Category Archives: Market Intelligence

World Class Procurement Organizations Are Beginning to Align with the Business

A recent publication from The Hackett Group for Procurement Executives addresses “How Procurement Organizations Are Reinventing the Stakeholder Experience” that looked at world class procurement organizations, which continue to outperform their peer group by a wide margin (by up to 5M in cost savings for a typical company), and found a surprising result.

We’ve known for quite some time that world class Procurement organizations, also known as The Hackett Group Top 8%, outperform their peers. We’ve known that some of these generate savings up to 41% higher than other (laggard) organizations. But we did not know that almost twice as many world class organizations (83% vs. 44%) have dedicated resources that act as liaisons between Procurement and the rest of the business.

As the authors state, raising stakeholder satisfaction levels builds trust and helps procurement gain the organizational permission to take on higher-value work. This is confirmed by the Hackett Group’s database of thousands of benchmarks across hundreds of performance studies which found that organizations that continue to invest in activities that elevate their role to that of a trusted advisor are taken more seriously, especially when they communicate that activity appropriately to the other departments in the organization. Furthermore, when these Procurement organizations are seen as a valued business partner, they generally report 68% higher savings! (This comes by way of an average cost reduction of 3.5% vs. 2.1% and an average cost avoidance of 1.2% vs 0.7%.)

Simply put, world class Procurement organizations have climbed to the top of the hierarchy of supply (which the doctor and the maverick discussed in their piece on “The CPOs Agenda I: Availability and Delivery”), having mastered supply assurance, cost reduction, and demand management. They listen and engage the internal customer, understand the customer’s needs, manage the relationship, offer them a superior service experience, and get better results. They follow all of the best practices the doctor and the maverick have been, and will be, discussing* over on the spendmatters.com/cpo site, and are seeing the return.

* The Agenda series has been broken up into three series:

  • the Conundrum# serieswhich discusses the outside-in issues putting pressure on, and shaping, Procurement
  • the Agenda serieswhich discusses the most pressing objectives on the CPO’s plate that are required to respond to the outside-in issues
  • the Value Drivers serieswhich discusses the primary actions that a CPO can take to realize the objectives on their journey to master the hierarchy of supply

# the doctor‘s terminology

Procurement Outsourcing is On the Rise

But is it the dawn of a transformational era?

Everest Global just released it’s Annual Report on Procurement Outsourcing, which it called the dawn of a transformational era, where it found that the procurement outsourcing market is growing at a rapid pace (12% year-over-year in 2014) but that it is in a state of flux with record new deal signings intertwined with high end-of-year terminations (26%), indicative of service provider switching (or, sometimes, the pulling of the function back in-house because not all outsourcing decisions outsourced the right functions). (However, 2 providers, Accenture and IBM, still command over half of the Annualized Contract Value and the next two largest providers, Xchanging and GEP, command about 17% of the ACV, which means that two thirds of the market is dominated by four providers.)

This, and other findings discussed below, was based on Everest Group’s database of over 1,100 Procurement Outsourcing contracts (each worth over 1M with managed spend typically in the 50M+ range), its database of operational capabilities of roughly 20 Procurement Outsourcing providers, and ongoing surveys and interactions.

There were seven key messages in this report, including the rapid 12% year-over-year growth, but the three we are going to focus on are:

  • The value proposition is transitioning from a cost-focussed model to a cost+value model, where strategic drivers such as market intelligence, supplier relationship management, and operational excellence are gaining more importance
  • The scope of contracts is expanding to a more end-to-end approach
  • The role of technology is growing, with increased adoption of end-to-end platform-based offerings

Advancement of the Value Proposition

In the beginning, outsourcing was mainly focussed on economics (cost reduction):

  • procure goods and services at the best prices
  • optimize activities to be cost efficient

More recently, outsourcing has been focussed on efficiency (cost avoidance):

  • spend consolidation to drive further impacts (with volume pricing)
  • satisfaction of complex demands
  • quality as well as price (to reduce warranty/return costs and protect the brand)

But now outsourcing is starting to focus on value generation:

  • the outsourcer is trying to become a strategic partner and not just a cost centre
  • the outsourcer is trying to define and drive business outcomes that impact overall growth
  • the outsourcer is trying to predict market trends to help organizations adapt to, and take advantage of, macroeconomic shifts early

How? Outsourcing is becoming more interested in identifying innovative suppliers, tracking and enforcing compliance and risk management, and gathering and harnessing the power of market intelligence.

Increasing Contract Scope

While many outsourcing contracts start out as Source-to-Contract (S2C), where the outsourcer helps the organization identify savings in indirect, non-strategic, or even strategic categories where the organization just does not have the volume, many are transitioning to Source-to-Pay (S2P) contracts where the provider also takes over the back-office invoice management and accounts payable function. Similarly, those contracts that started out as (P2P), because the organization thought its first priority was freeing up resources for strategic sourcing, are transitioning to S2P as well because these organizations realize that a third party can source those categories that it does not have expertise in better than the organization can.

