Category Archives: rants

You Don’t Need Gen-AI to Revolutionize Procurement and Supply Chain Management — Classic Analytics, Optimization, and Machine Learning that You Have Been Ignoring for Two Decades Will Do Just Fine!

Open Gen-AI technology may be about as reliable as a career politician managing your Nigerian bank account, but somehow it’s won the PR war (since there is longer any requirement to speak the truth or state actual facts in sales and marketing in most “first” world countries [where they believe Alternative Math is a real thing … and that’s why they can’t balance their budgets, FYI]) as every Big X, Mid-Sized Consultancy, and the majority of software vendors are pushing Open Gen-AI as the greatest revolution in technology since the abacus. the doctor shouldn’t be surprised, given that most of the turkeys on their rafters can’t even do basic math* (but yet profess to deeply understand this technology) and thus believe the hype (and downplay the serious risks, which we summarized in this article, where we didn’t even mention the quality of the results when you unexpectedly get a result that doesn’t exhibit any of the six major issues).

The Power of Real Spend Analysis

If you have a real Spend Analysis tool, like Spendata (The Spend Analysis Power Tool), simple data exploration will find you a 10% or more savings opportunity in just a few days (well, maybe a few weeks, but that’s still just a matter of days). It’s one of only two technologies that has been demonstrated, when properly deployed and used, to identify returns of 10% or more, year after year after year, since the mid 2000s (when the technology wasn’t nearly as good as it is today), and it can be used by any Procurement or Finance Analyst that has a basic understanding of their data.

When you have a tool that will let you analyze data around any dimension of interest — supplier, category, product — restrict it to any subset of interest — timeframe, geographic location, off-contract spend — and roll-up, compare against, and drill down by variance — the opportunities you will find will be considerable. Even in the best sourced top spend categories, you’ll usually find 2% to 3%, in the mid-spend likely 5% or more, in the tail, likely 15% or more … and that’s before you identify unexpected opportunities by division (who aren’t adhering to the new contracts), geography (where a new local supplier can slash transportation costs), product line (where subtle shifts in pricing — and yes, real spend analysis can also handle sales and pricing data — lead to unexpected sales increases and greater savings when you bump your orders to the next discount level), and even in warranty costs (when you identify that a certain supplier location is continually delivering low quality goods compared to its peers).

And that’s just the Procurement spend … it can also handle the supply chain spend, logistics spend, warranty spend, utility and HR spend — and while you can’t control the HR spend, you can get a handle on your average cost by position by location and possibly restructure your hubs during expansion time to where resources are lower cost! Savings, savings, savings … you’ll find them ’round the clock … savings, savings, savings … analytics rocks!

The Power of Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization

Decision optimization has been around in the Procurement space for almost 25 years, but it still has less than 10% penetration! This is utterly abysmal. It’s not only the only other technology that has been generating returns of 10% or more, in good times and bad, for any leading organization that consistently uses it, but the only technology that the doctor has seen that has consistently generated 20% to 30% savings opportunities on large multi-national complex categories that just can’t be solved with RFQ and a spreadsheet, no matter how hard you try. (But if you want to pay them, an expert consultant will still claim they can with the old college try if you pay their top analyst’s salary for a few months … and at, say, 5K a day, there goes three times any savings they identify.)

Examples where the doctor has repeatedly seen stellar results include:

  • national service provider contract optimization across national, regional, and local providers where rates, expected utilization, and all-in costs for remote resources are considered; With just an RFX solution, the usual solution is to go to all the relevant Big X and Mid-Sized Bodyshops and get their rate cards by role by location by base rate (with expenses picked up by the org) and all-in rate; calc. the expected local overhead rate by location; then, for each Big X / Mid-Size- role – location, determine if the Big X all-in rate or the Big X base rate plus their overhead is cheaper and select that as the final bid for analysis; then mark the lowest bid for each role-location and determine the three top providers; then distribute the award between the three “top” providers in the lowest cost fashion; and, in big companies using a lot of contract labour, leave millions on the table because 1) sometimes the cheapest 3 will actually be the providers with the middle of the road bids across the board and 2) for some areas/roles, regional, and definitely local, providers will often be cheaper — but since the complexity is beyond manageable, this isn’t done, even though the doctor has seen multiple real-world events generate 30% to 40% savings since optimization can handle hundreds of suppliers and tens of thousands of bids and find the perfect mix (even while limiting the number of global providers and the number of providers who can service a location)
  • global mailer / catalog production —
    paper won’t go away, and when you have to balance inks, papers, printing, distribution, and mailing — it’s not always local or one country in a region that minimizes costs, it’s a very complex sourcing AND logistics distribution that optimizes costs … and the real-world model gets dizzying fast unless you use optimization, which will find 10% or more savings beyond your current best efforts
  • build-to-order assembly — don’t just leave that to the contract manufacturer, when you can simultaneously analyze the entire BoM and supply chain, which can easily dwarf the above two models if you have 50 or more items, as savings will just appear when you do so

