Category Archives: Procurement Innovation

E-procurement benefits … fact or fiction? Part II

Today’s guest post is from Tony Bridger, an experienced provider of Procurement Consulting and Spend Analysis services across the Commonwealth (as well as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt) who has been delivering value across continents for two decades. He is currently President of UK-based TrainingWorx Ltd, a provider of a wide range of Procurement and Analytic business training programs (inc. GDPR, spend analysis, project management, process improvement, etc.) and focussed short-term consulting solutions. Tony can be contacted at tony.bridger@data-trainingworx.co.uk.

In our last post we noted that it has been difficult to find anything recent in the academic world on e-procurement.  Independent academic research appears to have started to fizzle out from 2007 as the e-procurement technology wave passed and moved on – as most technologies do eventually.  However, e-procurement software vendors are still going and new development companies still seeking a new angle – despite the fact that many e-procurement systems, and concepts, have proven notoriously difficult to embed in to the culture of organisations.

We can hypothesise and speculate on some of the reasons for this:

  • E-procurement has often been touted as the panacea for all procurement department ills. Stops maverick spending, controlled approvals and extensive workflow;

This is correct to some extent.  However, this focuses on a small slice of spend (i.e how much of procurement effort is actually spend under management?).

  • Many procurement teams write large contracts but rarely take the time or effort to check compliance to contract. No one ever said that vendor catalogues and associated pricing were always correct and accurate.   Automated PO processing cannot fix compliance if the core vendor source catalogue pricing is simply wrong;
  • Spend analysis is still lacking as a core skill in many procurement teams – so validation and compliance checking of pricing to invoice compliance still seems to be a low priority agenda item. Therefore, e-procurement provides no better protection for contract compliance than any other process in many cases.
  • The generic nature of indirect spend activity remains in many cases. Simply, this means that in some categories, the variation in process to specify, order and pay means that a “one size fits all” process platform simply will not work.   There are Purchasing cards and a range of other specialised P2P options available – but the advent of products like SAP Fieldglass for temporary labour and service time recording has started to erode the value of e-procurement investment in some categories.   All-encompassing e-Procurement capability is simply being picked off at a category level.    The purists will argue that it should all be on one system.  However, the pragmatists are busy creating applications that deliver value.

Could it be that e-Procurement has simply passed its apogee?    Perhaps.

However, do problems with purchase to pay in many organisations simply reside with procurement cultures?

There is little or no doubt that many procurement departments see the entire gamut of purchasing activity as their domain to control.   Many procurement executives still initiate major P2P investment projects on the basis that this will provide an entire control platform – and that business teams will simply comply.    That assumption is flawed as many imposed P2P initiatives run counter culture and are doomed to fail – or at best simply ignored.

It can also take time to set vendors up on e-procurement, maintain workflow using cost centre files, approve POs, set spend limits etc.   There are many variations on a theme in the e-Procurement space – many systems will now claim to resolve a range of category-based issues.   However, many business unit buyers have considerable market knowledge, good commercial evaluation skills and translate their domestic purchasing skills in to the workplace very effectively i.e.  specify requirements, create opportunities and evaluate responses from multiple suppliers – and place an order.   They also can save companies money.   As the old Chinese proverb suggests, “give a person a fish, feed them for a day, give them a fishing rod, feed them for a lifetime”.

It may simply be that the majority of e-procurement platforms are designed, in many cases, to pander to the notion of total control desired by procurement teams – not commercial pragmatism around the way the purchasing and business world really works.  A mystery for sure.

However, there are alternatives.   The question is … is anyone looking?

Thanks, Tony!

E-procurement benefits … fact or fiction? Part I

Today’s guest post is from Tony Bridger, an experienced provider of Procurement Consulting and Spend Analysis services across the Commonwealth (as well as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt) who has been delivering value across continents for two decades. He is currently President of UK-based TrainingWorx Ltd, a provider of a wide range of Procurement and Analytic business training programs (inc. GDPR, spend analysis, project management, process improvement, etc.) and focussed short-term consulting solutions. Tony can be contacted at tony.bridger@data-trainingworx.co.uk.

It has been difficult to find anything recent in the academic world on e-procurement.   What was once the doyenne of the procurement world does seem to have become very much business as usual.

However, it really does depend on how you define the term.

So, prior to running off at speed discussing an array of e-procurement related elements, let’s make sure that we discuss the right technology platform.