More Prominent Technology

“Cloud”, Big Data, Digitization, and Consumerization is reshaping the Procurement Outsourcing marketplace as organizations demand more from their outsourcing providers and outsourcing providers look for an edge over their peers. With the proliferation of S2P SaaS solution offerings on the marketplace, outsourcing providers can not only offer S2P services but also enterprise S2P platform deployments where the customer organization not only gets platform access, but the ability to use the platform for their sourcing projects as well.

These are promising findings. Given that most Procurement departments are under-staffed and that no Procurement department can be an expert in every category and every technology, it’s good that there are maturing outsource providers that can add value to the organization and not just drain dollars.

And the other findings, which can be found in Everest Global’s just released Annual Report on Procurement Outsourcing, the dawn of a transformational era, are promising as well. It’s worth checking out.

Data Analytics is Big Money, But

Last Friday, Palantir raised $450 Million in a new round of funding, at a valuation of almost $20 Billion, making it the fourth most valued “startup” to date with almost 1 Billion in funding including Founders Fund, Tiger Global Management, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm.

But it’s not just big data that generates big money (for the software provider) and big value (for the organization that has [access to] it). It’s big analytic power. And, as SI has indicated repeatedly, the data set doesn’t necessarily need to be that big to identify considerable savings opportunities.

A million transactions might not be more insightful than 1,200 transactions. If the transactions are for 10 different products from 10 different suppliers over the course of the year, a single summary transaction for each month for each supplier-product pair that summarizes the lowest price paid, the average price paid, the highest price paid, and the total paid is just as informative from a spend analysis perspective. Given this data, the buyer can see, for each product, how much money it would have saved if it always bought at the lowest price, how the price is trending, and how much could be saved by using a contract to lock the product in at a price less than the current market price. The other 998,800 transactions are not needed.

In other words while you need large spend cubes to find value opportunities, which will often depend on redefining categories, redefining shipping lanes, redefining delivery schedules, and so on, you can often get away with cubes that are at most, hundreds of thousands of well defined (summary) transactions (for the right time period). Millions of transactions are typically not necessary, and that’s why you can do enterprise wide spend analysis on a laptop with the right spend analysis tool (like busiq.com) as you can generally define a transaction set of just a few million transactions that covers the last three years and fits in memory!

Tips to Advance Your Procurement Career

Earlier this month, over on Spend Matters, the prophet coined an article on “5 insider tips to make more money in Procurement” which is quite interesting, and in the doctor‘s view, mostly on the money. According to the prophet, if you want to earn more money, you should:

  • Choose Your School Wisely
  • Take Advantage of Scholarship Programs
  • Become a Hacker
  • Start Out in Consulting
  • Learn the Language

the doctor certainly agrees whole-heartedly with 1, 3, and 5. 2 and 4 are good suggestions, but they are not necessarily always the right move. In order to explain, we’ll first discuss the tips that are always relevant, with a few slight modifications.

Choose Your Education Wisely

Maybe Sales and Marketing, which are led by MBAs*, which can be earned by any dummy while squatting on the toilet, only care about the name of the school (because it’s not like they actually learned anything in school anyway), but smart Procurement professionals — who realize that you have to analyze spend; do in-depth Kraljic, SWOT, and Kaplan & Norton analyses; develop detailed category strategies; build sophisticated cost (and optimization) models; negotiate detailed, risk mitigating, contracts with exit strategies, and execute. This requires a lot of knowledge, skill, and experience. And while experience cannot be taught, a good mentor will not be able to guide you if you do not have the skill, and foundational knowledge, to understand his teachings. It does not matter how good your sourcing sensei is if you are not ready to learn the lessons she is prepared to teach. So choose the right program in school, and the right continuing education or professional association after school as learning is a life-long process in Procurement.

Expand Your TQ

A hacker is someone who can do a heck of a lot more than use Access or a data mining tool. A heck of a lot more. However, in order to excel in Procurement, a Procurement professional needs to know a lot more than how to use Microsoft Office. Learn how to access public market data sources, how to use use open source or share ware data analysis tools to analyze data sets, how to apply basic statistics to a population to identify a distribution and appropriate pricing or sales trend algorithm, and get any hands on experience you can with best-of-breed operations research or Procurement platforms.

Learn the Lingo

It’s critical to not only learn the language of Procurement, but also the language of Finance. In order to be taken seriously by the C-Suite, you have to speak the language they understand, and that is Finance. Being able to talk in their language, which includes measurements like ROI, ROIC, RONA (which does not refer to the home-improvement chain), etc. gets their attention. It’s not just the language, because most multi-nationals use English as the official language, it’s the lingo.

Now onto the tips that are normally good, but sometimes iffy.

Take Advantage of Scholarship Programs

You want to search for these, but not all scholarships are beneficial. If they just give you cash, that’s great. If they connect you to a good network, that’s great. But if they require you to do an internship with a laggard company or, even worse, agree to work with that laggard company for two years upon graduation, that might not be the best deal.

