Category Archives: Procurement Innovation

KPMG Is Listening To Too Much Bob Dylan …

… but still failing to understand the subtlety of the message the Nobel Laureate conveyed in the message he imparted to us 53 years ago.

Recently, as pointed out by the procurement dynamo over on Procurement World in his post on 4 Fascinating Futures, KPMG gave us four potential visions of Procurement’s future in their recent Future-Proof Procurement paper (co-published with Florida State University’s College of Business). [It’s a great read, by the way, for those of you that always enjoy a good alternative universe/timeline SciFi story.)

According to KPMG, we are headed to one of four possible Procurement futures, namely:

  • Primacy of Procurement
    where Procurement becomes the center of power as a result of technology enablement
  • The Creative Agency
    where Procurement totally re-invents itself in order to stay relevant
  • World of Project Economy
    where Procurement disperses (and becomes merely a means to an end)
  • R.I.P. Procurement
    where Procurement brings about its own demise (and is replaced by machines)

All Depending upon the outcomes of the following matches:

  • human centricity vs. algorithms
  • centralism vs. decentralism

In the second case, it depends upon whether or not the march to centralization continues or decentralism retakes center stage. And in the first case, it depends upon whether technology becomes good enough where it can be trusted in place of a Procurement pro.

And, according to KPMG, the futures are defined by the winners as per the following graphic:

In other words, KPMG believes that we need to either prepare for

  • The Path of Dominance
    where Procurement takes total control of the extended supply chain, and, as a result, the business world
  • The Path of Salvation
    where Procurement totally reinvents itself and stays relevant in the turbulent global economy as time shifts the sands
  • The Path of Harmony
    where Procurement adapts to the gig based project economy and simply becomes a means to an end OR
  • The Path of Progress
    where we enter a new era where there is no Procurement. R.I.P. Procurement (Peter Smith, Spend Matters). (It’s already among the walking dead and soon to be entombed, anyway.)

But all this assumes that there will be one winner in the human centricity vs. algorithm war and one winner in the centralism vs. decentralism, but until SkyNet takes over and locks us in The Matrix, there will be no winner in the humans vs. algorithm war, just like there will always be no winner in the centralism vs. decentralism war as there will always be new recruits to factions on both sides.

We’re not in the world of Anachrony where there can be only one one winner if the cataclysmic future is to be prevented. We’re in the real world, and the situation is a lot more complex.

Bob Dylan said it best:

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slowest now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fading
And the first one now will later be last
Cause the times they are a-changing

The line is drawn and the curse it is cast. The two sides of the centralist debate will fight to the last.

The slowest now will later be fast. As the laggards adapt new technology and the leaders drown in that they amassed.

As the present now will later be past. And leaders will fly different masts.

The order is rapidly fading.

And the first one now will later be last. Emerging economies take lead and leading economies are surpassed.

Cause the times they are a-changing.

But the more things change, the more they stay the same. And that’s the underlying message. The conflicts won’t be resolved, fueled by emerging and changing economies, with new governments and organizations taking center stage, discovering and rediscovering the Procurement revolutions, while leading economies go through devolutions as a result of shifting market landscapes and first generation solutions failing to deliver.

Procurement will still be on the verge of death, or among the walking dead, 20 years from now. Only the technology (vendors), processes, and terminology will have changed. The only question is, will your organization have switched sides (from laggard to leader or vice versa).

Despite Bob’s plea, fifty three years later:

Senators and Congressmen still block the hall
They stand in the doorway, don’t heed the call
and the country gets hurt for they have all stalled
and the battle outside keeps raging
it shakes all our windows and rattles our walls
for the times they are a-changing.

On the Ninth day of X-Mas (2016)


On the ninth day of X-Mas
my blogger gave to me:
Direct Sourcing Posts
Risk Management Posts
Sustainable Posts
e-Procurement Posts
some SRM Posts
some CLM Posts
some Best Practice Posts
some Trend Bashing Posts
and some ranting on stupidity …

While it should just be sourcing, as direct sourcing for one organization is indirect sourcing for another, the reality is, it’s not. Most sourcing platforms were designed for indirect sourcing only and can’t handle the complexity that often goes hand in hand with direct sourcing.

