Category Archives: Event

It’s Conference Season Again — Do We Have to Talk About the Future?

Conference season is around the corner and, with it, plenty of talks on the Future of Procurement, Procurement in 2015, and Procurement 2025 — What it Will Take to Get There.

Regular readers will know the doctor is beginning to really despise this. Why? First of all, as will be outlined in an upcoming series of posts, it’s a lot of the same old, same old … which, in some cases, will be recycled for the tenth year in a row. Second, many* of the solution providers will be doing their best to instill in you an unnecessary sense of urgency to adopt second rate sourcing and procurement solutions that you aren’t ready for or that won’t deliver the returns you need now. (While 9 out of 10 companies do need better sourcing and procurement solutions, the solutions these companies need to start with often aren’t the solutions that money hungry solution providers push upon them.) Third, and most annoyingly, come the questions on what does the doctor think the future of Sourcing / Procurement is.

Why is this annoying?

  1. A Future Vision Doesn’t Change Much In Six Months

    Conference season is every six months, but unless a radical, ground-breaking, unexpected innovation hits the scene, between one conference season and the next, one’s future vision is not going to change a heck of a lot. And when one considers there has not been any radical new offerings in Supply Management in over 5 years, one’s future vision doesn’t have much reason to change at all.

  2. Tomorrow Has Come And Gone Many Times, but The Promised Future Has Not Arrived

    If you look at the predictions for 2020/2025, they are not that much different than the predictions for 2010/2015 that were made 10 years ago. Why? First of all, as per our last point, there haven’t been any radical new offerings in Supply Management in over 5 years (just steady improvements, with a few providers progressing much faster than others). Second, adoption of mainstream sourcing and procurement solutions remains slow. Third, the best solutions, and the advanced solutions that an organization really needs to make an impact on their Supply Management return, have not yet been adopted outside of a handful of best-in-class organizations.

  3. It’s Not What You Think the Future Will Be, It’s Where You Need To Go

    When an organization asks What’s the Future of Procurement, it’s asking the wrong question. First, while most of the consultancies, analyst firms, and providers feeding these consultancies and analysts firm their provider preferred messaging tend to agree on what the future is at a high level, each tends to tailor their message to the product or service offerings they can deliver to you today. Second, the future is in a state of flux due to uncertainties in supply management, business, and globalization. Third, and most important, it doesn’t matter what the future is, it matters what the future needs to be for your organization to succeed. The question an organization needs to ask is what is our Procurement Future — where do we need to go to succeed.

So while it’s very important to plan for the future, it’s very annoying to keep talking about it again and again in a way that adds nothing to the message. So, since the medium is the message, unless you want to be annoying, let’s ditch all this feel-good future talk and focus on figuring out how to get the right solutions into the companies that need those solutions now if those companies are to have any hope of having a future. Capis?

*Many, but, fortunately not all. But do you know enough to tell the difference?

The 2nd NLPA Conference: Tackling Topics that Matter!

On September 15th to 17th, the Next Level Purchasing Association is hosting its 2nd Procurement Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The agenda is almost final, and the topics being covered in the workshops are important ones. Unlike most conferences, the NLPA conference is focused on education — education that you need to do your job better (which is what conferences should be about, and not full-time speakers blowing their horns or vendors pitching their products, as you’d know what you had to buy without being told with the right education).

The workshops being offered are the following:

There’s No ‘I’ In Team: Collaborative Sourcing in a Decentralized Organization
Procurement success depends on collaboration — because procurement success depends upon consistent category management. Proper needs identification, vendor selection, contract creation, and compliance! Because, without compliance, maverick spend runs rampant — maverick spend with can only be eliminated when everyone is collaborating and on the same page.

Who’s on First? Strategies for Management and People Changes
Sourcing Innovation is always saying it’s technology, talent and transition for a reason. You need good technology to do your jobs effectively, technology that requires trained skill (talent), and technology that requires you to change your ways and transition to a better way of doing things. This is one type of management. But some people will be resistant to change, this is where transition management comes in — because they will need to be guided to the better way of doing things.

Charting Your Path to Victory: How to Successfully Manage Procurement Projects
Procurement is a lot more complicated than the 3-bids and a buy it was in the not-so-good ol’ days. In fact, some projects will require multi-phase vendor identification and pre-selection before you even begin the multi-phase negotiation and analysis that will lead to an award — which is where the real (multi-year) Procurement process begins! Which will have to be executed as plan, or you will have a lot of maverick (and expedited) spend.

