Category Archives: rants

That’s Right, You Do NOT need AI for Automation!

In our last article, we stated that our space was full of Overpriced “AI” you don’t need in source-to-pay, and one of our three examples was “Sourcing Automation” in Sourcing. To be clear, we’re not saying you don’t need automation — the whole point of software has always been efficiency through automation — we’re saying you don’t need “AI” automation.

The reason we’re doubling down into this topic is that we know there are a number of vendors pushing AI Automation and while automation is very good, AI is just not needed. But we know you’re going to get pushback if you echo the doctor‘s viewpoint here, so we’re going to double down into the details and explain why no AI is needed for great automation.

In our last post, we noted that, at its simplest, it’s the ability to auto-source a (set of) product(s) or service(s) once the need has been identified or the request approved. It’s useful, but you don’t need AI to accomplish this, just good-old rule-based (workflow) automation. After all, it’s just

  1. instantiating a new RFP (which can be done if you have a template tied to the product/service types)
  2. distributing it to known, approved suppliers (which is easily done if you have supplier management that tracks approval status and associated products/services)
  3. collecting the bids (automated submission management through a portal or provided spreadsheet for upload)
  4. selecting the lowest bids and marking it as an approved award (simple analytics)
  5. assembling the contracts (with templates, it’s just sucking in the supplier details, product details, and bids using tag-based search and replace)
  6. push it into the e-Signature portal (via the API)
  7. alert the buyer when the contract is ready for signature (via alerting)

1 You just need templates, and good providers have had those for a long time. And “AI” is not going to invent one you can trust.*1 It’s not too hard to tag your (provider’s) existing templates to all of the products and services you buy, and you only have to do it once.

2 When you onboard a supplier, you should tag it as approved, associate it with the products and services it is approved for, look up its risk and environmental scores, and track its performance over time. If it’s performance drops, it can automatically be suspended from consideration for new projects using old-fashioned business rules that will prevent it from being included in events it shouldn’t be. Thus, approved supplier management isn’t that hard to do and simple saved searches find all the suppliers that should be automatically invited to an event.

3 RFP and e-Auction software has been around for 25 years, so don’t let anyone ever tell you that you need AI.

4 If you’re trying to administer an award subject to constraints or goals, that’s good old fashioned strategic sourcing decision optimization. That’s not AI. MILP using classic tableau and interior point algorithms works just fine in predefined scenarios that suck in the organizational constraints … that leading SSDO (Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization) providers were building over two decades ago.

5 Contract templates should be prescribed by Legal Counsel, not by software flipping random bits using layered statistical algorithms in combinations no one truly understands. The vendor will provide you with templates, but you should be the one reviewing them to make sure they are too your liking. This includes the standard clauses and variation by geography, industry, or risk you want to address.

6 Software integration happened for decades before AI.

7 Alerts have been standard software capability for decades, no AI needed.

If the right data is captured, and the right rules are written, standard workflow-driven software systems can be fully automated without any AI. The only thing preventing them from going from one step to the next is the human verification checkbox being completed. You can turn that off and they will work just fine. So, again, don’t be fooled that you need AI for Sourcing Automation, because you don’t. And with rules-based systems, you’re guaranteed you won’t get the odd, unpredictable result, every 10th sourcing project (because AI is only statistically effective, which means, eventually, it will always fail).

*1 Sure “Generative AI” can generate one. But there’s no guarantee it won’t be hot garbage.

Overpriced “AI” You Don’t Need in Source-to-Pay (S2P)

Everyone and their dog is trying to sell you an “AI” solution. Most of which, as we continually lament is “Automated Idiocy” at best (and “Applied Indirection” at worst, see our article on the April Fools joke vendors are playing on you year round that relaunched SI full time). Some vendors, for select capabilities, actually have the first stage of AI, Assisted Intelligence and a few, for very select capabilities, actually have the second stage of AI, “Augmented Intelligence”, but, and this is what they won’t tell you, especially if you’re a mid-market (MM), you probably don’t need it.

In fact, if you don’t yet have complete S2P, we’d wager that you absolutely don’t need it and likely won’t get an ROI from it, at least not with respect to the price tag they try to charge. (Just like spending more than 120K a year on S2P as a MM generally decreases your Return On Investment [ROI].)

While what is and is not effective and valuable can be situation dependent (just like certain high-priced capabilities can be highly valuable in 10M+ categories but detrimental in 1M categories), there are some capabilities that are almost never valuable, and in this post we will give you some examples, and the reasons therefore, so that you will be able to both analyze whether or not a solution actually has AI AND whether that AI will provide any value.

