Category Archives: Market Intelligence

2025 Is Just Another Year … But Is It All Doom and Gloom? Part 3 (The Talent Tussle)

It’s another year, unless you decide to make it otherwise. As per our last instalment, the first thing you can do is look behind the hype and find the right tech (and not the tech the vendors and analysts are trying to push upon you.) The next thing you can do is:

Identify Talent Outside the Norms

There’s not enough talent in Procurement as there is, so STOP LOOKING in Procurement. Unless you are going to be smart enough to bring back apprenticeships, and even then, that could be long term talent (especially if you are bringing in kids with no real world experience in what the company does, how to run a company, or even how to do basic buying).

Start looking in functions that understand the business need, and find the doers with good people skills, good planning skills, and good computing technology skills. Hire them and train them in Procurement. Working for a manufacturer buying mainly direct parts — recruit engineers as sourcing professionals. Working for a department store chain selling primarily CPG, hire a distributor rep who knows all the big brands, products, and logistic networks as procurement professionals. Looking to create better contracts, hire a lawyer with a STEM background as your contract manager. What to get vendor management right, hire former vendor account managers who worked for multiple big names that match your customer profile and train them on Procurement needs so they can find a balance that will NOT p!ss off your customers. It’s a lot easier to teach basic Procurement than engineering, advanced logistics modelling and management, law and risk management. Especially to reasonably skilled and intelligent engineers, Masters of Operations Management in logistics, lawyers, and economists specializing in econometrics (and risk management). I’ll tell you one thing, learning everything a Procurement Manager did buying a nine (9) figure category was way easier than designing one of the first Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization solutions that hit the market (and the first with multi-line item support, as recognized by Gartner 25 years ago), and that’s with a PhD and degrees in mathematics and computer science. It’s not Procurement that’s hard, it’s the people and planning skills that are hard, and that comes from doing the hard STEM (-based) degrees and getting real world experience applying those degrees. And if you can find the engineer, lawyer, economist, etc. who’d rather work with people than machines, and offer them a bit more, those are golden hires that will quickly transform your operation once you teach them what Procurement does (as they are also seekers of efficiency and outcomes).

The reality is that Procurement skill is not buying skill, it’s relationship management skill; it’s strategic planning skill; it’s logistics management and supply assurance skills; it’s quality management; it’s risk identification, mitigation, and management; it’s everything but buying. You can automate an e-auction or a multi-round RFP to do buying, or outsource it to a GPO if you don’t even want to think about it at all. The value of Procurement is not just cutting costs and keeping them down, but it’s keeping the business running, and that requires, as they say, mad skillz, and those aren’t found in traditional Procurement departments staffed by the island of misfit toys, despite what some bloggers may claim.

And then, once you have that talent, remember that they need good solutions and that

There Are Affordable Solutions

If you think solutions still cost mid to high seven figures when all is said and done, I have news for you. It’s not the noughts (even though you may feel like it because budget requests always end in the nots and get you in knots), it’s the twenties. (And if you don’t start roaring, the 20th century showed us what awaits in the thirties.) And good cloud-native SaaS solutions cost two orders of magnitude less. Enterprise licenses for BoB modules that can do everything an average mid-sized plus business needs to do (and more) start in the five figures, with starter solutions for SMEs and smaller mid-sized businesses being cheap enough to put on a P-Card. We’ve already told you about Spendata for spend analysis, but there are solutions for every step of the cycle.

You have (pay-as-you-go) solutions like Market Dojo or Serex Procurement for sourcing. New players like Bedrock and Canopy for SXM (and if you just want survey powered SPM, check out Vendor Score IT). CLM, check out Curtis Fitch or an AnyData Solution. SME Procurement — get yourself a Blue Bean. Or, if you want a full Procurement Suite with proven performance at the mid-market and F500 levels, bundle up everything you need, pay a reasonable six figure fee, and off you go to a Vroozi or Eyvo. Can’t manage those categories? Go do an Airflip. Not enough service management, it’s trivio with Zivio. Vendor Data Nightmare. You don’t need a team of overpriced Big X consultants, you just need a Tealbook. Too many apps? Get a Focal Point. SaaS subscriptions out of control, lock them away in SaaSrooms. And so on. (More information on most of these can be found in the SI Vendor Archives. Also, while the dives are not nearly as deep, Mr. Meads does his best to catalog the mid-market providers on his Procurement Software.site. It may not capture the Mega Map, but trust when I say that’s a good thing!)

