Category Archives: rants

Yes, There is a Fork in the Road. Which Path Will You Choose?

THE REVELATOR asks What is the ProcureTech fork in the road.

The answer is easy! It’s the same fork every year. As a ProcureTech practitioner, you have two choices:

1. Take the shiny yellow brick road that the marketers are trying to lead you down with their fancy soundbite hogwash and promises that all your dreams will come true when the software is implemented (as long as you don’t ask to see the wizards behind the curtain creating and implementing the software until after the contract is inked and the payment made).

(But, of course, the wizard behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, is nothing more than a conman and a simple circus magician. The yellow paint is fool’s gold. And the bricks are made of cheap plaster and can’t take much weight.)

2. Take the dark path through the forest where you’ll have to clear the brush and bramble yourself, learn how to be self sufficient, and, presuming you survive, come out stronger in the end for undertaking the journey.

Of course, this is a harder path, and you’ll have to work for it. You’ll have to do all of the work and follow all of the guidance in our 2025 is Just Another Year series that we just finished. More importantly, you have to be willing to admit that all the marketers are telling you lies, damn lies, and fake statistics produced by Gen-AI. That the promises from sales are all best case hypotheticals and not practical reality, likely assume you are getting functionality not yet developed, and that you have perfect, complete, data well beyond what you actually have. That the implementation will be more involved, take longer, cost more, and be much, much harder than they want you to believe. And integrations won’t be out of the box and will take a lot of custom jiggery. And then your data won’t be clean enough or complete enough or in the “expected format” and the data migration will be way more challenging.

Success will ultimately depend on you owning the system selection, implementation, integration, data migration, and training. You have to understand your needs, your systems, their integration requirements, your data, the cleansing and enrichment requirements, and the training your team will need. And you have to oversee the creation of the plans for each step of the journey. You can hire outside expert consultants … but you have to make sure they are experts and nothing is overlooked. It’s all on YOU. Just YOU.

And only one of these paths is the right fork, but guess which fork will be chosen by the majority of people?

It Would Be Great if Future CEOs were Past CPOs …

… since that would at least shift the focus from “Sell as much as possible” to “Save as much as possible” and replace psychopaths with short-term profit mindsets with penny-pinchers with long term corporate survival mindsets (which is is going to be critical in the future with declining birth rates in the first world — and, FYI, this is why so many old white males are pretending to be faithful Christians as they want to get rid of birth control and working women, assuming that will lead to a higher birth rates and more future consumers to rip off … but we digress).

And while this doesn’t necessarily mean that this hypothetical future generation of CPOs would do the right thing (and not do massive layoffs when sales drop [like the former Nintendo CEO who was probably the last great, human, Mega-Corp CEO on the planet], not blame the customer when a multi-million dollar implementation fails, and not completely ignore sustainability), it does mean that they will at least consider all decisions from a longer term cost viewpoint and make better decisions.

1. Former CPOs would know that the cost to replace talent is almost always greater than the cost to retain talent and would not only ensure top talent is paid market rates, but given good raises every year based on performance which would NEVER be less than a cost of living increase. Thus, if the workforce reduction is expected to be only temporary, they wouldn’t layoff anyone they’d need to replace ASAP at a higher price tag when the market bounced back. They’d only reduce their workforce by the amount they would expect to be semi-permanent (3 years or more). Thus, they’d treat their true, top tier workforce, as real, somewhat valuable, human beings. (And not cattle to be bought and sold on a whim or indentured servants, if they use the H1-B in the latter case.)

2. Former CPOs would understand the pain and hardship of NOT having their problems solved, being lied to on a daily basis by vendor reps, and paying a lot of money for very little of the promised ROI and despise those people with a passion. They would at least instill a culture of honesty in their sales and services organization as a result. They wouldn’t promise what they knew they couldn’t deliver, and would quickly fire any rep who knowingly made false claims.

Now, whatever you do, don’t confuse this with a customer value mindset! They know that the value you get out of something is relative to the effort you put in and that the customer is as much on the hook for the ROI as they are. And, frankly, they know that the best you get is what you pay for. While they wouldn’t tolerate outright dishonesty in the sales organization, they’d have no problem with the sales person selling you sh!tty service package C and then gladly pointing out when you complain about the lack of support in service package C that all the Ts and Cs were presented to you before you signed, clearly laid out in a 47 page addendum at the link provided, and that while “priority one issues will be fixed within two code cycles”, that’s from the date the issue is confirmed, which means you need to work with them in the chosen confirmation windows that are from 9:01 pm to 11:59 pm Mon, Tues, and Weds during normal operating hours of the Tier 3 issue support centre half way around the world. I.E. they’ll sell you crap service if that’s all you want to pay for, but they’d be totally open about it if you remembered to ask.

3. We’d actually start to see some big sustainability initiatives in corporate. Not because they gave a flying f6ck about it, as we pointed out in our recent article about how No One Cares about sustainability, but because they would look at 5+ year horizons again (for the first time in over three decades) and realize that there are some investments that begin to pay off in 5 years and pay off big after 5 to 7 years when certain raw material, energy, or freshwater cost keeps going up year after year after year. They’d see that the right sustainability initiative is actually a mid-to-long term corporate sustainability initiative and just do it, no regulation or incentive needed.