… but yet, because it’s “math”, it doesn’t get used, even though you don’t have to do the math — the platform does!

Curve Fitting Trend Analysis

Dozens (and dozens) of “AI” models have been developed over the past few years to provide you with “predictive” forecasts, insights, and analytics, but guess what? Not a SINGLE model has outdone classical curve-fitting trend analysis — and NOT a single model ever will. (This is because all these fancy-smancy black box solutions do is attempt to identify the record/transaction “fingerprint” that contains the most relevant data and then attempt to identify the “curve” or “line” to fit it too all at once, which means the upper bound is a classical model that uses the right data and fits to the right curve from the beginning, without wasting an entire plant’s worth of energy powering entire data centers as the algorithm repeatedly guesses random fingerprints and models until one seems to work well.)

And the reality is that these standard techniques (which have been refined since the 60s and 70s), which now run blindingly fast on large data sets thanks to today’s computing, can achieve 95% to 98% accuracy in some domains, with no misfires. A 95% accurate forecast on inventory, sales, etc. is pretty damn good and minimizes the buffer stock, and lead time, you need. Detailed, fine tuned, correlation analysis can accurately predict the impact of sales and industry events. And so on.

Going one step further, there exists a host of clustering techniques that can identify emergent trends in outlier behaviour as well as pockets of customers or demand. And so on. But chances are you aren’t using any of these techniques.

So given that most of you haven’t adopted any of this technology that has proven to be reliable, effective, and extremely valuable, why on earth would you want to adopt an unproven technology that hallucinates daily, might tell of your sensitive employees with hate speech, and even leak your data? It makes ZERO sense!

While we admit that someday semi-private LLMs will be an appropriate solution for certain areas of your business where large amount of textual analysis is required on a regular basis, even these are still iffy today and can’t always be trusted. And the doctor doesn’t care how slick that chatbot is because if you have to spend days learning how to expertly craft a prompt just to get a single result, you might as well just learn to code and use a classic open source Neural Net library — you’ll get better, more reliable, results faster.

Keep an eye on the tech if you like, but nothing stops you from using the tech that works. Let your peers be the test pilots. You really don’t want to be in the cockpit when it crashes.

* And if you don’t understand why a deep understand of university level mathematics, preferably at the graduate level, is important, then you shouldn’t be touching the turkey who touches the Gen-AI solution with a 10-foot pole!

Last Friday Was International Women’s Day. You Made a Big Fuss. Well, What Did You Do This Week?

This is taken from a LinkedIn post the doctor posted on Monday, March 11. It’s being reposted here for those who don’t follow LinkedIn and because, as expected, he hasn’t heard a single peep from any organization that was spewing platitudes last Friday as if praise one day a year was doing enough.

If you truly celebrate women, then please tell me:

What are you doing TODAY to

  1. increase the number of women in Management, STEM, Executive Suites, and Investment Firms,
  2. close the pay gap that is still 15% to 30% across these areas,
  3. encourage women to join your company to pursue their career, and
  4. enable the work life balance they need to be AS or MORE successful than their male counterparts?

As most of you are probably well aware from the deluge of “we support and honour our female leaders who … ” posts on LinkedIn last Friday, International Women’s Day was last Friday (2024-Mar-08). I stayed silent, as usual, because I found the majority of them very upsetting.

While some of the posts were very sincere, and some came from individuals I know had the best of intentions:

  1. Lip service does nothing to address the four major issues above.
  2. The lip service I saw in some of these posts was about as meaningful as a token thank you card at the annual Christmas party.
  3. Few addressed the real issues women still face in “traditional” workspaces run, and dominated, by men.
  4. Those few that honoured teams with equal representation or greater, or at least statistically average representation (in companies in fields where women are currently only 25% of the workforce, like STEM) have done nothing to educate their peers on how important this is and how successful they are because of it.

