Category Archives: rants

CUCKOO

CAO: Chief Administrative Officer

Chief Academic Officer

Chief Analytics Officer

Chief Advisement Officer

CBO: Chief Banking Officer

Chief Brand Officer

Chief Brokerage Officer

CCO: Chief Compliance Officer

Chief Communications Officer

Chief Control Officer

Chief Customer Officer

Chief Creative Officer

Chief Carbon Officer

Chief Consulting Officer

CDO: Chief Development Officer

Chief Disciplinary Officer

CEO: Chief Executive Officer

Chief Ethics Officer

Chief Entertainment Officer

CFO: Chief Financial Officer

CGO: Chief Globalization Officer

Chief Government Officer

Chief Growth Officer

 CHO: Chief Health Officer

Chief Humanitarian Officer

CIO: Chief Information Officer

Chief Innovation Officer

Chief Intelligence Officer

Chief Investment Officer

Chief Integrity Officer

CJO: Chief Judicial Officer

CKO: Chief Knowledge Officer

CLO: Chief Logistics Officer

Chief Legal Officer

Chief Learning Officer

Chief Linguistics Officer

CMO: Chief Marketing Officer

Chief Medical Officer

CNO: Chief Nursing Officer

COO: Chief Operations Officer

CPO: Chief Procurement Officer

Chief Privacy Officer

Chief People Officer

Chief Performance Officer

 CQO: Chief Quality Officer

CRO: Chief Risk Officer

Chief Research Officer

Chief Revenue Officer

Chief Restructuring Officer

CSO: Chief Supply (Chain) Officer

Chief Strategy Officer

Chief Security Officer

Chief Sales Officer

Chief Science Officer

Chief Staff Officer

Chief Solutions Officer

Chief Suitability Officer

CTO: Chief Technology Officer

Chief Transportation Officer

Chief Telecommunications Officer

CUO: Chief Underwriting Officer

CVO: Chief Visionary Officer

Chief Volunteer Officer

CWO: Chief Web Officer

CXO: Chief eXperience Officer

and now a

CCO: Chief Commercial Officer.

I think we need a Chief Universal Cipher Keeping Ontological Officer, or CUCKOO, to keep track of them all. I know I’m going cuckoo trying to keep track of them …

Recession? What Recession? Here’s 91M for Inventory Software

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I couldn’t help but notice this recent article in Intelligent Enterprise that noted that “SAP offered 91M for SAF”. Now, good inventory management software is extremely valuable because it can significantly reduce the 30%+ overhead (on product cost) that many organizations lose in inventory each year, but SAF is a little company of about 100 employees that only had 19M in revenue last year. That’s a 4.8 multiplier … in a down economy!

Forget the current share price, which likely skyrocketed on the rumor alone. You invest based on the likelihood of getting your money back in a reasonable time-frame. Considering that most small company sales drop considerably when they’re swallowed by an 800 lb gorilla, SAP will be lucky to get their money back in five years.

But more importantly, if that 91M had been funneled into an R&D group with some freedom, imagine what that could have built! Maybe they could even realize their Vision of the Future. Instead, as far as I can tell, they’re just spending more of their customer’s money on empty calories by paying too much of a premium. Well, at least they ain’t spending 5 Billion for Business Intelligence.

Speculation is Fun … But You Should Get the Facts

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Speculation, a favorite pass-time of many bloggers, is fun, but you should get the facts before you sponsor any blog.

That being said, it never hurts to latch on to a winner early (especially if a sponsorship is being priced competitively), and there are a few up-and coming winners out there, particularly if your focus is narrower or broader than supply chain innovation, education, and best practices. So, if you are a forward-thinking marketer who knows your traffic is going to the blogs (after all, the only traditional publication that appears to get more regular web traffic than this blog is Purchasing), I’d highly recommend that you consider putting your logo on multiple, complimentary blogs and make your brand #1 in the eyes of your prospective, and discerning, customers.

First off, in the supply chain space, I’d recommend taking a close look at Bob Ferrari’s Supply Chain Matters. While still on the low end of the middle ground in the rankings (between Procurement Insights and Supply Excellence), Bob has been churning out high quality content since day one. If Bob decided to make Supply Chain Matters a daily blog, stepping up from his sporadic posting schedule of about every three days on average, I think Supply Chain Matters could shoot up the charts and quickly become, without question, the third most visited blog in supply and spend management space.

Secondly, in the related Metals space, I’d highly recommend Aptium Global’s Metal Miner. Now augmented with it’s MetalMiner IndX service, Metal Miner, which now claims to be the fourth largest online metals publication (and the traffic engines appear to support this claim), has been bringing you quality information on the metals market since it’s launch in December of 2007. It’s no-nonsense approach to quality information day-in and day-out, coupled with it’s metal pricing index that is updated daily, has allowed it to climb to the point where it is now also the third most trafficked supply chain blog (which you can verify through external triangulation across the five major traffic ranking sites). Quite impressive.