If you’re not convinced, take the Direct Procurement Challenge. Chances are your platform will fall flat on its user interface.

Remember, as Aberdeen pointed out in one of their better pieces, back in the time when they had strong supply analyst talent, we’re Living in a Materials World and you better be prepared to do something about it.

That is because Procurement is Complex [and] Your Platform [better be] Capable of Handling It!

The reality is that, for the average organization, Your Procurement Platform is Cost Centric Perfect for Indirect Only. And that’s just not enough.

If you don’t get it, then you need to get a grip on The Nature of Supply Dynamics
Part I: Unknown when Unmanaged
Part II: Commodity Based Cost Models Alone Aren’t Enough.

You need more, much more.

You need a direct procurement platform capable of Sourcing Lifecycle Management: [it is] The Direct Sourcing Cure.

Come back tomorrow for the tenth day of X-Mas.

iValua: Brewing the Kettle for the Vertical Petals

When SI last did a deep dive on Ivalua back in late 2013, they were proving their mettle with source-to-settle (Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV) because an integrated Source-to-Settle (S2S) platform brings unparalleled benefits to Supply Management. Since then, they’ve been extending the platform, but instead of broadening it (as they already had just about everything covered except decision optimization and cashflow optimization), they’ve been deepening it with industry specific functionality for a plethora of verticals, namely, the manufacturing and automotive industry; the banking and services industry; the retail and distribution industry; the construction, oil, and gas industry; the health care industry; the telecom industry; GPOs (Group Purchasing Organizations), and the public sector.

For the machining and automotive industry, in addition to their powerful RFX capability which allows buyers to create detailed cost models for components and products being sourced, they also have integrated sourcing project management (as a Bill of Materials might require multiple sourcing projects, capabilities for New Product Introduction (NPI) management, asset and tooling management and tracking, and the ability to identify raw material / component price data variance across plant locations. This is in addition to the detailed supplier master data management (that can support the definition of approved suppliers by category, buyer, and location), quality tracking and management (through scorecards), and productive action plans (that build on the corrective action plan capability).

For the banking and services industry, in addition to vendor managed catalogs, contract compliance management, invoice data capture, and dynamic discounting, unlike some of their peers that grew up in the indirect (commodity) sourcing world, they support detailed rate cards and services profiles, e-Signature integration, and multi-envelope bidding.

For the construction, oil, and gas industry, in addition to support for spot-sourcing and spot-awards to on-contract suppliers, detailed service personnel data collection, and supplier data access to available assets (and tools), the platform also supports the creation of field service request estimates based on PR and PO process initiation, asset and tooling management, automatic monitoring of supplier credentials and certificates, data collection for supplier personnel performance management, and the collection of documents and specifications on all relevant supplier safety practices.

They’ve also fleshed out their analytics and out-of-the-box reports to cover spend data and metrics from all aspects of the source-to-settle lifecycle (which is easy to do when all of the data is in one store maintained by one platform, and not 3, 4, or 5 — which is common with some of their competitors that created their suites from multiple acquisitions), increased the configurabilty of their solution (where the buying organization not only has control over modules and workflow, but even what is displayed, or not, on individual screens), exposed the full extent of their integration capability within the platform (where lead buyers can configure the APIs through a simple form-based interface and XML), and created an add-on store where clients can share and download additional reports and components and integrations created by their peers or third parties.

Ivalua is still coding strong, and extending their platform year after year. It’s hard to say what will come next, as two-thirds of their road-map is always client-driven, but if you’re looking for a true, native, end-to-end source-to-pay platform from a responsive organization, the Ivalua platform is one that should be on your short-list.

