Category Archives: rants

American Thanksgiving May be Over …

… but there is still much more your Procurement Department could be thankful for. For example, it could be thankful for:

  • a new, better, technology platform …
  • … particularly one that fills a hole …
  • … such as analytics, optimization, SRM, and so on …
  • a services agreement with a niche consultancy …
  • … to help source key categories and transfer knowledge …
  • a services agreement with a technology expert …
  • … to help select the right platforms …
  • a GPO contract …
  • … and tail spend management help

… because, as you should have gathered by now, most Procurement platforms are behind on tech, knowledge, and support and have too much spend not under management. And it will stay that way until such time as your Procurement team gets the software and services support it needs to get to the next level.

So make sure you give your Procurement department enough financial support in their next budget so they can take their operations to the next level. Because, when they get there, you will get many times your initial investment back.

They Terk Er Jerbs! Good for them.

Because, if they were intelligent, if they weren’t already insane, they would be! One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But an even better one is wanting to do the same mind-numbing task over and over and over again until anyone with a modicum of intelligence would go insane.

Like screwing the same rivet 10,000 times a day. Walking up and down the same 20 aisles looking for sold out products day after day. Or performing well-defined calculations millions and millions and millions of times. This last task is something good accounts payable and procurement folk have to do over their career without AI if they want to realize the savings they should.

I say let the machines do that. And then find ways to do more intelligent actions with the results that the machines can’t do. That’s Procurement Innovation. And if you were on the ball and set up your Google Alert and noticed that the doctor was in L.A. yesterday giving a talk on Procurement, and, more specifically, Procurement Innovation. Procurement Innovation that is going to arise when you let the machines do the tactical drudge work and focus on the more strategic aspects of product acquisition. And give yourself time to get innovative … and creative … instead of just pushing virtual buttons all day. (In some P2P systems, it takes 15 clicks to actually get a product delivered when it should take 0. And how many products do you need? It’s amazing you aren’t insane! Someone should calculate the mental strength and willpower of a Procurement professional. That would be an interesting study.)

One needs to remember that AI is not I, but it is A. It is artificial, and it is extremely well suited to running lots of advanced calculations against expert defined models, well-defined variables, and big data sets to identify opportunities, outliers, and options for pursuit even the smartest of us couldn’t see because our mental calculation powers stop in the ones per second while a typical laptop’s calculation capacity is in the millions per second. Even if the best algorithms we have are, relatively speaking, dumb, the machine will outperform us in evaluating data against models and desired outcomes and identifying the best directions to pursue (which is different than being able to evaluate the perceived best options and actually pick the best ones).

And because of this, it is extremely well suited to checking invoices against POs, goods receipts, and contracts — which is one key to making sure the savings that are negotiated are actually captured. The best I2P systems today with advanced OCR can reach invoice processing accuracy (IPA) levels of 98% with no human intervention, including automatic return to supplier if issues are identified, and the proper configuration of rules can enable up to 100% of these automatically processed, corrected, and confirmed invoices to be automatically queued for payment (and paid). Considering that the average invoice “error” rate in an organization is 10% to 15% and that this typically results in overpayments of 1.5% or more, automatically processing 98% of invoices and eliminating 98% of the errors is huge.

And it’s a key component of two of the innovations — true automation and overspend prevention — that the doctor highlighted in his talk that can be addressed today, and tomorrow, and change your work, and even your life. (When you work smarter, you will get smarter.)

They Terk Er Jerbs!


 

Now that the age of the robots are here (and this can’t be denied as the robots are in Walmart now [Source: Reuters]), will you be the next to join Darryl Weathers’ crew in screaming that they took your job?

Or will you welcome their entry into the workforce and their willingness to do the work you don’t want to do and take the opportunity to (learn to) do something better and more interesting and, frankly, more intelligent.

Face it. You don’t want to check inventory. It’s boring. You don’t want to apply the same rivet all day on the production line. It’s boring. And you certainly don’t want to harvest [as evidenced by the fact that most farms can’t find enough domestic workers during harvest season to do the same boring task minute after minute, hour after hour, and day after day during harvest season].

But you’re sometimes willing to actually stock shelves — organizing a display can be mildly creative, and you would probably rather help someone find a product and have some form of personal interaction than scan shelves for products people may or may not want. You’re probably also more willing to do quality testing on the outputs of the production line than construction, at least that’s verification of quality and a bit of creative destruction, and you’d probably be even more willing to review design aspects and even assist in prototype development if the company gave you a bit of training. Etc.

Robots will take jobs, but the jobs these artificially intelligent machines take are not always the interesting jobs, and there are jobs they can’t take. They are not truly intelligent, and as a result they can’t truly anticipate what we will want, they can’t create new works of art without guidance, and they can’t always read our mood and feelings, especially if we are not being forthcoming about it. Yes they can predict based on trends and be right a lot, but this means they can also be spectacularly wrong. And when it comes to quality, they can’t test for anything they haven’t been programmed to test for. So if a product had a major usability design flaw, as long as it passed the material stress tests, the robot would never know.