If you are a leader in a company (with actual employees) that truly cares, then I challenge you to celebrate their achievements and capability every day, and once a month make a post on efforts your company is taking to increase the number of women, close the pay and rank gaps, and support their work life balance, either through hiring, training, support for community programs that do such or at least make a post on the stellar accomplishments they have accomplished that would put an average salesman to shame.

And to keep doing this until they have the equality, and the respect they deserve.

The simple facts are

  1. women are half the population,
  2. are just as capable of men (as there is NO difference between average IQ scores), and
  3. should be half the workforce.

If women are not half the workforce at your company (or at least not represented statistically in line with the average representation in the field your company is in), it’s not their lack of achievement, dear men, it’s yours!

The Public Sector is Giving Procurement Integrity A Bad Name … Can the Private Sector Fix It?

A recent article over on Global Government Forum on Procurement Integrity: A Big Problem That’s Worse Than Most Organizations Think, pointed out that errors, fraud and abuse in procurement cost governments and organizations millions of dollars every year, and even though recent headlines in the US (TriMark, Booz Allen Hamilton), UK (NHS, Royal Mail), and Canada (ArriveCan) are starting to shine the light on the extent of (public sector) procurement fraud, the problem is still bigger than you think. Much bigger.

Current estimates are that organizations, across the public and private sectors, lose 5% per year due to procurement errors, abuse, and fraud. Given that Global GDP is about 85 Trillion dollars, at 5%, that’s 4 TRILLION dollars estimated to be lost annually to errors, abuse, and fraud. And that’s probably a low-ball estimate due to the fact that we just calculated that Over One TRILLION dollars will be wasted on IT software and services due, primarily, to lack of knowledge and/or outright stupidity (and not malicious intent, but if it’s easy for consultancies and third parties to considerably over bill for legitimate goods and services that you need, imagine how much they are fleecing you for goods and services that you don’t need and may not even receive).

It’s highly likely that the true cost of errors, abuse, and fraud (internal, collusion, and external) is closer to 10% of total GDP, or close to EIGHT TRILLION. That’s at least twice the GDP of every country on the planet except China and the United States. That’s a BIG PROBLEM, which is definitely not being helped by the 100M to Multi Billion Procurement Frauds being reported almost monthly across major western economies — and multi-million dollar fines don’t repair the damage. (They don’t even come close.)

This is damage which Procurement needs to repair — because Procurement is the only department that has any hope of putting proper procedures, processes, and platforms in place to minimize the errors; training the organizational employees on proper procedures and monitoring the implementations to prevent abuse; and putting in place proper detection systems to detect, and prevent, potential fraud and quickly identify and track it when it happens.

Unless all the bucks go through, and stop at, a modern Procurement department run by a CPO who puts in place proper people, processes, and platforms, loss is going to continue to run rampant. Which means that while the public sector is failing us daily, the Private sector has to step up and restore the integrity of Procurement. It can start by utilizing some of the the techniques in the linked article, and continue by continually learning and implementing the best technology and processes it finds to not only uncover significant savings in inflationary times, but return integrity and trust into big business, and give governments who have lost their way a model to follow.

And for more details on Bad Buying to avoid, and how to achieve Procurement with Purpose, the doctor suggests you start by following the great public procurement defender, Peter Smith.

One of these things is not like the other — it’s the right choice!

Note the Sourcing Innovation Editorial Disclaimers and note this is a very opinionated rant!  Your mileage will vary!  (And not about any firm in particular.)

Three bids for that spend analytics project from the three leading Big X firms come in at 1 Million. One bid for that spend analytics project from a specialized niche consultancy you pulled out of the hat for bid diversity comes in at 250 Thousand. Which one is right?

Those of you who only partially paid attention to the education Sesame Street was trying to impart upon you when you were growing up will simply remember the “one of these things is not like the other” song and think that any of the bids from the Big X firm is right and the niche consultancy is wrong because it’s different, and therefore must be thrown out because it’s too low when, in fact, it’s just as likely that the three bids from the Big X firms that are wrong and the bid from the niche consultancy that was right.

