Category Archives: rants

It’s Been Four Years Since I Told You About The Procurement Damnation of Project Management …

… but what has your vendor done to abate it? There’s a reason that the new iteration of Spend Matters’ Solution Map, designed by the doctor, has two subcategories dedicated to Workflow and Project Management (and two other sub-categories dedicated to Data and Document Management) … and that’s because of the importance of project management to your sourcing and procurement efforts.

Remember, while project management works good with the physical world, it doesn’t work so good with the virtual world. For example, where software development is concerned, there is a rough definition of what is desired, but the beginning and end is a best estimate that is no more accurate than a wild guess in some cases, the resources required (while defined as software architect, developer, network specialist, etc.) are not well understood (as a non-skilled software architect cannot define what makes, or identifies, a good software architect), and the amount of money required is relatively unknown (due to uncertain work effort requirements, unknown support requirements, etc.). And that’s just software.

When it comes to supply chain, the difficulty is intensified. There’s the management of the sourcing, the management of the negotiation and contracting cycle, and the management of the procurement. But before that, there’s identifying the right supplier, which requires detailed understanding of the product technical requirements and the supplier production capabilities. There’s identifying the expected costs, based upon understanding material costs, labour costs, energy costs, tariffs, and overhead. There’s managing the supplier relationship. There’s dealing with disruptions and disasters. And taking corrective actions.

Most supply chain projects don’t have well defined beginnings, or endings, or static workflows. There’s no one-size fits all and the platform needs to be able to adapt.

But even before we get to workflow and adaptation, we first need the ability to define a project and a workflow to support it – be it a full strategic sourcing project with supplier discovery, supplier selection, multi-round RFI, and online negotiations; a simple 3-bids-and-a-buy RFI for a services engagement; an automated auction for regular MRO purchases; a deep optimization project for multi-national transportation or services; a regular catalog buy for a regularly occurring purchase; etc.

How many platforms can define an appropriate project? They all have the capabilities, but in many platforms that’s it. You can’t define a workflow. You can’t capture basic category intelligence. Everything is one step at a time, where the steps can only be performed by an experienced platform master. You can create an event, and then do stuff in the event, but you can’t abstract the workflow, just copy it and edit it for next time.
And if you need a new workflow, you need to create a new event.

Even four years later, only a few platforms have any real semblance of project management, and that needs to change. But will it?

(If it doesn’t, at the very least the platform should integrate with a project management workflow tool like Per Angusta which was built to do precisely this and integrate your disparate best-of-breed Sourcing and Procurement modules into a unified platform with workflow and project management.)

Be Sure to Check Out the Prophet‘s Treatise on Industry vs. Technology Analysts

Before you fall for the advice of an industry analyst when making a critical long-term S2P technology platform selection. (Just today I heard about a company four [4] years in to a six [6] year Ariba implementation. That’s right! Six years! Wowzers. I’m not even sure Slow Poke Rodriguez could do an implementation that slow! But I digress … )

You see, as the prophet clearly states in Industry Analysts vs. Technology Analysts, industry analysts provided company/solution-level analysis and evaluation while technology analysts provide product/module- and architecture-level focus and comparative solution analysis. That’s a big difference.

In other words industry analysts tell you about the stability and market acceptance of the company while technology analysts tell you about the stability and market appropriateness of the technology, as well as the future outlook of its effectiveness post-implementation. [Just because your hardware is obsolete the minute you open the box doesn’t mean your software should be.]

Furthermore, what’s going to give you more reliable insight into a potential platform — information gathered by phone-based customer discussions, powerpoint presentations, and the odd customer survey — or — ground-up technology evaluation through interactive, in-depth, live product demonstrations focussed around granular RFI questions and important platform elements. If you trust an industry analyst, the best you’re going to get is second hand insight from happy customers where the blush is still on the rose and a review of the UI — from static screen captures in a powerpoint presentation. Not good. Not good at all.

For more insight on what makes a technology analyst, and just how rare they are, check out the prophet‘s article. FYI: as far as the doctor is concerned, the chances of encountering a true technology analyst is less than 100 to 1. Especially when you consider the educational and experiential background needed. (FYI: operations, MBA, psychology, history, etc. are NOT the right backgrounds to understand algorithms, software architectures, and modern technology at a deep technical level.)

Five Years Ago We Told You to Blame the Bankers …

… for the biggest risks in your supply chain, as per our classic post where we told you don’t blame the lawyers, blame the bankers because they were ultimately responsible for three of the top four most likely risks to disrupt your supply chain.

(Even though the doctor can sympathize with William Shakespeare when he said the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers, the lawyers are not responsible for the current state of the global economy, the bankers are. And while it’s true that the lawyers are not innocent, happily taking the bankers money to do things that disrupt entire economies, it is the bankers that were the ringleaders here.)

But do we still blame all the bankers? Well, yes, we blame them for the economic risks that continue to persist to this day. But we no longer blame them for the top three risks in our global supply chains.

That honour goes to … The United States of America. Yes, that’s right. The root cause of the three biggest risks in your supply chain is the United States of America. (And not China, although there is a massive risk there as well. And if we wait a few more years, they might get their turn on top.)

How can it be? How can the United States be the single cause of the three biggest risks in your supply chain?

To explain that, we’ll start by repeating them for those of you that have not read The Global Risks Report 2019, 14th Edition, from the World Economic Forum.

According to this report, produced in partnership with Marsh & McLennan Companies and Zurich Insurance Group, the three biggest risks are:

  1. Extreme Weather Events
  2. Failure of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation
  3. Natural Disasters

and, as should be obvious, these are all interconnected.