While there are dozens of capabilities being marketed as AI (which, if implemented using advanced techniques could fall under Level 1 AI), we’ll pick one from three (3) areas as our goal is exposition and not an all-inclusive treatise (that’s a novella, not an article).

Sourcing: Sourcing Automation

What is this? At its simplest, it’s the ability to auto-source a (set of) product(s) or service(s) once the need has been identified or the request approved. It’s useful, but you don’t need AI to accomplish this, just good-old rule-based (workflow) automation. After all, it’s just

  • instantiating a new RFP (which can be done if you have a template tied to the product/service types)
  • distributing it to known, approved suppliers (which is easily done if you have supplier management that tracks approval status and associated products/services)
  • collecting the bids (automated submission management through a portal or provided spreadsheet for upload)
  • selecting the lowest bids and marking it as an approved award (simple analytics)
  • assembling the contracts (with templates, it’s just sucking in the supplier details, product details, and bids using tag-based search and replace)
  • push it into the e-Signature portal (via the API)
  • alert the buyer when the contract is ready for signature (via alerting)

And while very useful for non-strategic and/or low-value categories, no AI is needed. Now, the vendor will counter with multi-round, but guess what, you just implement ceiling, best X, or mandatory response rules before allowing a supplier to progress to the next round and close round one and open round 2 on pre-set dates.

Low bid prediction? i.e. when should the RFX be ended? Guess what, if the platform has anonymized community intelligence, integrates with market data feeds, or supports should-cost modelling (and knows industry average margins), it’s pretty easy to calculate what the low-bid should be (and any bidder that bids lower has likely made an unsustainable bid that should be ignored), and end bidding when you hit that. No AI needed for any of this.

Contract Management: Contract Generation

The ability to auto-assemble a contract is cool, but leading platforms have had it for almost 15 years. How?

  1. A contract template for the category that specifies the clauses that are required, the data that needs to be included, and the meta-data that is needed to assemble the contract correctly.
  2. Default clause templates for each clause, with variants for each geography or industry of interest

That’s it. Then, the system just uses rules to select the template and the clauses and fill in the required supplier, product, and price data from the RFP.

Invoice-to-Pay: Automated Invoice Parsing

Yes, it’s great if you can reduce the number of invoices you need to review from an average of 15% with issues to 1.5%, but let’s face it, you can reduce it to 5% or less with just a little bit of automation, no AI needed.

Almost all invoices are coming in electronic these days, and suppliers that invoice regularly and want to be paid fast will use EDI, XML, or PO-flip through the portal, which means the invoices will come in electronic in an easily parseble format. Missing data / errors will be easily detectable in address, PO field, line items, amounts, etc. when there is an empty field or a mis-match between expected and received data (based on the PO, etc.), etc. and the invoice can be flipped back with notifications of issues for the supplier to correct. Most of the time it will be an honest mistake or oversight and the supplier will happily make the correction to get paid.

The remaining problems will fall into two categories.
1) Those few suppliers that don’t have a solution and have to send PDFs (or images) through e-mail, but those aren’t the suppliers doing massive business (as we’re talking about one time suppliers or consultants for the most part)
2) Those suppliers who don’t accept the requested corrections and have a dispute that needs manual intervention.

With respect to these two categories.
1) An “AI” parsing solution with 80% accuracy is just going to create more manual work, since you will have to correct all the errors anyway (which will be just as much work as entering the data in the first place). (And if the invoice automatically flows through, then it flows through with errors, and that touchless system leads to overspend. Better to touch an extra 3% of invoices and get it right than trust AI that, instead of saving you money, overpays suppliers or sends money to non-existent fraudulent suppliers.)
2) No AI will resolve a dispute. In fact, it will just annoy the h3ck out of the supplier representative and make the dispute worse.

So don’t fall for “AI” in the sales-pitch, even if it isn’t automated idiocy. The vast majority of it you don’t need as good rules-based workflow, configuration, and human ingenuity in the solution still gets the job done (and as the vendors get smarter, the software gets better, and that manually driven best-of-breed software optimized for the process doesn’t make company ending mistakes).

How Do You Reconfigure the Global Supply Chain? That’s Easy!