Those of us who paid attention knew that Sesame Street was trying to show us how to detect underlying similarities so we could properly cluster objects for further analysis. What we should have learned is that the Big X bids were all the same, built on the same assumption, and can be compared equally. And that the outlier bid needed further investigation — a further investigation that can only be undertaken against an appropriately sized set of sample set of bids from other specialized niche consultancies to compare against. And without that sample set of bids, you can’t properly evaluate the lower bid, which, the doctor can tell you, is just as likely to be closer to correct than what could be wildly overpriced Big X bids.  (Newer firms often have newer tech and methods — and if these are the right methods and tech for your problem … )

As per our recent post, if you want to get analytics and AI right, most of these guys don’t have the breadth and depth of expertise they claim to have (as most don’t have the educational background to know just how broad, deep, and advanced AI and analytics can get, especially when you dig deep into the math and computer science and all of the variable models and strengths and weaknesses, and instead are trained on what is essentially marketing content from AI and analytics providers). In the group that sells you, there will be a leader who is a true expert (and worth his or her weight in platinum), a few handpicked lieutenants who are above average and run the projects, and a rafter of juniors straight out of private college with more training in how to dress, talk, and follow orders than training in actual analytics … and no guarantee they even have any real university level mathematics beyond basic analysis in operational research (and thus a knowledge of what analytics is and isn’t and can and can’t do).  And unless you know what you need, and why, you can’t judge the response.  (Furthermore, you can’t expect them to figure out your problem and goals with only partial information!)

While there was a time big analytics projects were (multi) million dollar projects, that was twenty years ago when Spend Analysis 1.0 was still hitting the market; when there were limited tools for data integration, mapping, cleansing, and enrichment; and when there weren’t a lot of statistics on average savings opportunities across internal and external spend categories. Now we have mature Spend Analysis 3.0 technologies (some taking steps towards spend analysis 4.0 technologies); advanced technologies for automatic data integration, mapping, cleansing, and even enrichment; deep databases on projects and results by vertical and industry size; extensive libraries for out-of-the-box analytics across categories and potential opportunities; and a whole toolkit for spend analysis that didn’t exist two decades ago. This new toolkit, built by best of breed vendors used, and sometimes [co-]owned by these best of breed niche consultancies (that don’t try to do everything, and definitely don’t pretend they can), allows modern spend analysis projects to be done ten times as efficiently and effectively, in the hands of a master — a master that isn’t necessarily on your project if you hire a Big X or Mid-Sized Consultancy without doing your homework, vetting the proposal, and vetting the people. [See when should you be using Big X.]

In contrast, a dedicated niche consultancy should have all these tools, and only have masters on the project who do these projects day in and day out. Compared to the bigger consultancies who don’t specialize in these projects, which will have a team of juniors using the manual playbook from the early 2000s, and one lieutenant to guide them. That’s often why sometimes their project bids are five times as much — and why you should be inviting multiple niche best-of-breed consultancies to bid on your project as well as multiple Big X consultancies (including those that are truly focusing on analytics and AI, and you can identify some of these by their recent acquisitions in the area) and be focusing in just as much on the six figure bids for the one that provides the best value, not just the seven figure Big X bids.  (And, FYI, if you invite enough Big X, you might find some come in at six figures and not seven because they have acquired the newer tech, took the time to understand your request, and figured out how they could get you the same value for less cost, leaving you funds for the follow on project where you should consider the Big X!)

(This is also the case for implementations. The Big X always have a rafter on the bench to assign to any project you give them, but there’s no guarantee any of them have ever implemented the system you chose before, or if they did, no guarantee they’ve ever connected it to the systems you need to connect to. You need specialists if you want a new system implemented as cost effectively as possible, especially if its a narrow focused specialist application and not a big enterprise application the Big X always implements. At the end of the day, even if you’re paying those specialists 500 or more an hour because getting a system up in 2 months at 40K is considerably better than a small team of juniors taking 4 months at 200 an hour and a total cost of 80K.  But again, mileage will vary — if the solution you select is a Big X partner, then the Big X will be best.  If it’s a solution they never heard of, you will need to evaluate multiple bids from multiple parties. )

Remember, where any group of vendors on the same page are concerned, All of us is as dumb as One of us!

