Category Archives: rants

When Are We Going To Wake Up and Stop Wasting Food!

Recently, Italy introduced a new law designed to reduce food waste which is being celebrated by farmers and restaurant owners as it simplifies the donation of excess food that ends up becoming food (or field) waste. Approximately 100 Million tonnes of food across the EU is wasted each year. (Source: European Commission) That amount of food would sufficiently feed at least at least another 100 Million people annually (as the amount of food a person needs in a year varies between 0.5 and 1 tonne depending upon diet, weight, etc.). This is just in the EU. In the US, recorded food waste exceeds 30 Million tonnes, and is probably much higher. (Source: Feeding America) That’s at least another 30 Million people that could be completely fed. Putting these numbers together, and assuming the average amount of food consumed by a person a year is 0.75 tonnes (and not 1), that’s about 175 Million completely satiated. There are almost 800 Million undernourished people in the world. If we assumed that they were surviving on only half the food they needed (which is not reasonable, as that’s barely sustenance, and a lot of these undernourished people are in developed countries and still eating enough to work), this says that the recorded food waste in 1/7th of the world’s population could cut the number of undernourished people in the world by half! By Half!

Italy is only the second country in the EU to adopt such laws (following a similar move by France earlier this year – Source: The Guadian), so let’s hope that at least in the UK, sanity reigns. Because in North America, and in the US in particular, it does not. It’s illegal in many cities to feed the homeless (Sources: NPR and MIC), even if the food is not passed its expiration date and untouched, or you are a Pastor (Source: The Daily Signal)!. In some states, game meat donated to shelters is burned (Source: Daily Caller). And even if you can donate food without getting fined and arrested, and someone gets sick because, while it was still good when you donated, by the time it was prepared and eaten it wasn’t (or it was contaminated when you received it with e-Coli and you didn’t know), then you can get sued for millions of dollars, so why take the risk?

This is why, as per our post from August, 2012 on why it’s Not Criminal, But it Should Be, America Trashes 40% of its Food Supply. It’s insane!

Food reserves have not recovered from the all time low, over 800 Million people, including almost one third of children in developing countries, are malnourished and the two richest economies in the world (the US and the EU) are collectively wasting enough food to solve over HALF of the problem. All this in a time when agriculture produces 17% more calories per person per day than it did 30 years ago. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kCal per day, which is 30% more calories than an average person needs. Instead, the cost of staples is rising, access to food by the lower class and malnourished is falling, and, because of stupid, stupid laws made by stupid, stupid lawmakers, the situation is getting worse. When it should be 10 times better!

As per our research from four years ago, there is no excuse for wasting more than 4% of food. (That’s still too much, but the 100% solution is always difficult to achieve right away. And when the 90% could be achieved tomorrow, let’s start there!) Not only would sanity (and laws mandating food donations and feeding the homeless instead of laws preventing this) reduce costs by $150 Billion and methane emissions by 22.5% (as rotting food makes up 25%), but the US would NOT have anyone undernourished! (14% of households in the US are food insecure! Fourteen Percent! The US is the richest country in the world, how can this be???)

Bravo France and Italy for finally doing something right! Let’s hope the rest of the EU follows suit so at least some people won’t go hungry!

RIP to the Big Idea!

This post appeared in its original form almost 5 years ago on August 31, 2011 when it was titled What’s the Big Idea. Since nothing has changed, we’re knocking it up a knotch with our borrowed spice weasel.

Seriously, like your predecessor’s Procurement, it’s dead and Buried! Inquiring (not enquiring) minds are in mourning. Because, as far as any of us can tell, there aren’t any big ideas any more. As Neal Gabler said in the New York Times article on the elusive big idea, we live in a society that no longer thinks big. And that’s bad. Why? In many fields of technology, there have been no big ideas for decades. Sure, we see new and better devices every year and sure the iPad Air Mini just came out and now you can chase Pokemon in the real world with your Pokemon Go app, but, let’s face it, the iPad Air Mini is a netbook with a touchscreen. A netbook is just a miniaturized laptop, and a laptop is just a miniaturized portable computer, and portable computers have been around for over 35 years. (Yes, you read that right, over thirty years, with the first portable computer manufactured in 1979.) And touch-screens have been around almost as long (with the first commercial touchscreen computer released back in 1983). Apple just took the technology to the next generation, while making sure it was easier to use than all of its competitors products. And as for virtual Pokemon tracking, let us remind you geo-location technology has been around for civilian use since the 1980s.