Ever since the pandemic, there’s been quite a few articles about this despite the fact we’ve known the answer for well over a decade. (Or at least SI was giving away the answer, for free, over a decade ago, even though it seems no one was listening.) Or at least some of use have known the answer for well over a decade. So why was no one listening? Why is the answer still not well known? Is it not clear? Is the new generation not looking on their own and wanting the answer spoon fed to them? Are the articles with the solution either too generic, too politically correct, too vague or not actionable?

It’s hard to say, but to make sure this article is not too generic, not too politically correct, not too vague, and not inapplicable, we’re going to be very, very specific, as politically incorrect as possible, as to the point as possible, and actionable in our messaging. And we’re going to keep it as short and sweet as possible so that the message will be clearly understood.

 

Unless you are selling the product to China (/Asia), when sourcing,
FUCK CHINA.

It’s that simple.

 

Risk Mitigation 101 for Buyers is to have two sources of supply because risk mitigation 101 in systems design is no single point of failure. But over the last three decades, we have built a global supply chain where all roads simultaneously end in China and start in China. When there isn’t a single product you buy where a component or raw material doesn’t get produced or processed in China, it doesn’t matter that you use two different distributors or manufacturers for the product as the choke point is still China. Thus, if the factories or ports shut down because of China’s ridiculous “zero tolerance” policy to an unstoppable epidemic (which is not even as lethal as the bird flu if a large majority of your population that can be safely vaccinated is vaccinated); if the shipping industry gets overloaded due to a lack of ships, workforce (see yesterday’s article on how strikes are going to be your biggest source of supply chain disruptions for the next decade), or containers (which happens, especially since there are way more ships carrying goods from China than carrying goods to China, semi full ships will not load containers to take back until completely empty, and this results in many ships sailing back mostly empty); or critical commodities or utilities expected locally become temporarily unavailable to the factory, you, and everyone else in the world relying on that product, are shut down.

There’s a reason that North America used to primarily source products not made in the USA from Mexico or South America. If there was a disruption, you found out sooner. If a factory had a fire, you could fly in, assess the damage, and send in your engineers to help fix it — quickly. If not, you weren’t far from alternate suppliers you could fly down to assess, and if suitable, negotiate with. If there was a transportation backup, it was easier to clean up — you weren’t waiting for ships, you just sent down more trucks or ordered more rail cars.

And the answer should now be obvious:

  • Home-source anything that can be grown / mined / produced at reasonable economy of scale in multiple geographically separated locations in your home “region” (i.e. multiple states in the US; multiple connected countries in the EU)
  • Near-source anything that can grown / mined / produced at reasonable economy of scale in a relatively near-by country or region connected by land where the product can be shipped by rail and truck (Mexico / Central America / Northern parts of South America for the US)
  • Far-(Over-Sea)-Source only what can’t be home-sourced or near-sourced, which should just be raw materials or small components (i.e. there’s no excuse to be manufacturing and importing washing machines, refrigerators, and cars which are super bulky and weighty when there are only a few core components that need extreme specialization [where it would be hard to find another / build a new factory] or materials that need to be processed pre-transport

Which means that if you are sourcing for the Americas, the amount of sourcing that you should be doing from China is likely about 10% of what you’re actually doing, which, at the end of the day, gave you short term savings in exchange for long term debt including, but not limited to:

  • customer churn and angst
    (happy customers seeing value fork over $$$ a lot faster and in greater amounts than those that aren’t, and they aren’t happy when they don’t get their products on time)
  • constantly increasing transportation costs …
    containers went from < 5K to > 30K during the height of COVID, and while they have come back down, they’re still 30% to 50% more on average, and since most ocean going vessels still use HFO (the dirtiest oil there is, FYI), and the global port strikes are resulting in significant wage increase (partially due to significant inflation in many countries), they’re going to keep going up, especially once you factor in those
  • high carbon taxes
    (everything you make in China is dirty and the shipping is even dirtier)
  • high IP theft …
    even if most of the products don’t make it out of China, everything you produce in China is copied … everything … and some of the copies are now so good, even high end stores in the US are getting fooled!
  • limited options …
    many of your best options went out of business over the last two decades as you believed the overpriced consultants with their false promises that the savings would last forever (but nothing lasts forever …)
  • increased disruptions
    due to the soon to be three-fold increase in natural disasters annually since the China craze began in the late eighties/early nineties (which is projected to be five fold within a decade or so)

On the flip-side, many of the factories you used to use are still where they were. The workforce is still there. The potential is still there. All you have to do is invest in it. It may mean a partial return to the vertically integrated company where you own (part) of your supplier, as you may have to re-enter into co-opetition through conglomerates where you and a group of your peers each minority invest in a new entity to bring that factory back online (or build a new one), but nothing is stopping you. And it might take a year or two (or three) to bring it back, but you can do it, and greatly reduce your supply chain risk in the long term. And, to make it a bit more personal, when you do this, just like Justin, you will have brought SexyBack

In short:

Unnecessary Outsourcing, especially Unnecessary Overseas Outsourcing, broke the supply chain. If you want to fix it, JUST STOP!