Oversight for more than just your Travel & Expense budget management

Oversight is an Atlanta-based software (as a service) company founded back in 2003 to help organizations monitor spending in an effort to identify errors, waste, misuse, and fraud in the grey area of enterprise spend. As every recovery firm will tell you, the average organization will overspend by 1% to 3% as a result of over billings, duplicate billings, unnecessary spend on superfluous demand, maverick spend, and even fraud. (And they make their living recovering a portion of that, typically a third, and then charging you 33% of the recovery as their fee. Sounds small, but 1/3 of 1/3 of 3% of spend is 0.33% of spend, and if the organization spends 100 Million, they get 330,000 for an effort that can be largely automated and, even worse, be avoided with proper up-front spend monitoring.)

For example, if all invoices are compared to invoices and goods receipts before payments are authorized, this can prevent overpayments. Duplicate billings can be identified in the same way (and duplicate payments prevented). Potential fraud can be identified by forcing all invoices from unknown suppliers, for unknown products, or for unexpected amounts to be manually reviewed. (This can’t prevent in-house fraud, where a buyer pays a fake invoice to a fake company controlled by a relative, or a co-conspirator, but it can prevent external fraud.) Unnecessary spend on superfluous demand will require up front requisition control, as will maverick spend, but at least there will be no overspend or duplicate spend that can be unrecoverable once the contract with the supplier expires.

Oversight is unique in that it is not so much a software platform but an insights platform. Employing a team of data scientists focussed on identifying new algorithms and techniques for fraud detection, Oversight uses their in-depth knowledge of fraud to build solutions that will help the clients identify potential cases of fraud that they could never hope to identify on their own. The best most companies can do is sample based audits and spot checks which are unlikely to identify much fraud as these will generally only be on a few percentage of invoices or transactions, and most employees who have been getting away with fraud for a while will not be doing anything obvious, and the fraud will not be detected without correlations across documents and systems. That’s where Oversight comes in.

The Oversight solution is a web-based software solution for automatic spend analysis and identification of high-risk or potentially fraudulent transactions that comprehensively analyzes T&E, purchase card, and accounts payable spend using a suite of statistical, clustering, data mining, break point, rule-based, evidentiary reasoning, and machine learning algorithms that look for discrepancies, suspicious patterns, known fraud, and risk indicators to identify those transactions that need to be manually reviewed. The dashboard-driven, or work-bench driven, interface allows an analyst to drill into suspicious transactions by country, organizational unit, risk level, or exception type and can be configured to show the analyst only those exceptions assigned to her, or her team, or every unresolved exception in the system.

When a user drills in by exception type, she sees an overview of the overall risks by country and can drill into suppliers to see the specific exceptions. When a user drills in by country, she can see the overall risk by supplier and then by exception. In other words, she can drill into at-risk transactions using country, organizational unit, supplier, and at-risk type in any manner they please.

Or, they can look for exceptions by process. Right now, Oversight supports the identification of at-risk transactions in the travel & expense, procure to pay, and purchase card processes and has recently added support for FCPA, Anti-Bribery, and Corruption Risk — including the identification of known politically exposed parties.

Plus, the platform not only integrates with all of the big supplier and financial data providers — such as Dunn & Bradstreet, Bureau van Dijk, and CreditSafe — but also integrates with providers of risk indicator data such as Ecovadis and Sedex Global. Plus, they maintain their own databases of known politically connected parties, gentlemen’s clubs, denied parties, and other parties that an organization typically should not be allocating funds to. This last capability is quite important … just ask American Express which once received a 241K strip club bill authorized by the CEO. (Source: ShortNews)

Since fraud attempts differ by country, and collusion is hard to detect with a standard m-way match invoice processing platform, Oversight brings a powerful offering to the expense management space. It’s a platform worth checking out. For a deeper dive into the platform, check out the recent coverage by the doctor and the prophet over on Spend Matters Pro [membership required]. (Part I is up with Parts II and III coming within a week.)