Category Archives: Procurement Damnation

2025 Is Just Another Year … But Is It All Doom and Gloom? Part 6 (Wayward Son)

The real answer is: yes (for the majority) and no (for the minority). So be in the minority. And continue to

Keep Calm and Carry On

Ignore the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that the vendors and analyst firms are trying to instill in you on a daily basis in an effort to get you to buy, buy, buy something that you probably don’t need and definitely won’t work for you. (Just remember that tech project failure rate has reached an all time high of 88% [and climbing]. The more FUD you fall for, the more failure you’ll see in return.)

It’s not about the shiny new hotness, it’s about what actually solves your problems and works for you. And, as I’m not sorry to say, more often than not in back office data processing (which Procurement is), it’s usually the Old Busted Hotness that gets the job done.

Moreover, the fundamentals of problem identification and problem solving HAVE NOT changed.

  1. Understand the problem
  2. Formulate the problem
  3. Find the root cause
  4. Identify potential solutions
  5. Evaluate potential solutions (independent of marketing or underlying tech)
  6. Select and implement a solution

And you can do this using one or more general problem solving strategies. Moreover, if you need to understand the underlying tech, you can employ an expert to help you. When it comes to solution selection, the right consultants are cheap, especially when they have a solid foundation in Tech and the Domain in which you are trying to solve the problem, and you don’t, and these consultants already know a large number of potential solutions to help you evaluate. (Sometimes hundreds of them.) (Need help finding the right consultant? You can always contact the doctor.)

Furthermore, while it could be difficult to figure out the process you should be using and the system you should be using to implement the process, there are expert consultants who can help you map what you have, explain the art of the possible, explain the pros and cons of each process choice, and come up with the real requirements for a solution RFP (which should NOT be a list of feature and functions, and should not specify the how, only the what — and if you don’t understand why, engage a technology expert to help you with the solution/technology RFP and DO NOT use a FREE RFP Template as they are all lies)!

Roll Up Your Sleeves

Staples lied to you and all of the vendors repeat the lies daily. There is NO Big Red Easy Button. There is no Magic Gen-AI solution. There will be no Agentric AI that will come along and make your job super easy — and if you are using any of your intelligence whatsoever to make strategic decisions, the technology will not replace you. (But properly applied, it will enhance your performance beyond belief … you’ll be able to do the work of ten (10) or more peers! Now, this might be bad news for your peers if they can’t adapt and aren’t near the top of their game, but fortunately for us, talent is super scarce in Procurement and no one who’s good at their job should be in danger of losing it, as long as they are willing to skill up and keep performing).

But you will need to do a LOT of work to figure out what you need, why you need it, how you employ it, how you will utilize it most effectively, how you will achieve the ROI, and how you will build and sell the business plan. Then you have to manage the vendor selection process properly, the implementor/integrator process properly, the training and adoption process (because it’s NOT a matter of if you buy it they will use it, it’s more like if you buy it they will do everything they can to bypass it until it is easier to use the system than bypass it and everyone understands it). And when it comes to training the ML/AI enabled systems and verifying their recommendations, you won’t just need your brain on full, but your research skills on full as these systems are so convincing even when the recommendation is the worst recommendation possible that lesser minds will just accept the recommendation blindly.

Be ready to use your Human Intelligence (HI!)

The more advanced the technology gets, the MORE you need to use your human intelligence. Your job will get much more mentally challenging, as it will soon revolve entirely around strategy and system training (and, of course, human relations — what the technology cannot do), as the promises of an easy life multiply. However, once you select, implement, train, and wrap your mind around the new technology, the (physical) effort and drudgery you will have to employ will decrease significantly as that is the work that will be turned entirely over to the system. A human intelligence that can properly make use of augmented intelligence is the one that will enable Procurement to thrive.

And Remember

Just because 2025 is just another year, that doesn’t mean it has to be another year of struggle. Just because vendors won’t make a difference; analyst firms won’t make a difference; and the C-Suite likely won’t see beyond their desperate need for cost savings (if only to increase profit so the CEO can take home a few more million dollars he doesn’t need); that doesn’t mean you can’t make a difference. As we’ve pointed out, we’ve reached a point where you can, even with very little budget to help you. You just need to do it, start saving, and use those savings to invest in more tools and processes that create more value. But you have to take the lead. It’s up to you.

2025 Is Just Another Year … But Is It All Doom and Gloom? Part 5 (Risk Reduction)

It’s just another year, unless you look beyond the hype, identify true talent, give them real solutions, and then truly tackle the threats … with strategies for success.