Start Out in Consulting

the prophet thinks this is a good idea because a big-5 background or strategy firm background gives you a pedigree [that] can help with compensation. This is true, but great results can also get you a great compensation package. Maybe you’ll have to change jobs to get it, but, in Procurement, money talks, and the more you save, the more it talks. So, when deciding on your first job, take the job that will present you with the greatest opportunity to make a mark for yourself, which is not necessarily the job with the biggest name firm. But if all opportunities are equal, then it makes sense to go with the pedigree.

the doctor has deep disdain for many MBA programs, and many executive MBA programs in particular, that promise a lot but, in actuality, deliver very little. In other words, the doctor believes that educational program investigations should not be limited to, the now defunct, Trump University. (He understands why though. Trump is now a prominent figure, so it’s no surprise why the investigations are focused on an institution that he is connected with.)

Why You Should Not Build Your Own e-Sourcing System, Part IV Decision Optimization

In Part I, where we noted that Mr. Smith was right in his recent post on “thinking of building your own esourcing system please don’t” over on Spend Matters UK where he pleaded with those organizations, and particularly those organizations in the public sector, who thought they could build their own e-Sourcing system not to. We gave a host of reasons on why they should not because, like Mr. Smith said, they are

  • going to waste OUR money building it,
  • waste exorbitant amounts of money keeping the system up to date and compliant with ever-shifting legislation, and
  • only feed those dangerous delusions at best (and possibly create an epic disaster as 8 of the 11 greatest supply chain disasters of all time were caused by technology failures, and 6 as a result of software platform failures)!

Realizing this isn’t enough to convince the smuggest and most deluded from considering the notion, we are diving in and addressing some of the difficulties that will have to be conquered, one primary module at a time, ending today with Decision Optimization.

The simple fact alone that there have never been more than seven software providers on the market at any time selling a true strategic sourcing decision optimization (SSDO) platform, compared to the dozens that have offered spend analysis and the hundreds that have offered some form of e-Negotiation should be enough to make you cower in the closet and pee your pants. But if it isn’t, let’s start by examining the requirements for a true SSDO platform, as outlined in the e-Sourcing wiki-paper.

  • solid mathematical foundations
  • true cost modelling
  • sophisticated constraint analysis
  • what-if capability

As the doctor clearly said in the wiki-paper, the tool must be based on a sound (correct) and complete algorithm (capable of analyzing every possibility, not just statistically relevant or likely possibilities) that analyzes an accurate representation of the problem and not a (heuristic) simplification thereof. Generally speaking, a decision support tool built on mixed integer linear programming or constraint programming techniques will meet these rigid requirements and provide true decision optimization while tools based on heuristic techniques, evolutionary methodologies, or simulation models will generally not meet these requirements. In other words, you need top notch A+ mathematical knowledge and computing theory knowledge in the operations research, logistics, and sourcing domains, and these individuals are very few and far between. We’re talking a rarity of about one in ten million. Do you really think that individual is in your basement wasting his life doing your IT support? Really?

True cost modelling is more than just breaking a cost component down into a list of factors and asking for a value. Many cost factors are dependent upon sophisticated calculations, such as fuel surcharges based upon the distance and the weight or contingent labour charges with overtime calculations, expenses, etc. Complex formulas will need to be supported, and the logic just to determine the proper evaluation sequence will be quite sophisticated in itself.

And what-if capability is more than just making a copy of a scenario and changing a cost or a constraint, it’s the ability to compare scenarios side-by-side and understand the driving forces behind the cost and the award. Why is the constrained scenario 10M more than the unconstrained scenario? Which constraints are driving the costly award? What is the true cost of a constraint — it’s not just dropping the constraint and seeing how much is saved. That’s the cost of the constraint when all other constraints are present. It’s really the cost of the constraint against the unconstrained scenario. And so on.

But this pails in comparison to constraint support. As per the e-Sourcing wiki-paper, (at least) four constraint types are required, and these are not easy to define (and definitely not easy to build in a real instance of a model against a real sourcing event). For example, complex constraints cannot be implemented by a simple equation (pair). Some constraints require four, seven, eleven, or more related equations in a group of equations to be implemented. And these equations have to be consistent with every other equation in the model, of which there could be tens or hundreds of thousands thereof.

In other words, building the model is an almost mythical feat. There’s a reason there’s never been more than seven vendors offering a true strategic souring decision optimization solution and that the rarity of individuals who can even attempt to do so is at least one in ten million. Sometimes building a strategic sourcing decision optimization model requires as many as six impossible things before breakfast on a daily basis. The definition of a simple model of decent complexity requires about 10 pages of intertwined equation (template)s. They make modern MCNF (Multi-Commodity Network Flow) models look like elementary school math in comparison. In other words, they are about ten times the complexity of the following single page MCNF model (taken from D. Hejazi’s PhD thesis), which is enough to earn you a PhD.


Complex MCNF Model.
And, compared to the model you need, this is the easy button. Still think you can do it in-house?