or 3 lowest cost suppliers with the appropriate risk mitigation. In this situation, it would be easy for spend analysis tools to build in some simple optimization capability to tell you your lowest cost buy, and if it’s close to your should-cost model, you can just cut a contract without going through a time-consuming sourcing event.
  • True Federation across Related Data SetsMost spend analysis tools are only capable of working on one cube built on one data classification at a time. This means that even though a user can pick the drill dimension order, only one set of data can be viewed at one time. But sometimes you want to drill into greater detail (such as who requisitioned all those widgets from the wonky supplier), and that’s not in the transaction file — so you need another cube with more detail on the invoice (history). Then you drill in on the augmented AP (cube) data until you get to the invoices associated with the supplier, switch over to the new cube and drill down to the line items of interest and retrieve the requisitioners. Another situation is where you are getting a lot of warranty returns, and you want to figure out what batches the returned items are in so you can determine whether or not the batches were bad and it will be cheaper to do a mass replacement (by just putting out a recall) than dealing with one breakdown at a time. In this case, you need to drill into the warranty cube and then branch over into the invoice cube to get the batch numbers associated with the appropriate goods receipts that are associated with the invoice.

These are just a few things that can be done, and all would simplify the life of an analyst. More to come at a later time but first, what would you do?

* If you don’t know why, you don’t know your spend analysis product limitations!

In What Way Would I Improve Spend Analysis?

When it comes to spend analysis there is at least one particularly powerful tool out there that will meet the majority of the needs of any organization and probably at least one tool that will do, with elbow grease, just about any analysis an analyst can think of. Since businesses have wanted reports and analytics since the days of the first spreadsheets, analysis tools are always advancing and most are beyond the ability of the average user to fully utilize their functionality.

So, given this fact, how would I improve spend analysis? And given that this question may imply that I may only make one improvement, just what would that improvement be? Especially since most tools don’t do (true) federation, don’t support full reg-ex (regular expressions), don’t understand semantics, and don’t run fast enough on large data sets — indicating that, as a PhD in CS with deep expertise in analysis, modelling, optimization, and semantics, there are theoretically a number of advancements I could bring to the table if I put my mind to it?

Despite the plethora of options available, today there is only ONE thing I would do to improve spend analysis. I’d make it impossible to do anything but spend analysis. Specifically, I’d make it illegal to include dash-boarding capability in any (spend) analysis product.

Why would I do such a thing? Besides the fact that I’ve been ranting since 2007 that dashboards are dangerous and dysfunctional, I would do such a thing because, among other things, they give you a false sense of security that, if mismanaged, could be so grave that, like the myth of Nero, you would fiddle while the factory burned.

Why would I ditch the dashboards and make it a crime punishable by any fate one could devise that was worse than death to include any capability whatsoever designed to support a dashboard? Because I just read this post on Purchasing Insight on “the inordinate cost of poor spend analytics” that said that it’s reckoned that more than 50% of businesses employ between 2 and 5 people to prepare and create procurement dashboards and spend reports. This is ludicrous. (No, not Ludacris.) If these people are senior analysts, then a large organization is spending more than 500,000 a year on salary and overhead to create dangerous and dysfunctional dashboards that spit out shiny spend reports that, after being analyzed the first time for inefficiencies, provide zero value to the organization. Once the report is analyzed, the inefficiency identified, and the problem corrected, and once this is verified in the next report, no subsequent report is going to tell the analyst, or management, anything new.

As SI has said again and again, the value of spend analysis is actually doing spend analysis, again and again, testing new hypothesis every time they pop into the analyst’s head. Yes, most hypotheses will yield nothing, but that’s not important because it only takes one insight to yield 100,000 worth of savings. If the tool is flexible, powerful, and configured appropriately, the user will be able to explore dozens of different analyses in a week, and if even one yields 10,000 of savings, that’s an (amortized) ROI of (at least) 5X. Spend analysis is analysis. Not dashboards and reports.

So if you really want to improve spend analysis — ditch the dashboards and focus your talent on real analysis. Otherwise, just download a free reporting engine off the internet. You’ll get the same worthless result, without forking out six figures for a tool you’re not really using.

Why Don’t We Hear Anything About Market Informed Sourcing?

Because the acronym is a MIS!

While I agree that we need more discussion around Sourcing Optimization, I don’t think calling it Market Informed Sourcing is going to help any just because people are afraid of the “O” word. Even though good optimization is “market informed” and uses up-to-date market data, people don’t really understand what “market informed” really is. When people hear informed, they tend to not only think of fact but opinion, and optimization is all about fact, not fiction.

In a recent 3-part series on Sourcing Optimization (Part I, Part II, and Part III) by Alan Geelson over on Spend Matters UK, of Keelvar, a company which SI reviewed in its recent post on Strange Name. Uncommon Results, he notes that while there is no consensus on the name that best describes the approach — Market Informed Sourcing (MIS) Sourcing Optimization, or Collaborative Sourcing, the view at the heart of these propositions, namely, that suppliers should be afforded the opportunity to have greater flexibility as to how they engage with buyers, is an important one. And optimization is what enables this.

Furthermore, it also enables all parties to play to their strengths without discriminating against any one group. Suppliers can submit “sealed bid” bids bundling and packaging lots together as they see fit, offering price breaks and rebates for certain volume purchases. And buyers can weight the advantages and disadvantages of aggregating spend with less suppliers, finding the right balance between economies of scale and risk mitigation should one supply source go down.

However, sourcing optimization still has not enjoyed mass adoption. Some reasons for this, as noted by Alan, include:

  • lack of process, technology, and key benefit understanding,
  • cost, which is believed to be prohibitive, and
  • perception of complexity.