Supplier (Plant) Shut Down

In reality, typically only three things shut down a supplier:

  • Bankruptcy
  • Disasters
  • Governments

With respect to each of these:

  • you can typically predict bankruptcy from financial monitoring, which is easily available for public companies, semi-available for private companies that survive off of international trade (just monitor the public trade data), and highly correlated with a noticeable decrease in quality or performance (which can be predicted off of your data)
  • you can’t predict disasters, but based on geo-location, you can predict type and likelihood, and subscribe to news-based event monitoring services to identify when one happens that likely impacts your supplier (and then verify) so you know the minute a disruption occurs, and not three months later when the order doesn’t materialize
  • governments will generally only shut down a company if it is a fraudulent enterprise or when they are taking something over that was private; your category expert consultant can let you know whether or not the country the supplier/plant is in has a history of forced public acquisition or is eyeing restrictions on the industry (and otherwise, the risk is pretty much non-existent)

Supplier Becomes Unreachable

This usually happens as a result of three things:

  • sanctions
  • border closings
  • customs / port shutdowns due to strikes

With respect to each of these:

  • sanctions are typically politically driven and hard to predict, but a sanction list monitoring service can inform you within 24 hours if a supplier or connected party has been sanctioned
  • border closings usually result from trade wars or real wars, and news monitoring can indicate potential that can be monitored, and once the threat gets too high, you can proactively identify new / switch suppliers
  • customs / port contracts with unions in terms of validity dates are typically public knowledge, and you can monitor when they end, and whether there is any news that negotiations have started once you get close (say 3 months) to expiry … as well as monitor statements put out by both sides during negotiations that could indicate a strike (vote) (and look at the history to see how often a strike [vote] results in a strike, how long it usually lasts, etc.)

Supplier Loses Access to Raw Materials

With respect to a supplier losing supply, they have the same risks you do with respect to supply lines, plus two more major ones and one more minor one:

  • sanctions, border closings, and strikes
  • mine collapse / crop destruction from a natural disaster
  • government reclamations or limitations on natural resource extractions
  • mine / well runs dry!

With respect to each of these risks, if you map your supplier’s critical supply chain:

  • you can monitor sanction lists for sub-tier suppliers and news sources for events that would lead to border closings and strikes as you do for your suppliers
  • you can monitor news sources for events that indicate a natural disaster that would threaten or destroy raw material supply
  • you can research past history and monitor news sources for indications a government might restrict access to or reclaim natural resources from the private supplier in your supply chain
  • you can contact environmental experts to determine when a given source a sub-tier supplier depends on might run out!

Logistic Route Cut-Off

This is pretty straightforward to enumerate. In addition to port closures above, you have:

  • major carrier strikes and failures (as only public postal services can run deficits ad infinitum)
  • natural disasters that take down major roads, bridges, and ports
  • intermediate border closings on current routes

And the way you handle each of these is to:

  • monitor the financial scores from the financial monitoring services and the union contract expiry dates to know when you need to look for negotiations and negotiation status to try and predict if you will need to lock in new carrier contracts before competitor quotes go through the proverbial roof in response to your carrier striking
  • monitor news sources for natural disaster events along your major supply routes
  • monitor geopolitical situations across countries on your routes

Procurement risk management doesn’t have to be hard to not only be good enough, but considerably better than your peers. Dwell on that.

2025 Is Just Another Year … But Is It All Doom and Gloom? Part 4 (Risk Redux)

It’s just another year, unless you look beyond the hype, identify true talent, give them real solutions, and then truly tackle the threats.

Risk Management IS Easy

And so is getting started with risk management as long as you approach it correctly! The key is not to try and identify every conceivable risk that might impact your business (there are literally too many to enumerate now and trying will drive you mad — but if you really want to try, we suggest starting with the 101 Damnations that SI chronicled for you back in 2015), but to identify what impacts would seriously hurt your business and work backwards to risks from there.

For example, if your primary revenue stream is products, what are your major product lines where a disruption would significantly hurt (and possibly even end) your business? Analyze the Bills of Material and identify what are the key components that can’t be easily sourced from a different vendor because they are proprietary and/or need a specialized manufacturing process. It doesn’t matter how much you spend on them or with the supplier, it matters how hard it would be to replace the component if it suddenly became unavailable.

Once you identify those critical components, look at

  • the supplier,
  • where the supplier is located,
  • what critical material inputs the supplier needs to make the component, and
  • how it gets the component to you.

The critical risks, that you have to monitor for, mitigate, and manage if they arise are precisely those risks that would

  • shut down the supplier
  • cut the supplier off from you
  • cut the raw material supply to the supplier
  • cut off the logistics routes you depend on

That’s it. Yes, there are more risks. Yes, they could occur. Yes, they could have a big impact on your brand and your business. But chances are that as long as you keep getting product in, selling that product, and moving it out, i.e. as long as you have assurance of supply, everything else will eventually blow over or be forgotten. Even if there is a temporary disruption in profit, it will return and the business will continue. Sensationalist media can’t keep people’s attention if it tries to sell them the same story everyday, so unless your product actually kills people, you don’t really need to worry about brand damage (unless it’s due to a lack of quality control, but you should already be ensuring that on every contract signature and critical shipment). (Plus, preventing brand damage for something out of your control is PR’s job anyway!)

If you analyze these four risks, and cross-correlate with the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report, you’ll see that most of the time there’s not that many risks with a reasonably significant chance of occurrence that you really need to worry about. (Except Pandemics! There’s going to be more of those as the world still isn’t ready for them and wont’ make the investment to get ready for them.)

Focus on identifying the risks around supplier and supply, and you’ll be leagues ahead of your peers.

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.