To be fair, we should point out that this article is aimed at the primary readership of this blog, which is North America / (Western) Europe as well as the continents of Australia, South America, and Africa. This article is NOT aimed at Asia, because China is part of Asia, which means if you are buying to support an Asian market, in this situation you should be buying from China (and Fuck the Americas), as per our qualifying assertion near the beginning of this article.

Your Biggest Threat of Disruption For the Next Decade is NOT What You Think!

Disruptions are on the rise. It’s a fact, and if you want proof, just visit the World Economic Forum and check out their Global Value Chain Barometer. While some categories of disruptions are holding steady, disruptions are on the rise overall and not a single category is declining.

If asked what the biggest source of disruptions are, depending on where you are located in the world and what industry you are in, you’re likely to say that the biggest sources of disruption are either
a) war and conflict,
b) natural disasters, or
c) cyberattacks.
And while those have traditionally been (among) the highest sources of disruptions, you’d be wrong. The biggest source of disruptions this year have been strikes and walkouts globally. And as the brilliant Robert Reich will tell you, despite the large number of strikes we’ve seen over the last year, workforce revolts are just getting started.

When you consider

  • the rapid rise in inflation globally, especially around necessities (food, housing, healthcare),
  • the fact that, despite the almost two decades of low inflation, intermixed with short periods of stagflation, the majority of the population in many first world countries were financially struggling before inflation came back, especially given that many were out of work for part or all of COVID and didn’t get near enough financial aid to keep their heads above water, and
  • they’re all scared of AI taking their jobs

Many people are near their breaking point. Strikes are going to keep happening, and repeat every 2 to 4 years (depending on the union contract length) until the underlying issue is fixed. But it’s not going to be fixed!

Why? As the brilliant Robert Reich points out, it’s because of the vast inequality between the (super) wealthy and the average person. In the past 45 years, CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% while the typical worker saw a pay increase of just 18%. This has led to a vast inequality between a small group of very wealthy people in a mid-size or large company and the average employee. Until this gap is narrowed, the situation is only going to worsen as more and more laborers reach the point where they’re already broke and have nothing to lose by walking off the job, and strikes are going to become much more common than they were in the past 40 years.

The situation could be fixed easily if CEOs and Boards increased worker’s pay each year a few % above the average rate of inflation for the next few years, a move that would cost most companies only a small fraction of their profit (and still keep the differential pay increase between the average worker and the CEO above a 1000% differential using the same baseline), but it’s obvious this is not going to happen (even though that would still be a ridiculous divide). This fact is best illustrated by the current writers’ and actors’ strike that every single person in the world is aware of where the executives have simply decided to do nothing because the unions will come around when the majority of writers and actors (where 99% don’t make enough to pay their rent and eat without side-jobs) get to the point where they are at risk of losing, or have lost, their sh!tty apartments. (And trust me when I say that they are sh!tty apartments! There are two sides to Hollywood, the side you see, and the run down slums you don’t see where the majority of actors and writers live by doing side gigs while waiting for their big break, which won’t come for over 90% of them.)

It’s an utterly ridiculous situation, especially when it would be trivially simple for any government to fix with a one page bill. (For example, it could be solved if all first world governments were to simply pass a law that, in any company with more than ten employees,
1] No single person in the company can earn more than 100 times the lowest paid worker on an hourly basis during a year across all company payouts including, but not limited to, salary, bonuses, stock grants, share grants, and company paid benefits where the definition of worker would include all employees, contractors, and contractor employees doing any work for the company, which would prevent the company from shifting all low paid employees to a subsidiary to try and get around the law;
2] Any individuals found in violation of this rule would get fined $2 for every $1 in excess of their maximum allowed remuneration for the year;
3] Any officers responsible for compensation who knowingly violated this law could be criminally charged and serve jail time; and
4] These Companies would be required to submit a financial statement of compliance listing the full effective compensation of every worker (down to the janitor in the contracted cleaning firm) as part of their tax returns. Just these four simple rules would prevent most CEOs and their overpaid C-Suites from earning more than 1,500 an hour or 3 Million a year as these mega corps have plenty of minimum wage employees under current remuneration models.)

