Category Archives: Services

Supply Chain Education is Important

As with any professional field, the appropriate education is often a critical sucess factor. And, as with any professional field that is constantly changing, continual education is often key to continued success. Moreover, although the academics will often tell you this continued education should be delivered by them either through more advanced degrees, specialist degrees, or appropriately designed continuing education courses, the reality is that it is what you learn that is important, not who delivers it. In other words, we are no longer in a world where the medium is the message, we are in a world where the message transcends the medium and we are the message – and the message that we convey is what is important.

This means that professional development courses and certification programs, if appropriately designed and delivered, can be just as effective as academic programs, if not more so – especially if they are tailored to the challenges we address in our daily routines and convey to us the knowledge we need to do our jobs, and do them better.

To this end, I’d like to formally point out that if you are a traditional purchasing manager looking to update your capabilities from those of a twentieth century purchaser to a twenty-first century strategic sourcing professional, you have a professional option through Next Level Purchasing (now the Certitrek-owned NLPA)- the first (and only?) organization to offer training, and certification, over the internet at your pace.

Observant readers may remember that I’ve referenced Next Level Purchasing a few times before and wonder why I’m drawing extra attention to them now – and the answer is simple. First of all, until recently, there were very few academic programs with supply chain components, and most of these programs do not have extensive modules on today’s eSourcing enabled strategic sourcing best practices, as most of this technology is quite new. Therefore, this program provides a great way for you to update your skill set very quickly. Secondly, after a great discussion with Charles Dominick, the founder of Next Level Purchasing about current and future course offerings, I’ve decided to review a course or two* to help you understand the benefit of their unique offering and how you can use their offering to jump start your advancement to a Next Level Purchaser.

* I may not get to it until after the Supply Chain Directions Summit hosted by eyefortransport in San Francisco at the end of the month.

Best Practices from Lessons Learned

One of the best practice-oriented talks at the 2006 Informs Annual meeting was William Hefley’s talk on Identifying Issues in Sourcing: Informing Development of Best Practices. In this talk, William Hefley of the IT Services Qualification Center at CMU discussed lessons learned from dealing with client organizations. The fifteen lessons learned identified point to best practices that you can adopt to improve your sourcing organization.

Lessons Learned

  1. Clients often make decisions to source without considering:
    • fit with broader strategy
    • short term organization performance impact
    • appropriateness
    • risk of losing internal expertise
  2. Clients tend to rely on consultants to conduct source selection without consideration of consequences.
  3. Some client organizations establish special sourcing projects named to convey popular images to investors.
  4. “Distress outsourcing” leads to more distress.
  5. Most clients do not baseline existing operations or benchmark desired states.
  6. Clients tend to abdicate entire responsibility to providers after a deal is signed.
  7. Clients negotiate better deals when internal team bids are involved.
  8. Both clients and service providers are challenged in SLA (Service Level Agreement) interpretation.
  9. Most client and service provider teams interpret scope differently.
  10. Client organizations often have difficulty with expectation management.
  11. Clients typically do not execute communication plans for internal or external audiences.
  12. Buy in of management, power brokers, and other key stakeholders is important for any project.
  13. Clients are seriously challenged by internal and external change management.
  14. Clients need to know skill sets and competencies required to manage services internally and externally.
  15. Clients need to retain, develop, and deploy appropriate technology and management skills to manage, oversee, and coordinate with service providers.

Implied Best practices

  1. Determine appropriate sourcing strategies and anticipated results before considering outsourcing to a service provider. Outsourcing doesn’t always add value.
  2. Bringing in consultants is a great way to augment your expertise, but only if you work with the consultants and actively participate in the process.
  3. Don’t initiate a sourcing project just to please investors – initiate a sourcing project because you expect benefits.
  4. Handing your problems over to someone else will not solve them – identifying the causes and resolutions will. Outsourcing improves efficiencies, it is not a miracle cure.
  5. You can not measure improvement without a baseline, nor can you define an appropriate SLA without a reasonable understanding of expected improvements.
  6. Outsource providers are good at managing their operations – not yours. You need to define your overall sourcing strategy, manage the relationship, and make sure the services provided are in-line with your goals.
  7. Understand your costs before you attempt to negotiate a deal. After all, the goal of outsourcing is to add value, and a service is generally not valuable if it costs you more to outsource the process than to manage it in house.
  8. Adopt a common language consistent with customer service goals, not hard-to-measure quality metrics.
  9. Again, adopt a common language consistent with your organization’s customer service goals and make sure both parties understand the scope of the deal on both sides before it is signed.
  10. Define your outsourcing goals up front and make sure a senior, experienced professional is in charge of managing the relationship.
  11. It’s important to communicate your intent before the deal is inked, gather feedback from the appropriate stakeholders, and update them regularly on results.
  12. Without buy-in, it will be hard to gather the internal support required to make your project a success.
  13. Hire or retain a change management expert and have the team responsible for managing service delivery work with the expert to define and implement appropriate processes.
  14. Seek external training for any skill sets and competencies that your organization is weak on. Consider academic programs and professional programs (such as Next Level Purchasing’s, now the Certitrek NLPA SPSM program).
  15. Define appropriate processes and employ technology to ensure those processes are consistently employed in a best-practice fashion. Strive for six sigma quality.