But alas, as we have implied and said before, when it comes to CPOs holding the top CEO spot in big corpo, THIS WON’T HAPPEN! And, like the bullsh!t sustainability push, we get very upset when we see these grand proclamations every year by Procurement “influencers” who either don’t get it or are just trying to get noticed, liked, and subscribed to.

It’s California Dreaming, and it’s very easy to explain why this will NOT happen.

Right now, roughly 15% of F1000 companies have CPOs, and the stats get worse as you go down to the G3000 and the mid-market. But 100% of companies need, and have, a CEO! That means we’re either going to lose 90% of companies in a great purge to allow this dream to become reality or it’s not going to become reality as at most 1 in 10 big corporates could have a former CPO as CEO.

Now, I like the dream, especially when you consider that the two most important roles in any organization are CRO and CPO (NOT CEO and CFO), and that the key to bottom line success in tough economies (which are about to become the norm … the golden age of pretend infinite growth is over … made clear by the fact that we are in an age of rapid decline in population growth rate in most first world economies) is the CPO, which means every G3000 should have a CPO, but that’s not the case. Thus, the dream is just a dream and, as long as we live in a capitalistic age focussed on short term profits, it’s not going to happen.

The best we can hope for is that, over the next decade, the percentage of organizations with CPOs doubles. We need more than that, but it would be a start!

It’s Human Intelligence (HI!) That Matters!

Just like

  • the NLP-based Eliza was NOT Intelligent (and that’s why it’s creator shut it down)
  • Early Expert systems were NOT Intelligent (and that’s why they disappeared as fast as they appeared)
  • Machine Learning systems are NOT Intelligent (they just do math exponentially better than we do)

It’s also the case that

  • Gen-AI (i.e. ChatGPT) is NOT Intelligent (deep probabilistic correlations are just that, correlations, not necessarily causations or, to be blunt, even relations, or, in some cases, even real!)

And the scary thing, as THE REVELATOR points out, is that the industry is catapulting itself to accept the regurgitated and, gasp, reformulated scraped information vomited by ChatGPT and the other Gen-AI platforms as factual when, in fact, it will happily make up alternative facts backed up by fake articles written by fake people backed up by fake biographies that it will joyfully generate for you as long as its calculations indicate that is what will make you happy. (It desperately needs to finish the chorus of its favourite Sheryl Crow song!)

Unless it is programmed in accordance with CCP requirements NOT to discuss a particular topic (like Deepseek won’t discuss Tiananmen Square), it’s quite happy to interpret whatever you ask in whatever manner will allow it to compose a proper response and the quality of that response will range from completely non-sensical (yes, you should eat one rock a day) to sensical, but not quite right. For example, THE REVELATOR asked ChatGPT what were the top 10 ProcureTech companies in 1995, 2005, 2015, and 2025 knowing full well the FIRST ProcureTech company, FreeMarkets, was only founded in 1995, and only released its solution in November, but ChatGPT gladly interpreted the question to be “a company that provided a platform that was, or could, be used for Procurement” and not “a company created to offer, or classified in the space of, ProcureTech” and gave 10 names for each year, in later years pushing a couple of non-ProcureTech companies as ProcureTech simply because they had some functions that overlapped ProcureTech. In the first situation, even a dullard (using the original Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale) should know that you shouldn’t eat rocks and that the AI is, well, just wrong but in the latter situation, most practitioners with an above average IQ don’t know what companies are ProcureTech centric vs. back-office ERP vs. SC(O)P etc.

Which is why Human Intelligence is absolutely critical. A human intelligence that will independently vet and verify the response, using their education and experience to come to real, defensible, conclusions. (Although its often better to just do your own research and not chase fake leads.) This is because, the one, and only, constant with these (Gen-) “AI” systems besides the accuracy limit, is failure — meaning it’s Human Intelligence (HI!) that matters!

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.

Let’s Be Crystal Clear — in the Corporate World, Sustainability/ESG is NOT a Priority!

It’s never been, and now that the 47th is inaugurated, it’s less of a “priority” than it’s ever been in North America! If the Republicans get their way, they are going to roll back climate change legislation back to the Early Modern Era, and by that I mean the formal definition of the Early Modern Era, which Historians and Scholars will tell you was between 1914 and 1945.