Moreover, these solutions don’t take months to implement and years to integrate. They take a flip of a software switch to activate, usually a few hours to days at most to configure, and the only delay is usually your IT department providing the integration details to the necessary systems or producing the data dumps for flat file upload (which will then have to be cleansed, enriched, and mapped because your data will be dirty.) Some of these (like true DIY analytics, vendor performance assessment, and e-Procurement enhanced with full internal catalog [cross-indexed with active contracts and agreed to pricing], punch-outs, GPOs, and third party marketplace support) will deliver an ROI the DAY you start using them.

So get them … and use them!

2025 Is Just Another Year … But Is It All Doom and Gloom? Part 2 (Real Tech!)

As per our first instalment, it all depends on your point of view and whether you are willing to look beyond the hype, buckle down, and get the real job done.

For instance, just the following five technologies will eliminate 95% or more of your tactical sourcing, procurement, and supplier monitoring work — and all you have to do is find them, properly implement them, and use them. Let’s talk about them briefly.

Real DIY Analytics

The ability to analyze the data you want, when you want, how you want, enriched and augmented using the auxiliary data you want … and not in predefined dash-boards or hidden “AI Agents” which may, or may not, do the analysis you want (and need) … cannot be underestimated! Real value comes from ad-hoc analysis and investigating hunches, abnormalities, and trend changes when you discover them; not days, weeks, or months later when the “cube” has been refreshed, and it might be too late to correct a problem or capture an opportunity!

Remember, this is not 2005, this is 2025, and there are at least half a dozen great DIY (spend) analysis solutions that will do most of what you want, for a price tag that is a fraction of what you might expect, and if you are okay with full DIY, some of these start at a price you can put on a P-Card. For example, Spendata Classic (which can handle data sets up to 5 Million Rows) can be obtained for $699 a year, and Enterprise, which can handle data sets up to 15 Million records, which comes with unlimited use for 5 users (and view licenses for more), and some consulting and setup, starts at an amount that will surprise you. (You can still put it on a P-Card if you pay monthly.) And there is literally nothing you can’t do in it if you’re willing to apply a little elbow grease. It truly is The Power Tool for the Power Analyst.

(Strategic Sourcing Decision / Supply Chain Network) Optimization

Yes, it’s math. But you know what? Math works! And when you use deterministic math, it’s 100% accurate, every time! And it’s one of only two technologies in S2P+ that was been proven (by multiple analyst firms) to repeatedly identify 10%+ savings year-over-year (but since this was pre-COVID and pre- the 47th, we need to amend this finding to adjust for inflation and tariffs). And as an FYI, the other technology was NOT AI. (It was proper DIY spend analysis. Only Human Intelligence can intuit where to look for previously unidentified opportunities, the best AI can do is just follow a script and run standard analysis. Furthermore, the thing about spend analysis is that an analysis that identifies an opportunity only helps you ONCE — once you capture the opportunity, the analysis is useless. You need to do a new, and different, one.)

Rule Based Automation

When you think about most tasks across Source to Pay, most of them are just execution of simple, easily defined processes — most of which don’t require much (if any) intelligence and, thus, don’t need AI (and shouldn’t use an unpredictable AI agent when you can encode a process that gets it right, guaranteed, every single time. (Plus, the way you want to source, buy, pay, track, manage, etc. is probably a little bit different than your peers, and who knows how the AI Agent would do it for you. You certainly don’t!)

With rule based automation, you can easily execute an entire sourcing event in the background all the way to award if you like. It can run auctions, it can run multi-round RFPs with detailed feedback (it’s all calculations, response comparisons, and decisions on what data you want to share and how blinded you want it), it can run analyses and optimizations, it can calculate recommended award decisions subject to the constraints and goals that matter to you, present that to you for acceptance, or, if it’s a simple winner take all or top 2 situation, create the award automatically, send it out, get supplier acceptance, assemble the contract, and send it for e-Signature. You don’t need Agentric/Gen-AI, just tech we’ve had for over a decade!