In 2016, I sat in on an EU conference that had a presentation session on “e-procurement”.   Having implemented an end-to-end B2B procure-to-pay platform, I had considered that it was pretty much a common technology – and well understood.  I was wrong.    I was treated to an hour on e-procurement as an RFP (request for proposal) and optimisation tool.   Not the e-procurement I was expecting.   The (real) e-procurement, from my perspective, is the good old shopping cart and payment process.  So, let’s stick with that definition for now.

At the turn of the millennium, e-procurement and the sister product e-marketplaces, were being implemented at a furious speed.  However, as fast as the companies were starting up and creating e-procurement systems, the dot com era brought the entire edifice down and left very few players standing.   I was amazed recently to discover that start-ups are still creating these platforms.  So much for the concept of a mature market.

For those that have little experience with e-procurement systems, the simplest analogy is that it’s a little like a single organisation implementation of Amazon.   The hoster (the buy side) will have access to the range of catalogues and suppliers like any Amazon user.   However, these are only generally only contracted suppliers.  The supplier makes available their catalogue and goods to organisational buyers.  If you do not work for the client company you cannot see or interact with this environment.   The supplier can have their own website catalogue (termed as “punch out”) or use third party or software vendor supplied catalogues.   Once a PO has been raised and goods despatched, invoices can be submitted, matched and paid.  All automated.

Sounds like a transactional nirvana.  However, just how successful has e-procurement actually been?

Independent academic research appears to have started to fizzle out from 2007 as the e-procurement technology wave passed and moved on – as most technologies do eventually.    This article does not suggest that e-procurement is a failure or is declining – it merely suggests that little real evidence exists to suggest that it is an outstanding success.   One may assume that if it was a major success – there would be many (and wide ranging) articles that vaunt the case for investment.

However, e-procurement software vendors are still going and new development companies still seeking a new angle.   There have been many variations – from free systems (with revenues made on services), to the more expensive, fully integrated ERP suites.    However, none of these options are cheap to implement – and can be notoriously difficult to embed in to the culture of organisations.

Why?

Stay tuned for Part II

Thanks, Tony!

Zycus – Expending their Horizons in the EU

Zycus recently held their inaugural event in Europe — the last three days in Prague, to be precise. the doctor was there and he has to say he was impressed with

  • the conference organization
    (less snafus or lack of organization then a few conferences he’s been to recently organized by larger peers),
  • the content
    (they did a great job blending content from them, their partners, their customers, and leading analysts),
  • the progress
    both on the customer front and the product front

Recently we’ve seen a number of companies break out of Europe and into North America — like Ivalua and Synertrade — but we rarely see companies, even those from North America (and definitely those from India), break in, especially in a short time-frame. In the last two years Zycus has went from almost no presence in Europe to a known provider of S2P services with dozens of local customers among its 300+ worldwide deployments supported by local partners.  That’s quite impressive.

This last fact is key — Zycus understands fully that Europe is not India or America. It is dozens of countries with dozens of languages and dozens of local cultures that need to be supported by a provider that wants to effectively support its customers and the continent in, and on, which they do business. And Zycus understands that there are local implementation partners and providers in Europe that understands these needs. So while some providers try to sell locally with their own staff that they hire in Europe (who can’t know everything as they are few), others try to sell exclusively through partners (who are better equipped for local support, but if not well trained, can’t accurately represent the provider), they sell as a partnership with the local implementation partner, provider of software and provider of service (but take all the responsibility for ensuring the customer receives a successful deployment).

And a successful deployment is something they are quite capable of achieving. Not only do they have 300+ people to support implementations, but they have a history of working with partners to ensure that any localizations that need to happen, happen. We expect that as long as all parties go in with a solid understanding of what needs to happen, and what the true effort is, deployments will be appropriately planned and be successfully realized. And customer progress will continue.

Then we have the product front. Zycus continues to develop and have made good progress on a couple of modules, and their iRequest module in particular. While this may seem the least sophisticated from a sourcing perspective, it is the most important from a success perspective.

When one thinks about why most mavericks try to bypass the Procurement department, it’s typically because they see the Procurement department as a bottleneck. Too long to get approvals. No visibility into the sourcing event. Etc. Etc. With iRequest, anyone in the business can make any sort of request or requisition to Procurement and follow it through to the conclusion, with visibility not just into the status, but into the sourcing event, contracting process, or anything else that is relevant. It links into almost all of their other modules and allows a buyer to kick off events, approval chains, and information request processes with relative ease. It makes Procurement look like an enabler and that is key to organizational acceptance and success. It’s definitely worth checking out.