Based on the fact that they managed to stack the Supreme Court to get their long-term goal (which was part of decades long planning) of overturning the 1973 decision of Roe vs. Wade, if you think they’ll be happy just dismantling the EPA and rolling back the 2007 Emissions Reporting Act, you’ve got another thing coming! They’re going to do their best to go back … way back … after all,

  • the 1999 Emissions Standard for Passenger Vehicles
    is going to get in the way of their fight against electric vehicles and China’s dominance (unless, of course, you buy a Tesla … at least until the 47th tires of First Buddy) and the return to big pollution muscle cars to soothe their big egos
  • the 1990 Oil Pollution Act
    is going to get in the way of fracking, piping, and other means to increase oil production, distribution, and burning
  • the 1984 Hazardous Waste Amendments to the RCRA
    is going to get in the way of chemical production and utilization, needed by big Food and big Pharma to eliminate anything from nature they don’t have a patent on
  • the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recover Act (RCRA)
    is going to get in the way of profit if they have to replant forests, repair environmental damage from strip-mining, minimize fresh water usage, etc. (after all, big companies like Nestle need those 59 million gallons of water more than the citizens of California do … and you can bet they are NOT the only corporate overtaxing public water systems instead of building their own desalination plants and using ocean salt-water … but yes, blame the Democrats)
  • the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act
    requires them to spend a lot of money (that these governments apparently can’t afford) not only filtering and purifying the water that flows through municipal pipes, but monitoring the quality throughout the system since the dissolving and rotting infrastructure (which has not been properly invested in across the majority of the US since the 70s) makes it not only susceptible to leaks, but contamination from pollution
  • the 1973 Ocean Dumping Act
    prevents them from cheaply and easily disposing of their (hazardous) waste in the ocean (because it’s apparently too expensive otherwise)
  • the 1963 Clean Air Act
    means that they can’t burn anything or create chemicals that can pollute the atmosphere and us, when that’s often the cheapest or easiest route … after all, it’s not their fault certain chemical processes create by-products (that’s just nature, right?) and, at the end of the day, it’s our problem we can’t afford industrial air purifiers or decontaminators, right?
  • the 1955 Air Pollution Act
    means that these companies can’t operate if their plants could create hazardous by-products that would pollute the air en masse (if they cant’ afford to prevent the pollution, and apparently they can’t) … and …
  • the 1948 federal water pollution control act of 1948
    because this means they can’t just direct their chemical and hazardous waste to the nearest river (that runs to the ocean and takes it away) … and that’s apparently the only disposal method they can afford

… and, then, we are back to the early modern era!

And you know this is going to happen to the full extent possible as Big American AND Canadian corporations are already leaving the Global Corporate Alliance as they know they won’t be subject to to any goals once the 47th and his hand picked oligarchs get their way. It’s the Ferengi MBA Rules of Acquisition all the way now, and the best deal that makes the most profit is one that doesn’t have to pay the climate bill that WE are going to get stuck with when our health fails and WE have to pay rising medical costs.

So, please dear LinkedIn Procurement Evangelist, cut the bullcr@p about how this is going to be the year of Sustainabilty, how your application is going to save the world, etc. etc. etc. because, in big corporate, NO ONE CARES! (Do we have to remind you that the CEO role has the highest rate of psychopaths of any profession, even surpassing Lawyers?) As I already myth-busted in my series on 2025 2015 Procurement Predictions and Trends, we’ve had this BS pushed upon us for the past two decades, and some of us are tired of hearing about it. (SI should know! It ran the first cross-blog series on Sustainability back in 2008!)

Yes, Sustainability is the right thing, but no one cares about the right thing if it costs more! All you have to do is change how you ask the question to get the truth:

Is sustainability important to you?
Consumer: Most definitely! I only want sustainable brands!
Corporate: Yes! Our mission is to be the most sustainable …

How much more will you pay for a product/service that is proven to be sustainable?
Consumer Minority: Maybe 3% to 5%, it is important to me so if I have a few extra dollars, I’ll go sustainable and consume less.
Consumer Majority: Maybe 1% or 2%, money is super tight you know! Some months I struggle to pay all the bills and keep my children fed!
Corporate: NOTHING! If it doesn’t reduce costs, it’s not sustainable as a business practice!

Or, you could just ask the Founder of Trade Extensions (now Coupa Sourcing Optimization) who was one of the first to ask the questions this way back in their Sustainability Survey of 2014, over a decade ago, who more or less got precisely these answers. (They focussed on customers, and found that the vast majority would NOT pay more than 5%, ever, and if you wanted a majority of customers to buy into sustainability, you needed to keep cost increases under 2%!) Nothing has changed, especially as the average consumer buying power has continued to decrease across the First World as greater and greater shares of wealth end up in the hands of the 1%.

And yes, Europe might introduce a few new regulations and keep the ones they have, but all that does is relocate the multi-nationals to countries with leaders that don’t give a cr@p about the environment because they are so poor that they can’t even feed the majority of their people. And yes, Europe can regulate hazardous materials, etc. on what’s coming in, but all that does is ensure those companies that choose to stay in the market (while producing goods that just make the cut) charge more, because adhering to the regulation cuts into their profit, and after some of the worse run companies get forced out or leave on their own, there is less competition.

And as long as short term profit is the #1 motivation, nothing is going to change. So please STOP the preaching. No one cares, it’s not going to happen, and too many startups buying into this fantasy are, sadly, wasting time and resources on products and services no one is going to buy — especially in the SaaS/App space.

If you can’t invent more sustainable technology that costs less, it doesn’t matter how good your tracking software, reporting application, or advisory service offering is. Either solve a fundamental problem with revolutionary new cost-effective technology or stick to real Procurement, which, sadly, is a fundamental problem in most companies even though we’ve had decent solutions in Source-to-Pay for two decades!