Category Archives: SaaS

The Sourcing Innovation Source-to-Pay+ Cascading Mega Map! (2026 Edition)

(c) 2025-12-15

Still useless, but still slightly less useless than every other logo map that clogs your feed!

1. Every vendor offering verified as of 4 days ago!

2. Every vendor logo is clickable!

3. Every vendor is mapped to a meaningful category as of the last date of analyst investigation!

So what’s the point?

To again make it utterly clear you can’t select a vendor based on a random grouping of logos on a map, even if they are categorized!

Not even if the map categorizes the vendors by market size, industry, and/or geography. Those are just proxies for organizational spend, solution needs and cultural requirements. And not every mid-market manufacturing plant in the USA is the same.

The only way to select a good vendor is to follow a proper assisted process and engage an expert who understands what vendors are out there to identify the right vendors to invite to the RFP process once your true needs have been identified.

Especially considering the true number of vendors out there is many times more than what an average big analyst firm will tell you, especially when they restrict their recommendations to their paying clients in their maps, and multiples of what an average big consultancy will tell you, that only knows their partner solutions (that they need to maintain significant focus on to maintain their preferred partner status).

So let this be proof that there are a lot of logos and that, if you want logos, you got logos! 666 of them!

Please see the V2 Edition for the actual cascading Mega Map.

Successful Vendor Selection – The Series

Even in a House of Lies there is Truth!

From 2012 to 2016, Showtime ran a series called House of Lies, which was a comedy drama where a charming management consultant and his crack team used every dirty trick in the book to woo powerful CEOs and close huge deals.

And, unlike many consultancy teams, they were quite successful. There were TWO reasons for this.

  1. When they worked together, they brought the A-Team.
    • The Face, Marty, played by Don Cheadle, who was not only charming, manipulative, and opportunistic, but skilled enough in business to nail the spin brought by
    • The Brains, Clyde, played by Ben Schwartz, who specialized in marketing and spin doctoring and could craft just the right messages for Marty to deliver (and, like the Marketing Mad Men, partied a bit too hard and struggled with addiction), and who would have his plans backed up by
    • The Techie, Doug, played by Josh Lawson, who was a genius in numerical analysis and statistics and could find the right numbers to spin any tale The Brains and/or The Face need to weave to make the sale, and this was all brought together by
    • The Toughie, Jeannie, played by Kristen Bell, who managed the engagements, supported the team, and made sure the clients were reeled in hook, line, and sinker. (Without her, the team probably would have fallen apart, especially given the egos that had to be managed on the team. Don’t overlook the importance of The Toughie!)
  2. They came together, and even after falling outs, stayed together.

The third point is probably the most important.

A team is NOT assembled by a sales manager assembling four random consultants with “the right backgrounds” and throwing them on your project. Four random consultants who

  • might not even speak the language when it comes to your problem domain,
  • could be missing critical skills,
  • have entirely different work styles, and
  • are misaligned on what the right outcomes of a successful engagement for the client actually are!

An A-Team

  • speaks the same language,
  • have all the required skills between them,
  • work well together and have already succeeded doing so, and
  • are aligned on a successful outcome for the client.

In response to my LinkedIn summary on why you need The A-Team for Proper Selection Advice, someone asked how do you identify the right persons? The answer is, YOU DON’T!

The A-Team is already working together, delivering success. And in the case of the House of Lies, they succeed as a team by using their history together to effectively work together to sell the client a shared vision, even if the vision was one big lie. (So imagine the results you would get if you hired an A-Team to work for you, and not a consultancy that’s also an implementor that wants to maximize billable hours.)

True Orchestration Platforms Are A Lot Rarer Than You Think. How do you find one?

In our last article we told you that you need a modern orchestration platform in order to deal with the application sprawl not just in an average organization but in your own department. However, the majority of today’s platforms are not orchestration platforms but ORCestration platforms, integrating your applications in a manner that is forceful, ugly, and impure, to say the least.

So how do you find a real platform? Well, for starters you can use the checklists in our first two part where Part I gave you the red flags to look out for and Part II gives you key features to identify.

But if you’re techie enough, or savvy enough, here’s a starting list of technical requirements that you look for. (There are more, especially if you’re looking ahead to 2035 and beyond, but let’s face it, you’re lucky if you’re running 2015 technology anywhere in your organization. So if you make it to 2025, that would be a quantum leap for you.)

Technical Requirements

  • Micro-Service Building Blocks that can be assembled together to support all existing and emerging internet an communication protocols
  • Transactional Blocks that encompass standard data-centric operations in the business back office around the information and finance supply chains
  • Blockchain Support for immutable records that capture data, ownership, and processing that has transpired
  • Context Aware as it’s not just data, it’s metadata of what it represents, who’s data it is, where it was obtained, when it was obtained created, and how it was accessed, why it was valid (and who validated it) in a secure, immutable, block
  • Policy Definition Support that can recognize the security and compliance policies of the integrated applications and ensure they are checked and adhered to before processing any request
  • Dynamic Routing that can ensure messages are re-routed when issues are detected to maintain (guaranteed) response times
  • Resiliency via decentralization and multiple service instances to ensure that one failure doesn’t prevent critical functions and processes from being completed
  • Adaptive when human intervention is required, it is recorded and new rules, and workflows, are generated to prevent a human from having to intervene again for the same problem
  • Secure as modern security protocols and requirements are built in at the core, not around the edges as an afterthought
  • Trustworthy full support immutable data objects, policies, and security independent of what systems are connected to the orchestration platform

Savvy Requirements

The whole point of Procurement is supposed to support the business, a business which must buy and sell to survive, and do so profitably. (That’s why Procurement is so focussed on cost, to keep expenses down, and supply assurance, to keep sales flowing.) This means that the business also requires Sales (who sells) and Supply Chain (who ultimately supplies) and that all of these units must work in harmony. However, fundamentally, without inputs, which depend on suppliers, there are no outputs, which means that the Supply Chain, and the support for the Supply Chain Ecosystem, is fundamental.

This means that the best orchestration solution will be one that is built to support the supply chain department’s integration requirements within the organization and with external partners, not just Procurement. After all, if you read the series Bob and I authored on Legacy Sourcing and Planning Solutions, you can’t divorce Direct Sourcing from Supply Chain and expect success.

So if you want a great orchestration solution, find one that was originally built for supply chain where the vendor has layered on out-of-the-box support for Procurement. This maximizes your chance for success as you will already know supply chain integration support has been taken care of.

Wondering where to start? Maybe start by taking a look at something like HubX12 built as a decentralized distributed network for next-gen supply chains. With its built-in support for modern and emerging internet and communication protocols, advanced chains of custody, and compliance, it could serve as the transaction backbone that you need to integrate existing systems and build custom capabilities both within your organization and your supply chain.