There may come a day when they are almost as good at us at design, creative, and social jobs, but that’s still a ways off. For now, we can at least be content in the fact that while they take some jobs, they can’t take all aspects of those jobs and we can create new job definitions that expand upon what they can’t do. We will have to keep learning, and truly work smarter, but screaming They Terk Er Jerbs won’t get us anywhere (as it hasn’t since the dawn of the industrial revolution). So, for now we can take solace in the fact that we can create a two-tier society: us, and them, and relegate them to the lower tier, as long as we don’t grant them citizenship! (Even pretending to is too much!)

And use them, and advanced software, to do our jobs better! Even in Procurement. How? Stay tuned.

None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us! Unless, Of Course, You Include AI!

the doctor sees a lot of unsolicited pitches hit his inbox each and every day. Since SI does not cover press releases (since he just does not give a damn about your meaningless marketing sound-bites which do little to nothing to advanced education and technology) he ignores most of them. But this week he saw one of the most ridiculous headlines ever:

Can AI Harness the World’s 2 Billion Social Media Influencers?

Ignoring the fact that that the headline is factually incorrect (there are 2 Billion Users, NOT Influencers), this is one of the dumbest questions ever posed and anyone who understood anything about the state of AI today would not even want to ask it!

Generally, if you are going to train AI, you want to train AI on expertise. And where’s the last space you’d expect to find expertise? That’s right! Social Media.

But that’s just the tip of the why-you-should-not-do-this iceberg! If you include everyone, you not only include everyone of above average intelligence, but everyone of below average intelligence by very definition. So while you will have a few geniuses, you will also have morons, imbeciles, and possibly even idiots (as per the original Binet IQ scale). Do you really want them training your AI?

Moreover, what do people share on Social Media? Their most brilliant ideas? Well developed arguments? Philosophical contributions? Wisdom? Profound insights? Or pictures. Comments on politics. Viewpoints on pop culture. Their thoughts of the moment. Complaints. Rants. Digs. Manifestos. Insults. Self Praise. And so on. And most of it in blurbs, not sentences, and definitely not paragraphs. And in addition to the onslaught of bad grammar, the rate of spelling errors is atrocious.

Is this what you want to train an AI on? Really? You really want an AI that is going to make decisions like an angry dumb, self-obsessed, neurotic, troll with self-esteem issues making your decisions? And that’s likely a best-case scenario.

the doctor doesn’t know about you, but if he’s going to trust an AI, he wants that AI trained by experts for specific tasks, with performance analyzed and tweaked by other experts, since, as we know, there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, since no algorithm is intelligent, no matter how advanced, and what we really have are advanced automated reasoning algorithms. But if those algorithms were trained by the impaired, those algorithms are the last algorithms he would ever want to use. And those algorithms should NOT be on your list either.

Are You Doing Your Own Quality Spot Checks? And Should You Be?

By now, if you haven’t heard of the Kobe Steel Scandal, you’ve been living in a cave. (Which, in some organizations, is highly probably given that one of the tricks the CFO likes to do to Procurement when fiscal year end is approaching is to lock them in the basement until the mandatory savings objective is reached … hence our post yesterday on why every day is Halloween for some Procurement departments.).

This scandal is scary. Not only because the data falsification on strength could go back as far as 10 years on some batches, and who knows what bridges, high-rises, and busses that steel has gotten into (and even a .1 degradation, while not enough to jeopardize immediate safety, can impact expected life span and increase susceptibility to decay, making safety a concern down the road before inspection and maintenance schedules kick in).

But this brings up a good point? If more companies were doing more spot checks on shipped product and quality, instead of just trusting Kobe, would it have been 10 years before the scandal was exposed. Even if only a small percent of batches are affected, I highly doubt this would have been undetected for 10 years, even if only one bar or sheet in multiple shipments were tested.

This is an example of what happens when finance tries to get too greed or supply chains to lean by centralizing a function downstream. When one party is responsible for everything, one failure can reverberate up multiple chains undetected — and have potentially disasterous consequences. Now one might say this problem is solved by co-locating people on-site, but if those people never leave the site, even though you pay their salary, their work family is the people they work with day in and ay out and the existence of that company is their livelihood. Are you sure they won’t bow into the local culture and, if the culture dictates, defer to authority or collectively hide the shame?

Just like third party audits are needed, for critical materials, so are third party quality tests. Doesn’t have to be you, could be an independent organization set up between your co-opetition that does random independent quality spot-checks on 1 in 10 shipments and shares the data with everyone.

Just like a good Chef would never use an ingredient without insuring it’s quality, a good Procurement organization should never let a shipment be accepted without a high degree of confidence that it’s a quality shipment. And confidence like that only comes from organizational testing or trusted third-party independent testing. So don’t get too lean or too cheap — your organization, and the lives of its customers, could depend on it.