Thirdly, in the broader enterprise solutions space, I’d recommend Vinnie Mirchandani‘s Deal Architect. While Vinnie doesn’t tend to do deep dives into particular solution offerings very often, he offers a myriad of insights on a regular basis that can help you get a very strong understanding of the enterprise software space if you read it regularly. And that is one heck of a useful service … especially since you’d have to subscribe to Gartner or Forrester to get the same quality of insight, and they’re certainly not free!

Well, those are my recommendations if you’re on the market for (multiple) blog sponsorships as an innovative, thought-leading organization.

Why Are You Negotiating The Wrong Terms?

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At the beginning of every year, the IACCM does a survey of the top negotiated terms of the previous year. And for the last three years, the top negotiated terms haven’t changed much. This is not a good thing, because the top terms are not what you should be focussed on. As of today, the top negotiated terms are the following:

  1. Limitation of Liability
  2. Indemnification
  3. Price / Charge / Price Changes
  4. Intellectual Property
  5. Confidential Information / Data Protection
  6. Service Levels and Warranties
  7. Delivery / Acceptance
  8. Payment
  9. Liquidated Damages
  10. Applicable Law / Jurisdiction

This is nuts. The most important things are:

  • what products / services do you need,
  • what quality and service levels are required,
  • what quantities do you need,
  • when and how do you need the products / services delivered, and
  • how much can you / are you willing to pay?

And if you look at the top ten list, only three of these five key points make the top ten. Furthermore, if you examine the top thirty list of the negotiated terms, we see that

  • scope and goals is 14,
  • freight / shipping is 23, and
  • information access and management is 29.

This is absurd. If you can’t verbally agree up front in the first five minutes that

  • you’re liable for your actions (and your supplier is only liable for theirs),
  • your IP is your IP (and your supplier’s is your supplier’s),
  • you’ll take the utmost care to protect your supplier’s confidential information (in exchange for your supplier taking the utmost care to protect yours),
  • each party will respect the laws in each country where they do business and the jurisdiction will be that of the buyer (or destination), and
  • you’ll each respect all of the applicable import and export regulations,

trust each other on these points, and just go with standard clauses in the final agreement, then should you be negotiating in the first place? Because if you can’t get right down to what’s important, I’d argue that maybe you don’t trust each other enough to be doing business in the first place. It’s not about how many billable hours your lawyers can wrangle out of you on administrivia, it’s about getting down to business and making sure you can each profit on the transaction. I’m not saying these clauses aren’t important … I myself insure they are included in every contract I draft and / or sign … just that they’ve been written thousands of times, there are standards that capture reciprocal protections, and it’s not worth sacrificing your goals to try and wrangle out provisions that may be unfair to one party and inevitably destroy the trust that is needed for a successful relationship.

Praise for Purchasing’s Paltry Precise of Payment Partitioning? Puh-leaze!

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I was going to just pretend that Purchasing never published its “guide to spend analysis”, but then a fellow blogger decided to praise it and now I just can’t keep my pen down (or, in my case, MacBook Pro off).

Now, don’t get me wrong. While I don’t read it very much, I do like Purchasing Magazine. They’ve been doing a fine job lately of covering the basics, and if you don’t know the basics, there’s no way you can tackle the more advanced and in-depth topics covered in the Supply Chain Management Review (which is personally my favorite traditional supply chain publication and home of one of my favorite supply chain bloggers, Robert Rudzki).

But this “guide”, which amounts to not much more than a screen scraping of 16 different vendor web-sites is pathetic. It doesn’t do an in depth review of any product. It doesn’t offer any meaningful apples-to-apples comparisons. It isn’t even “comprehensive”!

It only lists 16 vendors. Namely:

 

Ariba
Basware
Bravo Solution
CVM Solutions		 Emptoris
Enporion
Field Glass
Global eProcure		 Iasta
IQ Navigator
Insight Sourcing Group
Ketera		 Oracle
PNet Software
U.S. Bank (Access Online)
Zycus

 

What about?

 

AECsoft
BIQ
CODA		 IQ West
Moai Technologies
Ocean Software		 Oco
Perfect Commerce
Power Advocate		 SciQuest
Spend Radar
Synertrade

 

And that’s just off the top of my head!

And what about advice on how to evaluate, compare, and make a decision? And what about some background? Like the fact that the Emptoris product is still largely based on the defunct Zeborg offering? That the Ariba solution is still not a unified best-of-both worlds solutions (as they are still working on their “9S5” suite that takes the best of the Procuri offering, which was based on TrueSource). That Ketera is based on MicroStrategy. Or that four (4) of the above solutions are based on BIQ. And so on.

Basically, I think it would have been more useful if they’d just posted a complete list of vendors. Because you can’t trust what you rip off the website. Many of the solutions are good solutions … but the marketing spin they cut-and-pasted won’t tell you which solution is right for you!