The cloud? Well, I hate to burst your bubble (actually, not true, I love to burst that bubble), but the cloud is just a return to the fundamental concept of mainframe computing with dumb terminals — one big shared computer that services a whole bunch of users who are remote and don’t want, or need, to know how the big computer works. Except this time the big computer is a whole bunch of smaller computers networked together and, since the network is very big (and, in fact, global), the computers can reside anywhere. I could go on, but, even in computing theory, almost everything traces back twenty to thirty five years (or more).

I’m almost ready to agree with the author of a recent Forbes opinion article on the New York Times article that asked why did big ideas die when he said that we live in a post-idea society where people don’t think at all. With exceptions fewer and further between by the day, most people don’t think [deep] anymore.

Why is this? As Gabler says, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them.

Who’s to blame? Gabler blames the usual suspects — the web, Twitter, and everything else that, instead of facilitating a lively intellectual life, instead drowns us in information. And while some of these suspects, like Twitter, are indeed a problem, the reality is that they are a symptom and not the root cause. (Even though it was demonstrated back in 2010 that excessive use of Twitter and similar real-time communication platforms makes you dumber than a Pothead.)

The problem lies with Wall Street and VCs. They’ve convinced the business world that nothing matters beyond the current quarter and any idea that can’t be brought to market overnight isn’t worth it. We did not come further in the last 100 years than in all of human history by only focussing on products that could get to market quickly. (We have to remember that the first cross-Atlantic transmission did not occur until 1902. This transmission, and all major computational and communication advances since, did not happen in a quarter. Most of the advancements took years of research and decades to perfect.) If you’re trying to change a market — to go from a Model-T to a Jaguar — that takes years, but VCs won’t support anything that can’t be done in more than a few months. As a result all we get are small incremental improvements, with significantly diminishing returns as time goes on, as no one is investing to take the big leap forward.

And, despite claims to the contrary, we haven’t really reinvented the organization (as telecommuting and outsourcing have been common for at least a couple of decades), education, health care, or ownership. We’ve simply redefined management and, in some cases, who foots the bill. I’d like to see some fundamentally new big ideas, but unless someone from a parallel universe where they invented time travel finds away to break into this one and give me a time travel machine to go back in time, I may not live to see that day.

Millions Saved. Pennies Spent. Why Won’t They Learn?

Trade Extensions recently released a new set of case studies chronicling just half a dozen sourcing projects it did over the last couple of years for its fortune 500 clients that chronicled, on average, savings of 10% or more which ranged from 500K on a 5.5M category to 28M on a 200M category. All of these companies saved tens of millions (or more) and only spent in the six figure range for the Trade Extensions solution, which means for every penny it saved a dollar.

It is not just the magnitude of the savings that is significant though – it is the breadth of the impact. The air freight example not only identified a savings potential of 42%, with a realized savings of 21% (when the company took risk, performance, and preferred vendors into account), but also identified a scenario which improved service levels and reduced risks while delivering 21% savings.

The compliance reporting example helped an organization that, due to the scale of it’s operations, took five days to analyze the output of its Transportation Management System (TMS), reduce its retrospective analysis time to a proactive operations step that automatically executed in 30 minutes or less, and allowed the organization to, for the first time, ensure its product movements were consistent with the awarded contract scenario.

In the full truck load and global packaging examples, the companies were able to rationalize the supply bases by 25% to 40% while reducing cost and at least maintaining service levels and risk (if not increasing service and decreasing risk).

But yet these examples are rare. Every year many organizations as large, or larger, than these continue to spend close to, if not, seven figures on their first generation sourcing or source to pay platforms while generating savings that, instead of being in the 10% or more range, are in the 2% to 3% range, which means that the organization is essentially spending dollars to save dollars — which does not make good ecnoomic sense. Especially when a modern optimization (backed sourcing) platform can always be run along side existing supply management system and used as appropriate to generate 3X to 5X the savings and value than the organization would otherwise obtain.

So while the leaders have learned, why won’t the laggards learn?

Don’t Be Fooled. There is no SaaS. Part II

In our last post, we said there is no such thing as Savings-as-a-Service and any organization promising to deliver it (with the exception of the big provider recently valued at 1B) is making a promise they likely won’t keep. The majority of organizations that jump on this new acronym with grandiose claims of SaaS delivery will not meet up to expectations, and many will not deliver any savings at all.

The reason being is that a company is not delivering savings unless they are either delivering a product or service below market average price or delivering a product or service at market average but at a higher value than would normally be obtained (either through enhanced quality, reliability, features, knowledge, etc.). After all, anyone can go to Amazon, Staples, Office Depot, eBay, etc. and figure out a rough market average and get that price if they want to.