Don’t fall for the Collectivism MindF6ck! that if multiple parties agree on something, that’s the right answer!  the doctor does NOT want to do say it again, but since a month still is not going by where he’s hearing about niche consultancies being thrown out for “being too cheap” or “obviously not understanding the problem” (which means the enterprise throwing them out is too uninformed and not recognizing that the Big X bids could just as likely the outliers because they aren’t inviting enough expert consultancies to the table), apparently he has to keep writing (and screaming) this truth. (the doctor isn’t saying that you can’t get a million dollars of value from some of these consultancies, just that you won’t by giving them a project they are not suited for;  again, see when should you use big X to identify when that million dollar project will generate a five million ROI — it’s people doing these projects at the end of the day, and where are those people?)

Remember, most of these firms got big in management, or accounting and tax, or marketing and sales consulting, not technology consulting. The only reason these big consultancies started offering these services is because of the amount of money flowing into technology, money which they want, but while the best of the best of the best in more traditional accounting, management, and marketing fields flocked to them, the best of the best in technology flocked to startups and c00l big tech firms  Now, some of these firms double downed, went and recruited those people, built small teams, learned, bought tech companies to expand the team, and now have great offerings in a number of areas.  But we have tens of thousands of tech companies for a reason, not everyone can build every type of technology, and not everyone can be an expert in every type of technology.  So while they will have expertise in some areas, they just can’t have expertise in all areas.  No one can.  Find the best provider for you.  Sometimes it will be Big X.  Sometimes Mid-Market.  Sometimes Niche.  It all depends on your problem at hand.)

And yes, sometimes the niche vendor will be wrong and woefully undersize the project or your needs.  But as per the above, if you don’t do give them a chance, and deep dive into their bid, how will you know?

 

Did you ever try eating a mitten? the doctor bets some of those clients did! (He feels you’re not all there if you think glorified reporting projects should still cost One Million Dollars by default and might actually try to eat your mittens! [Joking, but you get the point.]  Deep analytics projects that require the most advanced tech, especially AI tech, will cost a lot, but standard spend analysis, sales analysis, etc. where we have been iterating and improving on the technology for two decades should not.)

Be Wary of Top X Lists That Only Have ONE Specialist Vendor!

For every area of Source-to-Pay, including, but not limited to Sourcing, Supplier Management, Contract Management, Spend Analysis, e-Procurement, Invoice-to-Pay, Accounts Payable, Intake, Orchestration, and Spend Management, you can find a Top 10 vendor list. In fact, you can find multiple … just do a Google or Chat-J’ai Pété! search. However, if you compare them all side by side, you’re likely going to see the same vendors over and over again. Specifically, in all but one of the lists, you’re likely going to see the following vendors: SAP Ariba, Coupa, iValua, GEP, Jaggaer, and Oracle. In other words, you’re going to see the same six vendors over and over again.

And therein lies the problem. These are top suites. Suites may be best in breed in the one or two modules they started off with when they were startups, or the one or two startups they just acquired, but they are NOT best of breed across the board. Not even close. If you’re looking at a Top X Supplier Management list, you want a vendor that is best of breed in (at least one aspect of) Supplier Management. If you wanted a top suite, you’d look at a top suite list.

And it wouldn’t be so bad if you knew this, but you don’t. You’re looking for these lists because you are looking for a solution, don’t know what the options are, or where to find them. So when there’s only one specialist vendor on the list, and the list is on a major site like Supply Chain Digital or CIO, how is an average Procurement Professional supposed to find out what vendors even offer the type of solution they are looking for, let alone who the best vendors may be?

The answer is they don’t. And who does help? No one! The reality is that those suites are enterprise suites, all designed for, and going after, the same Fortune 500 / Global 3000. All are great baseline end-to-end solutions. But this also means they are not designed for the next 30,000 companies in the mid-market. That they don’t have end-to-end deep capability, and may not have specialized capability in the one-or-two modules the organization needs deep capability in due to the organization’s specific needs. If the organization is a utility, it needs deep contractor vetting (which is a specialized type of supplier compliance management), especially when those contractors send people to consumer sites and a safety violation could not only harm them, but also harm the consumer. If the organization is a financial institution, contracts need to be extensive and iron clad when it comes to risk, compliance, and security and a top of the line contract management solution is needed. If the organization does a lot of small purchases, it probably needs a best-of-breed catalog management solution with easy search and request so the average organizational buyer can request it. If you examine each of these requirements, none of those suites due specialized contractor vetting. Only one has a best of breed CLM, and only one other has a partnership with a best of breed CLM (and while they’ll tell you otherwise, remember that the doctor was a Spend Matters Analyst, designed ALL of the original Source-to-Contract Solution Map evaluations [which are still the deepest technical evaluations in the analyst space], as well as led the development of the common stack and infrastructure sections across all of the Maps and knows with authority what the “best” solutions are in each of these categories when you go broad and deep technically*). With respect to catalog management, half of these suites do it quite well, but with regards to organizational roll-out and tail-spend capture, most don’t get good adoption and that’s why you have intake/orchestration specialists (like Zip, Oro, and Tonkean) providing easy to use, consumer friendly, natural language interfaces to the organizational users beyond Procurement (and sitting on top of these suites).