Many (if not the majority of) natural disasters are the result of extreme weather events, and many (if not the majority of) extreme weather events are, whether your choose to believe facts or not, the result of the failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation.

And why has climate change mitigation and adaptation failed? Because it hasn’t happened. And why hasn’t it happened? Because countries aren’t aggressively working toward it. And why is that not the case? Because only 175 parties, of 197, have ratified The Paris Agreement (the UN Convention on Climate Change) … and one party that initially accepted has withdrawn (and done so in a very public manner). Guess what that country is? You guessed it!

The United States of America has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. If the country that is responsible for approximately 25% of global GDP refuses to support the most important initiative in the world (which still falls short of where we need to be to truly mitigate climate change, but would make a substantial impact on slowing climate change down), especially when it comes to preventing the three biggest risks in your supply chain, then that country is unilaterally responsible for those risks.

So next time a typhoon sinks the freighter carrying all your goods, don’t blame God, Poseidon, or Mother Earth. Blame the United States of America. Or, if you really want to, blame Trump. But don’t blame God or nature because, with the current rate of increase in the number of natural disasters annually, there will soon be a 90% chance that it the natural disaster is 100% the result of climate change brought on by the United States inaction to do anything about it.

We’re Still Stuck in 2009 … Why?

Five years ago, the doctor wrote a post about how the doctor’s 2014 Procurement Prediction is Going to Come True and that 2014 was going to be 2009 Part VI and

  • the focus will continue to be on cost-cutting and not value-creation,
  • valuable, high-ROI, technology will continue to be ignored, and
  • the training and new talent budgets will remain empty.

And it was a sad state of affairs. And he’d hoped that, by now, things would have changed. But if you check the latest Deloitte Global CPO Survey, 78% of CPOS are still PRIMARILY FOCUSSED on Cost Reduction!

Unless they’re Procurement team has been totally incompetent for the last five year, that’s not going to happen. We’re about to return to Depression Era Economics. We’re heading for a downturn a result of a global slowdown in GDP growth. China can’t keep building empty cities. The US can’t continue to build (defence) debt and grow without an immigrant workforce that will do the jobs Americans don’t want. Goods can’t continue to get cheaper when labour costs are rising and materials are becoming scarce. Outsourcing is not going to get cheaper when transportation costs have to rise as energy (oil) costs rise. And so on.

Also, the study found that, even in 2018, only one third of Procurement Leaders use modern technologies such as predictive analytics and collaboration networks.

And over half of Procurement Leaders believe that their current teams do not have sufficient levels of skills and capabilities to deliver on their procurement strategy … proving that they have, as expected, not been investing in training like they should have been.

Eleven years ago, Hackett published a vision of Procurement in 2020 where it predicted that, through a year-over-year evolutionary strategy, it would reach the point where it was harnessing the power of supply markets to maximize the value it is getting from its spend, enabling business strategy, and optimizing its tactical execution. But, in an average organization, Procurement is, at least for now, still overspending, still divorced from business strategy, and unable to react to unexpected disruptions or opportunities in the supply chain.

And it looks like 2020 is, not as everyone predicted in the noughts, going to be 2009 Part XI. Who will take the lead and change it?

Your Successful Supply Chain will NOT be Autonomous!

the doctor has recently seen a few pieces out there on the forthcoming autonomous supply chain and even a few pieces on the “self-driving” supply chain. Eek! Just like we’re not ready for AI-enabled self-driving cars that will drive us off a cliff as soon as they become self-aware (and that’s why you can have Carl and I’ll stick with Alfred), we’re not ready for self-driving supply chains that “predict” future demand, automatically order large numbers of products for you, and push them to local warehouses and retail stores without any human intervention.

Just because your demand sensing engine, which works well for established products, can use PoS data and other demand signals to auto-reorder staples with 98% accuracy doesn’t mean it can predict the success of an upcoming, or relatively new, product line — especially if it’s new for your business and you are, unbeknownst to your sensing engine, about to be beat to market by your nearest competitor — and it’s in the consumer electronics industry where first to market typically captures 10% to 30% just for being first. The last thing you want is for the platform to increase your initial order by 30%, ship straight to store, and then have it sit there for six months, and depreciate. Not a good use of cash.

Nor do you want your TMS automatically assigning shipments to carriers, intermediate warehouses, and ports without any human intervention. Software with limited data feeds often have no forewarning when a port might shutdown due to a strike, but humans might. Nor will a limited feed software algorithm know when a border might close and also close a supply route. But a human might. And so on.

And, despite what Amazon may think, you definitely don’t want to be thinking about anticipatory shipping. As we noted in our post five years ago, while predictive analytics is getting better by the day, it’s still hit and miss at a granular level. And individual purchases are quite granular. Just because 4 out of every 5 people who buy a Buzz Lightyear Cup also buy a Sheriff Woody Saucer, doesn’t mean the 4 people that your “AI” chooses will. One of them might not like saucers. Or Sheriff Woody. Shipping on an anticipatory nature guarantees that at least one out of every 20 units will be unwanted, and as many as one out of every 4. That’s a lot of returns. And, as we have noted again and again, including our recent article on how there is no free lunch, and there is no free shipping either, that could get quite pricey. How are you supposed to keep costs down if you have to budget for amortized high, wasted, return shipping costs across every unit?

So please, please, don’t try to give your supply chain autonomy. Automate it. Apply the best assisted intelligence solutions on the market to provide one-click recommendations, but always make sure there is a human check before any decisions are made that affect millions of dollars.