Where is the Playbook: Hidden Risks of Terms & Conditions
Terms and conditions are the concealed weapons of the legal world. Concealed weapons that will be pulled on targeted upon you at the worst possible time. For example, Force Majeure, while seeming fair and innocuous, when combined with sole-source requirements, is a Masamune blade guaranteed to cut you every time. While it’s fair for a supplier to not be expected to deliver when a typhoon shuts down their factory, it’s not fair to have a non-breakable sole-source clause for the contract duration which could force you to shut your production line down if you are unable to get your parts in time.

One Week … to Uncovering Savings You Never Knew Existed!


It’ll be one week ’till you’ll look at me
Cock your head to the side and say “I’m listening”
Five days and you’ll look for me saying
“Get that together come here and teach me”
Three days and the lecture room
You’ll realize you’re too early, but yet not too soon
Next day I’ll have swayed you
but it’ll still be two days till you say I’m spot on!

That’s right, one week until the doctor gives the keynote at Vinimaya’s User Group Workshop on The New Archaeology of Spend Management: Uncovering Savings That You Never Knew Existed. So, if you’re part of the Vinimaya community, you might want to answer that invite.

Energy and Utility Procurement – Where Do You Stand?

Before ProcureCon released their recent “State of Indirect Procurement Benchmark Report”, they put out a study on “Energy and Utility Procurement” that summarized responses from 39 survey participants. While it was by no means an empirical study and the be-all-end-all to energy and utility sourcing, it does allow you to compare your own program to some extent and may inspire ideas for program enhancement.

One of the most interesting points of this report was that there doesn’t seem to be a single approach to any aspect of managing energy that respondents agreed upon. Like many other aspects of non-direct sourcing, companies are all over the board. This is likely due to the relatively new involvement of procurement, the sheer complexity of the category and variety of energy requirements on a company-by-company basis.

This is one of the many areas where, due to the varying degrees of regulation in different locales, the different types of energy (production) available, and the different views on the need for green, it helps to get with your peers and get different ideas, best practices, and perspectives — as well as the inside information on what works, and what doesn’t.

Fellow Canadians, your options for events have been limited, but now that ProcureCon has come North, you have one more option. Join the doctor at the inaugural ProcureCon Canada event (and register with code PCA14SI) and share your experiences.

Acquiring e-Sourcing and e-Procurement Technology: What Questions Should You Be Asking?

Join Sourcing Innovation and the doctor for the next NLPA Members-only webinar on Acquiring e-Sourcing and e-Procurement Technology; What Questions Should You Be Asking. Taking place next Wednesday, February 26, at 8:30 am Pacific, 11:30 am Eastern, and 16:30 pm GMT (London) time.

This webinar, which follows Novembers webinar on Making Sense of e- in Sourcing and Procurement, will outline the critical questions that must be asked when searching for an e-Sourcing or an e-Procurement solution.

In our last webinar, we clearly defined the sourcing and procurement cycle, indicated where each technology (e-Sourcing, e-Negotiation, e-Procurement, e-Invoicing, e-Auction, e-RFX, e-Contract, e-Payment, Procure-to-Pay, Source-to-Pay, etc.) fell, outlined what each technology did, and indicated the conditions that needed to exist for each solution to potentially be appropriate for your organization. This provided your organization with a set of questions it could ask to determine what technologies it needed to focus on as it looked to acquire new sourcing and procurement technologies to support it in its Supply Management Journey.

However, just knowing that your organization needs a solution is not enough, especially if its biggest need is a basic e-Negotiation suite that is theoretically available from over two dozen vendors. Which solution, or solutions, are right for your organization? Depending on the needs of the organization, it might be the case that only two out of twenty solutions will appropriately address the organizational needs, but unless the right questions are asked, it might look like six meet the needs and the organization will have a 66% chance of selecting the wrong solution.

That’s why the doctor of Sourcing Innovation is hosting this follow-up webinar on Acquiring e-Sourcing and e-Procurement Technology; What Questions Should You Be Asking. You’ll learn the critical questions that must be asked when searching for an e-Sourcing or an e-Procurement solution, some important questions that should also be considered for each major module, and how to structure a (multi-round) RFX for Success.

To register for this free event, login to the NLPA and navigate to the “Webinars” tab where you’ll find a registration link. Be sure to enter a valid email address as attendance details will be sent to you by email. Registration is free (as is basic NLPA membership) but attendance is limited, so sign up soon to ensure access to this event. (If you have forgotten your NLPA password, please visit the NLPA password reset page.)

See you next Wednesday, February 26, at 8:30 am Pacific, 11:30 am Eastern, and 16:30 pm GMT (London) time.