In other words, these lists are junk, and besides presumably keeping the advertisers happy, they offer no value to anyone. In fact, they are so junk that, if they are not clearly labelled as advertorials (because that’s what they effectively are), they could be in violation of Competition Acts (introduced to bring transparency into journalism and “influencing”) in some states and countries if it wasn’t for the inclusion of exactly one best-of-breed vendor on the list who clearly wasn’t paying the publication anything (because they are small and definitely couldn’t afford the advertising rates).

In short, if half of a “Best Of” list for a Procurement module is suites, it’s junk and you should completely ignore it, and the publication should do better (or not do it at all).

And while the doctor can’t point you to any Top X lists that are suite/advertiser free (as he’s never found any), what he can do is point you to non-exclusionary vendor lists that you can start from to do your own research.

ProcurementSoftware.site has an open directory of a large number of Procurement software companies organized across 20 categories and the Spend Matters Vendor Directory has an open directory of vendors across 26 categories. And while neither of their category definitions or segmentations is perfect, they’re pretty close and a great start (and infinitely better than useless suite-filled Top X lists).

Also, the doctor regularly posts easy access lists of vendors when he does a(n update of a) summary of an area, and so far has listed hundreds and hundreds of vendors across the main areas of S2P in these posts (with almost 100 vendors addressing some area of Supplier Management, over 80 of which ARE NOT SUITES — which means this recent Top 10: SRM Providers list on Supply Chain Digital was very, very, sad when it had 6 suites: Ariba, Coupa, GEP, iValua, Jaggaer, and Oracle; 2 Supply Chain ERPs: Blue Yonder and Epicor [well, 4 actually as SAP and Oracle are ERPs, but at least they have specialist Procurement suites]; 1 trade network (which isn’t actually SRM by the way); and EXACTLY ONE best of breed SRM solution: Vizibl. FYI: SI’s list of over 100 SXM platforms has over 20 SRM specialists … just sayin’.)

For easy consumption, here are:
75+ Sourcing Vendors
90+ Supplier Management Vendors
80+ Contract Management Vendors
40+ Spend Analysis Vendors
70+ e-Procurement Vendors
75+ Invoice-to-Pay/Accounts Payable Vendors
20+ Intake/Orchestrate Vendors
10+, 5+, and 20+ Legal, Marketing, and SaaS Management Vendors
55+ Supply Chain Risk Vendors

And if you’re wondering why the doctor doesn’t do Top X lists, it’s twofold. One, in no area are there exactly 10 best vendors, so it’s a disservice to you to leave vendors out or add vendors in just to make a round number. Two, and most importantly, the top X vendors are predicated on the specific functionality you are looking for and the ability of the vendor to plug into your software ecosystem. For example, in Supplier Management, there are over a dozen different areas of focus. the doctor‘s coverage included 10 major areas of functionality, of which “R”elationship was just one, and while a large number of vendors “do” relationship, there are a number of different definitions as to what that is (and what functionality must be included). So, without a good definition accompanied by an ecosystem definition, there’s 40-ish vendors that may or may not be on that list. Every module has 3 to 10 major functionalities it has to support, and then sub-functionalities you may want. Without that context, no one can provide you a Top 10. (But if you engage an advisor who knows all those vendors at a high level, and provide your requirements, that person can help you get to a relevant short-list quickly so that you are making meaningful comparisons at decision time.)

* the doctor also knows that you don’t always need the absolute best, that sometimes the 80% solution [compared to the absolute best] is more than enough for most organizations, and that’s why a suite is often the right starting point for a large enterprise; especially if the enterprise augments the suite with one or two specific best-of-breed applications for specific use cases, as needed; but that’s your decision, not the suite, and not an uniformed third party hiding potential solutions from you