Furthermore, if a reasonable fix was made (in law) that limited executive pay to more than reasonable levels and thus limited the ability of these executives to grow their wealth to ridiculous levels unless they:

  1. paid their workers more,
  2. increased their net company value (to increase the values of the shares and stock options they earned in prior years), or
  3. started or invested in other companies

… the truth is that such a fix would all be fantastic for the economy as it would force a return to classic growth scenarios (and not the current focus of make money today to please Wall Street, even if it bankrupts the company tomorrow), which would create a much more sustainable economy in the long run. (Markets only crash when they are run up to unsustainable levels. This is a result of Wall Street pushing companies beyond sustainable growth levels.)

But it will never happen, because all the Billionaires would simply spend whatever amount of money they needed to buy enough senators and congress representatives to prevent it from happening (or enough judges to find it an unconstitutional law).

Thus, in the interim, across all industries (not just the entertainment industry the news is fixated on) you will have the greedy out-of-touch Billionaires, whose loss of income from a strike event is so negligible they won’t notice it, starving out union workers until they cave to a new union contract below inflation (while giving themselves a big year end bonus for their trouble). This will not only cause you additional disruptions you weren’t planning for (as strikes linger on for weeks and months), but will increase the inequality gap even further (while the workers get even poorer due to pay raises less than inflation), which, in turn, will set the stage for a whole new round of strikes (and disruptions to your supply chain) in two to four years when the contracts end (that the Billionaire executives will deal with in the same way).

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Billionaires are bad (because I shouldn’t need to say it), I’m saying that the actions of the ridiculously overpaid super rich and their sole focus on the almighty dollar have set the stage for the first decade in our lifetime where strike-based disruption events will exceed natural disasters, even though natural disasters have almost tripled in the same time frame (and will continue to increase as long as global warming continues to increase).

the doctor would wish you luck, but even that can’t combat greed!

There’s Some Really Awful Procurement Job Seeking Advice Out There — Truly Awful!

On a weekly basis, the doctor scours the internet for recent developments and news in sourcing, procurement, and supply chain that major publications, analysts, bloggers, and the major LinkedIn trolls … errr … influencers might have missed. If you follow a half dozen thought leaders, analysts, major sources, etc., you won’t miss much, but deep searching can sometimes dredge up interesting tidbits, and other times can dredge up decaying waste that really should be left in the deep.

Recently, deep searching for procurement news dredged up one of the worst Procurement job seeker interview questions and answer articles he’s ever read. (These are bad in general, but if I was hiring, and you gave a single one of these answers, I’d end the interview then and there. You would have clearly demonstrated you do NOT have what it takes to survive one of the hardest back-office jobs there is, with new, unforeseen challenges arising daily.)

I’m not going to link to the article in case the author is a real person who was assigned the grisly task by the publication of writing about something they clearly had no clue about and not auto-generated by a BS OpenAI tool trained on the worse mush it can find, because they don’t deserve the embarrassment if they are a person assigned to write about a subject they were clearly clueless about. However, I am going to quote the first three questions and responses and point out why any Procurement Director worth their weight in any commodity would quickly judge you as unworthy and show you the door, before it had time to finish closing, if you rattled off one of these extremely poor canned responses presented to you.

Q1: Describe your previous experience.

Not a bad question (but the interviewer should ask you about unique aspects of your relevant experience). But

With a background of over 10 years in procurement, I bring comprehensive experience spanning various aspects of the field. My expertise includes sourcing, supplier management, contract negotiation, and administration. Throughout my career, I have consistently delivered noteworthy cost savings and streamlined processes. Additionally, I possess in-depth knowledge of both local and international procurement laws and regulations.

Is NOT a good answer.

1) Presumably if you are applying for a senior procurement role, you have significant relevant experience, how many years you have is going to be clear from your resume, and if you don’t meet a baseline, you don’t get the interview. More meaningful is related experience that brings unique insights to the role.

2) Buzzwords are meaningless. If you don’t have any experience in sourcing, supplier management, or contracts, you’re not Procurement. This is super obvious. If you don’t have any specific skills, or deep knowledge of certain processes, back to the sea with you.

3) If you didn’t deliver savings or process improvements, you would have been fired. Multiple times. It would show on your resume, and you wouldn’t get the interview.