Machine Learning

Now, when it comes to Enterprise Master Data Management and Administration (E-MDMA) and Invoice Processing, it can be quite a lot of work to keep up with the mapping, cleansing, and enrichment rules, and you don’t want to have to manually define all the new rules every time a new data element appears or a new invoice format arrives, especially if the system can auto-detect/”guess” 90% of the time through rule re-use and generalization. With machine learning, the system can keep track of your corrections, mathematically extract models, and adjust it’s rules to handle the new mapping again automatically as well as improve its suggestion logic when it doesn’t know what to do — increasing the chance that you just have to “accept” a new rule vs. defining it from scratch. (Unlike Gen-AI which just tries to find similar patterns somewhere to present you with something that may or may not have any correlation to your business and even reality!) And we’ve had great non-(pure-)Neural Network machine learning that works great with enough data for decades! Predictive analytics was making huge progress late last decade before this Gen-AI BS took over and could have helped Procurement departments automate 90%+ of what they wanted to automate with just a bit more development and effort by the leading vendors — it just required a bit more time, money, and focus. (Gen-AI has set us back a decade!)

Analytics Backed Augmented Intelligence

We don’t need machines to make decisions for us (especially when they can’t think, or even reason), we need machines to do calculations for us that help us make the right decision quickly and effectively. We need the machine to automatically identify and retrieve all of the relevant data, do all the relevant situational and market analysis, do all the predictive trend analysis, identify all of the typical responses with respect to the situation, predict the likely success of each, and present us with a set of ordered recommendations, complete with the calculations and supporting analysis, so we can pick one or realize that the machine didn’t/couldn’t know about a recent event or a human factor and that none of the responses are right (and that only we could craft one, with full information on the situation). The machine may not think, but the thunking it can do far exceeds our computational ability (billions of computations a second, all flawless), and that’s EXACTLY what we should be using the machine for.

If we give up on this Artificial Intelligence BS (even if the current models are right, machines need to be 100 Million times more powerful for it to even “mimic” human intelligence. That’s not happening any time soon) and instead just give all the machines all the (boring) grunt work, leaving us free to do what they can’t (strategy and relationships). If we do so, we can be at least 10 times as productive as we are now and deliver on the promises Gen-AI / Agentric AI / AGI never will, and do so at a small fraction of the cost. And oh, we have that tech today … we just need to deploy and integrate it properly!

And this is just the beginning of what you can do when you look beyond the hype and use your Human Intelligence [HI!] to cut through all the BS.

2025 Is Just Another Year … But Is It All Doom and Gloom? Part 1 (Find Out!)

So now that I’ve myth-busted all the trends and predictions, told you yet again that AI won’t save you, told you that all the upbeat “influencers” are just dreaming (and should get back to reality and spend a few more years, or decades, in the trenches), that things aren’t going to rapidly and magically change, and popped all of your bubbles of joy (because they were all fake), what should you do? Should you just crawl back to the dungeon in the Tower of Spend that they’ve locked you in?

No. Just because the hype is all fake, the talent is scarce, the budget isn’t what you hoped, the risks are worsening, and your stress levels are at an all time high, that doesn’t mean all is lost, that all tech is fake, that you can’t find talent, that you can’t do something with the budget, or that you can’t manage the worst of the risks.

It just means that you have to

  • look beyond the hype,
  • identify talent outside the norms and do more with less,
  • realize that not all solutions are overpriced or unaffordable,
  • need to identify which supply disruptions will cripple you and which risks are most likely,
  • keep calm and carry on,
  • roll up your sleeves, and
  • be ready to use your Human Intelligence (HI!).

Look Beyond the Hype.

As we’ve told you time and time again.

  • AI won’t save you
  • Gen-AI won’t help you do anything that is not essentially (large) document (collection) summarization
  • You can’t turn it all over to the machine

This doesn’t mean that

  • you can’t use tech to do most of the boring, tactical, drudgery that you are doing now,
  • you can’t use automation to improve your productivity, or that
  • you can’t use AI to improve your decisions and outcomes.

It just means that you can’t expect that these solutions are the magical big read easy button silver bullet solutions to all your problems that the vendors are promising, regardless of what fancy words they use. (Always remember that AI really stands for Artificial Idiocy and you will do so much better in tech selection, especially when Gen-AI is involved, because hallucinations aren’t a feature, they are a function of the underlying model!)