For a company to deliver savings, they need to (have a platform that):

  • know what the market average is for a commodity or service, and always provide options that are less or the same with additional value beyond the market norm (which means they need a modern catalog platform)
  • have a way of collecting quotes and bids from potential suppliers that can be compared in a normalized, weighted, apples to apples fashion (which means they need a modern e-Sourcing platform with strong e-Negotiation support capability)
  • have a services team to handle the negotiations and the contract process to make sure that what gets offered gets agreed to
  • have a platform capable of managing the PO, invoice, and goods receipt process (and m-way matching) to make sure that the right products are ordered at the right price, that only invoices at the right price are accepted, and that payments are only made for goods and services received (which means they need a modern e-Procurement platform with strong e-Document management capability)
  • have a platform capable of tracking obligations and supplier performance (to make sure that deliver is on time, quality is up to snuff, etc.) and handling any corrective actions that are needed and supplier development that can improve overall value (which means that a strong SRM platform is needed as well)
  • and have the expertise in the appropriate categories relevant to your business! An engineer from the direct materials world probably know squat about contingent lab or procurement or marketing agency management, which could be where a considerable portion of your unmanaged spend is.

How many providers have a full featured S2P platform with enhanced e-Catalog and SRM functionality, budget integration, analytics that support normalized year-over-year spend reporting, services professionals to support all of this as a true SaaS (Software as a Service) platform *and* the expertise to support the categories you need supported?

The answer is: relative to the number of providers in the Supply Management space, very few. Only this handful of companies can claim that they can deliver Savings-as-a-Service. And, fair warning, their services will come with a hefty price tag. (This is not to say that the price tag will not be worth it, especially since there are providers that can consistently deliver a 5x to 10x ROI year after year, but that you need to be prepared for the price tag up front and willing to work with them and follow their lead in order to realize the savings.)

Because it sounds so awesome, expect a number of companies to jump on this new SaaS acronym, and expect most of them to be stretching the truth at least a little (if not a lot). Do your due diligence and find out what it is they really deliver and what will be expected of your team to realize the ROI they are promising. Then figure out if your team is up to the challenge, can be with training, need (temporary) (GPO) (expert) augmentation, or need a services provider to simply take over part of the Procurement in an outsourcing relationship until they can be brought up to the level (and manpower) needed to realize the ROI themselves.

Everybody wants savings, but simply not paying more than you have to under normal circumstances is not saving, it’s just avoiding clearly unnecessary cost. Savings is going below the baseline, and to realize that, you need a provider that can actually help your organization achieve that consistently across categories.

Don’t Be Fooled. There is NO SaaS! Part I

That’s right — there is no such thing as Savings-as-a-Service and any organization promising to deliver it (with the exception of the big provider recently value at 1B) is making a promise they likely won’t keep. The majority of organizations that jump on this new acronym with grandiose claims of SaaS delivery will not meet up to expectations, and many will not deliver any savings at all.

That doesn’t mean that you will not see reductions in spend, because many of the offerings proclaiming SaaS will lead to reductions in unit price, but this isn’t savings. Paying less than you were spending is not saving. If you were paying more than market average, and you reduce the cost to market average, you are simply realizing a cost reduction you could have realized any time you wanted simply by shifting the spend to a GPO, (an) Amazon (or e-Bay) (reseller), or an e-Catalog provider with punch-out integrations to all the big marketplaces. That “savings” was yours for the taking any time you wanted. And, moreover, once you make the switch, and start paying market average, if you simply stay with that provider, you will never see the “savings” again.

“Savings” is what you realize when you reduce spend below market average or extract value beyond what you typically get at the price point you are paying. Thus, to deliver savings you must deliver a customer a viable option to obtain a product or service they need below market average or to obtain more value (add) when they pay market average. And, thus, to deliver savings as a service you must do this repeatedly on a regular basis.

This is NOT something you can do if all you offer is a catalog. All a catalog allows you to do is determine the market average (range) for a product or service and identify those products that meet the price (range) and document which are of the best quality or the best fit for your organization. This is a valuable “service”, and every organization should be using one for their commodity product and service tail spend, but this is not “savings as a service”. Savings comes from analysis, engagement, negotiation, and relationship management.

If you want a better than market price or value-add features and services, you have to engage a potential supplier, negotiate for delivery (based on guaranteed volume, dollars, or value-delivery — such as co-marketing, lean training, or volume-based raw material purchasing at a better rate on their behalf), and manage the relationship. Thus, obtaining savings is also more than just sending out an RFQ and accepting the lowest bid (because if quality or reliability decreases and you have more returns and stock outs, you are actually paying more), so providers that just offer RFQ/e-Auction technology don’t deliver “Savings as a Service” either. They deliver a platform that you can use as part of a strategic sourcing process to negotiate savings, but as you can see, there’s a lot more to delivering savings than just providing a platform.

And we’ll address this in Part II.