4) What local and international laws? There are 195 countries. These all have laws and regulations that affect Procurements in, from, and through their countries. These could be finance (post-audit/clearance, anti-bribery, etc.), human welfare, sustainability, or other laws. Get specific. If you spent a decade buying fruit from South America but the company wants you to buy semiconductor chips from China, Taiwan, and Japan — how does that help?

Q2: Tell us about your qualifications for this job.

Again, not a bad question (but the interviewer should focus in on your strongest or most unique). But

I hold a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a specialization in supply chain management. Over the course of 5 years, I have actively worked in procurement, honing my skills and expertise. My experience spans the management of both direct and indirect spend, granting me a comprehensive understanding of procurement operations. Moreover, I possess proficiency in various procurement software systems and boast a solid comprehension of contract law.

Is also NOT a good answer.

1) Obvious from the resume, but I can, and probably will in a later article, argue that most business / operations / supply chain programs are NOT (on their own) qualifications for Procurement. (Future article, because this rant is more than an article in itself.)

2) Repeating an answer, inconsistently (10 to 5 years), is useless and adds nothing beyond the resume (except confusion).

3) Again, buzzwords are meaningless. Indirect to one company is direct to another and vice versa. What did you buy? And what insights did you glean (that the average schmuck has no understanding of)?

4) Various systems. Do you mean email and Excel? A 20 year old version of SAP Ariba? A modern suite like Coupa or Jaggaer? Or BoB solutions like Anydata, Bonfire, ContractPodAI, DecideWare, EC Sourcing, etc. etc. etc.

5) Contract Law? Great! But what countries, states/provinces, and contract types are you most adept with. (And remember, expertise in contracts is NOT expertise in contract law. It’s pretty easy to be an expert in contracts if you do them enough, but without a solid legal understanding, it’s pretty hard!)

Q3: How would you describe your procurement process?

Finally, a good question. But

The procurement process typically starts with the receipt of a request for proposal (RFP) from a potential customer. This document outlines the customer’s specific requirements for the desired product or service. The procurement team will leverage this information to compile a comprehensive list of potential suppliers. Subsequently, they will issue a request for quotation (RFQ) to these suppliers.

Is NOT a good answer. It’s actually even worse then the answers above!

1) If you worked for a make-to-order / build-to-order organization, that’s typically the process. If you make off-the-shelf CPG, then the process starts with a forecast and an assignment to “get ‘er done“.

2) If the interviewer doesn’t know what an RFP is, you should run for the door.

3) You can’t procure without suppliers, so this is a standard step in every 5/6/7/8/9 step process out there!

4) DUH!

Not once does it get into any specific, unique, best practice details that show the deep understanding you possess of Procurement processes.

At this point in the article, the questions got slightly better — but the answers continued to be bad or even worse than this one.

It’s sad. None of them address what a Procurement Director / Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) is looking for.

The relative priority of desires will vary from CPO to CPO, but these are the big ones that all CPOs have in the back of their minds.

1) Education – a university degree; relevant to what you are buying is typically preferred if you are junior, any degree if you are senior; how does your education relate to the position you are applying for?

2) Experience – relevant experience in what you will be buying, not necessarily as a buyer, possibly as an engineer, depending on the expertise needed to do the job (just like you can teach a mathematician accounting but you can’t always teach an accountant advanced mathematics, you can teach a trained professional Procurement but you can’t always teach an average buyer the fundamentals of technology or engine engineering).

3) EQ (Emotional Quotient) – you will have to work in a team; how did you work in a team in previous job(s) for complex procurements

4) TQ (Technology Quotient) – you will have to use technology, and hopefully continually improving and evolving tech; what modern tech have you used?

5) Think-on-Your-Feet Adaptability – nothing will ever go according to plan, and you will have to fight fires on a daily basis and find solutions quickly to prevent minor bumps leading to major derailments

6) Strategic Thinking – how should you approach a category or a problem; how could you improve current processes based on current learning; what did you do that improved a process in the past or solved a difficult problem?

7) Risk Management Mindset – you can’t eliminate all risks, but you can mitigate many and manage others; how do you embed this in your process

8) Sustainability – both environmental and corporate; you often have to find a delicate balance; what requirements did you have and how did you meet them without skyrocketing costs

9) Mathematics and Cost Modelling – a quote is not a cost, it’s a quote; you need to understand core cost drivers to judge quotes; demonstrate this in at least one answer

10) Independence – you will need to continually learn and continually self manage; your boss won’t be available 24/7 and definitely not when you need to make a critical decision quickly to keep a project moving