More coverage on Zycus, here and in depth on Spend Matters Pro (membership required), is coming, so stay tuned.

Supply Management Priorities are Hard to Define

As per yesterday’s post, figuring out your priority can be particularly painstaking because the maximum benefit is only realized when certain supporting systems are in the mix.

If we reverse our last post, you might well think that you need the following core modules to benefit from the indicated modules, and you might well be right.

Spend Analysis –> Product Management, Category Management
e-Negotiation –> Spend Analysis, SSDO, Guided Buying
SSDO –> Spend Analysis
Contract Management –> Spend Analysis, Requirements Definition, Product Management
Catalog Management –> Supplier Management, e-Negotiation, Guided Buying
Purchase Order / Invoice Management –> SSDO, Guided Buying, Catalog Management, Supplier Management
Supplier Management –> Opportunity Analysis, e-Negotiation
Risk management –> Opportunity Analysis, Contract Management
Product Management –> Contract Management, Guided Buying

But something interesting falls out of this. You don’t really need anything to get started on supplier management, and the only thing you need to benefit from e-Negotiation is a way to make use of the data (be it spend analysis, optimization, category-management based guided buying, etc.). And when you start on your supplier management journey, it’s supplier information management (followed by data-backed supplier performance management).

What does this tell us? The starting point is a (set of) solution(s) that helps you get your supply management master data under control. After that, the primary buying categories, the market, the internal situation, and a host of other factors will need to be balanced to select your next (set of) priority(ies), but without data, you’re not going anywhere.

What’s Your Supply Management Priority?

Supply Management Mastery is an elusive goal. As SI has been documenting for years, in order to master supply management, you have to manage a slew of Source to Pay processes as well as related Operational, Finance, and Risk processes.

But this is not easy when you consider the many steps involved in even source to pay. Spend Analysis. Opportunity Analysis. Requirements Definition. e-Negotiation. Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization. Contract Negotiation Management. Catalog Creation. Guided Buying. Purchase Order Management. Invoice Management. Supplier Management. Risk Management. Product Management. And so on.

You have to master all of them, but you can’t work on them all at once. You have to make priorities, and eliminate all but the top three (3). And even then, you might not be able to tackle all three if each would require a separate system.

So what’s your priority?

Spend Analysis gives you insights, but you have to be able to act on them. That requires e-Negotiation, SSDO, contract management, etc.

Opportunity Analysis goes beyond just spend to determine if your opportunities are spend related, supply base related, process related, or otherwise.

Requirements Definition helps crystalize organizational needs and helps the buyer zero in on what really matters. But then it has to create good contracts and statements of work.

e-Negotiation helps capture all of the back-and-forth between both parties so that the organization can build supplier profiles and take advantage of that. Provided the organization has deep supplier master data management.

SSDO can find the optimal cost allocation across suppliers, products, and carriers and delivers an average savings year over year that exceeds 10%. But it requires deep models and lots of data. And where does that data come from? Typically from e-Negotiation.

Contract negotiation management is great for creating great contracts. But you need product details, SOWs, risk management and liability clauses, and other data.

Catalog management software is great, as long as you have a supplier management portal to manage the supplier the catalog comes from.

Guided buying is even better, but only if you have the solutions to guide the buyer to that captures the majority of organizational spend. Guided buying that only works in an incomplete catalog is more of a frustration than a solution.

Purchase Order Management can eliminate a lot of paper, provided there are catalog, sourcing, etc. systems to integrate with to auto-generate those POs on buyer actions.

Invoice Management systems are great, as long as you have POs, contracts, goods receipts, and other documents to m-way match against! Otherwise, they just collect e-paper that still has to be manually reviewed. (And in the average organization, that still typically results in them being printed.)

Supplier Management is great for managing information, relationships, and performance, provided their are networks and portals to collect the data from, and internal systems to create and manage scorecards to define performance improvements on.

Product Management is key to understanding the product and category dynamics, but then you need category management strategies to map to.

And, these days, instantiations and realizations of risk can wipe out the savings from 10 sourcing projects, so risk management is paramount, but detecting and monitoring for risks requires a slew of systems internal and external and lots of data.

In other words, every system is great, but generally only if you have one or more systems to collect the data it runs on or supplement key functionality.

Which again begs the question, what are your priorities? Otherwise, you’ll never know where to start.