The reality is that if you stop looking for Artificial Intelligence, which doesn’t exist (and definitely don’t fall for AGI), and start looking for Augmented Intelligence, then, if you are willing to look hard, you can find some really good solutions. As we pointed out in our recent article on You Don’t Need Gen-AI to Revolutionize Procurement and Supply Chain Management — Classic Analytics, Optimization, and Machine Learning You have Been Ignoring for Two Decades Will Do Just Fine!, if you pick the right technology for the task, you can get great results.

For instance, just five technologies will eliminate 95% or more of your tactical sourcing, procurement, and supplier monitoring work. In our next instalment, we’ll talk about what they are and how they will change your life!

For Procurement, 2025 Will Be … A Year.

That’s it. And that’s all folks!

You want more? Even though we just did a 12 part series that was myth-busting 2025 2015 Procurement Predictions and Trends?

Wow! Either you are an unwavering dreamer or a sucker for punishment!

In addition to every major trend and prediction being a straight-forward copy of last years’, where only the cool tech has changed (name), every prediction that goes too far from the norm will prove to be, as always, dead-wrong. 2025 is just a continuation of 2024 (but worse), which was just a continuation of 2023, all the way back to 2020 (which was just 2019 to the nth degree thanks to COVID-19). Except now we have more disruptions caused by the return of the 45th as the 47th who, on his whims or the whims of his Billionaire buddies, will revive a whole host of disruptions to throw at you that you hoped you were done with years, or decades, ago. (Enjoy tariffs! Enjoy sanctions! Enjoy closed borders! And that’s just the beginning. They have to Make America Great Again at any cost! [Just remember, it’s their definition, not necessarily yours.])

But here’s a few more points we need to address.

1. This won’t be the year of Outcomes.
Why? Because every year is the year of “Cost Savings”. Costs keep going up. Risks keep going up. Competition keeps increasing. Sales keep staying flat (or falling) because of constantly decreased buying power in the working class. And investors are demanding ever increasing profit margins. There’s no room to focus on anything else as far as the C-Suite is concerned. (Because, as we pointed out, they only care about short term profits. Long term thinking was thrown out the window over three decades ago.)

2. AI Agents won’t save you.
Why? Simply put, they are dumber than doornails, and you need real Human Intelligence (HI!) to solve today’s Procurement problems. But we all know that the more tech appears to accelerate while competition races costs to the bottom, the faster it’s experimented with. And we mean experimented with. Many organizations will try, and even buy in, but when these solutions start failing, the tech will be abandoned and organizations will back of from tech until the next tech craze solution hits the market.

3. Apprenticeships won’t reappear.
Why? Because organizations won’t pay for training, and that’s paying an employee to learn and a senior employee to mentor. While it is the only way to save certain professions in North America, the lack of foresight up until now should tell you that there’s just not enough foresight to bring this back en-masse, which is what is needed. (In other words, you may see these reappear in a few select enterprises as a counter to DEI programs that were abused and recently terminated, but they will be the exception and not the rule, and not likely to stick around.)

4. The coming M&A surge cycle won’t help you, even though it will be the biggest in two decades.
Just like a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a heaping pile of bull manure will smell as sh!tty. And with the over-investments likely to occur at its peak, it’s just going to drive the prices up on rather mundane solutions … while pushing likely better solutions out of business as they won’t have the funding to cut through the surge of marketing BS that is going to peak after these companies get huge cash influxes. (Because the tech and Procurement focussed founders of the better solutions, who are problem solvers and not snake oil salespeople, can’t hype their story as much as the savvy sales people and former CEOs who will manage to sell solutions with very little substance using their ability to smooth talk until the investment sounds sexy [even though a sober look would show it’s not a 10, but a 01]).

5. The new leaders being instated across the free world won’t save us and definitely won’t bring a new golden age to Procurement!
(They will bring a Guilded Age to trump the one a century ago, and since there is no Roosevelt on the horizon to save us, that is a very bad thing.)
Considering all they are interested in doing is lining their pockets and those of their Billionaire friends while still pretending trickle on economics, sorry, trickle down economics, is a good thing, fat chance. The best we can hope for is that they don’t start WW III.

In other words, it’s another year of hardship for Procurement, just like every year in every Procurement Manager’s history. Same struggle, just a different name for the problem and the tech of the day.