In other words, as SI pointed out in its recent post on how, When It Comes to Optimization, You Need Every Insight You Can Get!, it all comes down to

  • misinterpretation and misinformation,
  • cost, and
  • fear.

Even though it should all come down to, as Alan points out,

  • finding savings without “squeezing” suppliers,
  • gaining greater control over outcomes with business constraints,
  • while keeping acquisition cost and operating costs down.

Maybe some day the truth will be known and accepted, but, until then we have to keep spreading the truth.

Keelvar: Are They Right For You?

As a preamble, in today’s post we’re not going to discuss whether or not optimization is right for you because the answer is an unqualified “it is” because there does not exist a vertical that is unable to benefit from an appropriate optimization solution that supports the right model. If you are a 100M+ company, you should be using optimization. Maybe not on all categories, because you don’t source categories where the return doesn’t exceed the cost of the effort, but on the large and strategic ones.

Instead, as a follow-up to yesterday’s post, we are going to discuss whether or not Keelvar is right for you.

Right now, most of the companies that use optimization are in the high-end of the market, with a few leading companies at the high-end of the mid-market dabbling in it. Furthermore, most of the optimization solution vendors out there are focussing on this market. As a result, as per a previous post, most of the mid-market is not using optimization because they see it as too costly and too difficult. Seeing this, Keelvar decided that what was needed was a solution that was focussed entirely on the mid-market and, more specifically, at the lower end of the mid-market. That’s the solution they built.

This has advantages, in that they have a large market they can go after, and disadvantages in that the simplifications required to make the solution useable by that market limit the solution’s flexibility and power for large problems that require complex models and powerful solutions capabilities. But since the high end market already has good solutions, that’s okay. Given the different needs of the lower mid-market, the higher mid-market, and the global multi-nationals that need almost customized solutions, and the different needs of well-staffed and well-educated Supply Management organizations and poorly-staffed organizations that need to augment their solutions with a lot of services, there is still plenty of room in the market for a new entrant as even the six market segments just defined (3 tiers, without services and services required) aren’t adequately covered by the current players.

So if you’re in the lower-end of the mid-market and you’re ready to start optimizing your sourcing, you should head on over to Keelvar’s site and check them-out. The solution might just work for you, and with event pricing starting in the low five figures and unlimited annual licenses starting in the extremely low six figures, it won’t take long to see an ROI — especially since Keelvar makes optimization affordable on an event basis on categories as low as 500K to 1M and on an unlimited basis on categories as low as 100K to 250K (because if you have an unlimited license, why not use it on every event — it doesn’t take long for 10K savings to add up!).

Keelvar: Strange Name. Uncommon Results.

In our last post we talked about a new entrant to the Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization arena that was about to take up the education gauntlet. That new entrant is Keelvar. A spin-out from the 4C research laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork that raised 750K Euros in 2012, it was formed as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company to help purchasers establish a balanced and cost-effective outcome between large and small suppliers, which can be critical to indigenous industry by way of a price-gathering mechanism that supports communication of creative ways in which waste can be removed, helping government departments and multinational companies reduce costs. (Source: Silicon Republic)

It does this by augmenting its auction and RFX-based technology platform with true strategic sourcing decision optimization technology, but doing so in such a way as to hide the inherent complexity from the average buyer. Unlike many competing solutions on the market, the Keelvar UI is designed using a wizard-based workflow that guides the user in the setup of a combinatorial auction that is then solved using an optimization engine that uses a mix of solver technology developed at the 4C research laboratory and commercial solvers.

The solution walks the user through a simple process that even an average buyer can handle. The user needs to only:

  • Define the event typeThe solution comes with a number of pre-configured event types, each of which has appropriate corresponding bid templates.
  • Select the products and services and define the lots (contracts)The bidding sheets can be auto-generated off of these templates.
  • Select the suppliersWho will be bidding? The system then sends out the appropriate auto-generated bid sheets, tagged to each supplier.
  • Accept the bidsWhen the bids are returned, the user has to specify what bids are accepted and are to be used in the scenario.
  • Define the constraints.For each pre-configured event type, the system supports a number of pre-defined constraints. These include:
    • Supplier Limits (Risk Mitigation)
      where the buyer specifies a minimum or maximum number of suppliers
    • Award Splits (Allocation and Capacity)
      where the buyer can dictate that a supplier, or the winning suppliers, get an award split, minimum, or maximum award
    • Quality/Delivery Requirements (Qualitative)
      if the model is a freight model, the suppliers can specify lead times and the buyer can insist upon a maximum lead time, etc.
  • Run the ScenariosThe solution then runs the unconstrained scenario, the constrained scenario, and outputs a report that summarizes the constrained scenario cost, the number of bidders, and how much more it costs than the unconstrained scenario.
  • Define What-If Scenarios (Optionally)The user can specify constraints to add or drop, run the scenario again, and compare it previous (and the unconstrained) scenario.
  • Output a full award reportOnce the user is happy with a scenario.

It’s as easy to use as an auction tool, which is something that cannot be said for many of the optimization solutions out there, and no math or understanding of optimization is required. Plus, it’s a true SSDO solution as it is based on solid mathematical foundations (as the scenario can be built and solved as a MILP model), supports true cost model (as some of the templates allow different cost factors to be defined), supports reasonably sophisticated constraints (and enough to meet the minimum requirements of a SSDO solution), and has what-if capability. It’s definitely not the most sophisticated or powerful tool out there, but it doesn’t need to be.

For your average mid-size company at the lower end of the range, the solution gets the job done and does it in a way that the buyer can understand. There are thousands upon thousands of companies out now that don’t need more than this.

So if you’re in the lower-end and you’re ready to start optimizing your sourcing, you should head on over to Keelvar‘s site and check them-out. The solution might just work for you.