Procurement Outsourcing IV: Is It Right For You?

This summer, one of my weekend series over on e-Sourcing Forum [WayBackMachine] focused on Procurement Outsourcing. This series discussed some basic reasons for outsourcing, discussed the different levels, gave you some high level direction into what you should outsource, some tips for identifying a good Procurement Services Provider (PSP), some suggestions for tackling the SLA (Service Level Agreement), and some best practices to follow in preparing for the transition.

  • The series can be found here:
    I: Is it right for you?
    II: Selecting a PSP
    III: Getting the most out of your PSP

In order to entice you to keep reading, I’d like to point out the benefits that can be gained from successful outsourcing initiatives, as per Aberdeen’s May 2006 “Procurement Outsourcing Benchmark Report”. The study found that best-in-class companies achieved improvements that were almost 2.2 times, on average, better than all respondents on seven key metrics. These results, summarized in Aberdeen’s August 2006 “Procurement: Are You Ready to Outsource?” Enterprise Strategies, were as follows:

Benefit Achieved Best-in-class All respondents Ratio
Access to Supplier Intelligence 86% 33% 2.6
Fewer FTEs 71% 32% 2.2
Access to Category Expertise 71% 38% 1.9
Enhanced Ability to Track and Report Savings to the Company’s Bottom Line 43% 15% 2.9
Access to Improved Pricing 71% 48% 1.5
Improved Visibility into Spending 43% 21% 2.0
Refocus Procurement Team on More Strategic Activities 43% 23% 1.9

In other words, if you outsource, and outsource well, you can achieve substantial benefits. However, these results, and the insight piece, overlook one fundamental question – Is it right for you? Unless you’re a perfect organization who does everything perfect, then you should definitely outsource. Since there is no such thing as a perfect organization, as all organization’s have their strengths and weaknesses, outsourcing is definitely something that should be considered. In the procurement organization, the same argument applies. It’s something you should consider, but you should only do it if it makes sense to do so and the benefits – operating cost reduction, capital investment reduction, access to new technology and processes, or an increase in flexibility, for example – are there.

As with the Aberdeen Insight piece, my previous posts also did not tackle the question “Is it right for you?” directly, mainly because this is a very tough question to answer, and the best way I can find to approach it is to describe what kind of organization it is right for, but a Critical Issues Report by CAPS last year, entitled “Outsourcing Strategies and Implications”, is very insightful.

The benefits will only be there if the business functions you intend to outsource can be done better by the PSP you have selected AND outsourcing fits your organizational culture. This second requirement is often overlooked. If you’re not set up for outsourcing, if many individuals or departments fight any initiative you’re going to undertake, or if the PSP’s technology and processes are incompatible with yours, you are not going to see the benefit. Therefore, before you outsource, you need to make sure outsourcing is right for you. If it’s not, you either have to find internal alternatives, or, better yet, change your organizational culture so that outsourcing of functions and categories that can be done better by a PSP fits into your culture.

One of the key points made by the CAPS Critical Issue Report is that outsourcing is a strategy that complements a larger business model. Your larger business model needs to be conducive to outsourcing. It needs to be based on a culture of continual process improvement, regardless of whether or not it is internal or external, and, most importantly, and this is also overlooked by many articles, your business model needs to be focused on your core assets – your people. Outsourcing should displace resources within your oganization, it should not remove those resources from your organization. You outsource to a PSP to reduce the tactical burden on your procurement professionals, freeing them up to spend more time on the strategic planning and secondary spend categories they would otherwise not have time to address. The Hallmark example in the CAPS report provides a brilliant example of the success can be achieved when you focus on improvement and not simply headcount reduction. The following paragraph in particular makes my point:

In order to make the transition, Hallmark kept its corporate beliefs and values foremost as a guide. This meant open communication with employees and a very gradual transition. Domestic workers who previously worked on handwork were either retrained, placed in other positions, or opted for early retirement, thus avoiding layoffs. Remember that at all times you need to maintain an innovative culture, and this is hard to foster in an organization who places its emphasis on the bottom-line and not the employees who create the bottom line.

Aberdeen: Analysts Wanted!

At least, that’s my guess. As soon as the news hit the wire that Aberdeen was being bought by Harte-Hanks, I started hearing rumors of potential departure(s) at Aberdeen, possibly significant ones. Well, I checked the main analyst bios page on the Aberdeen site today, and, lo and behold, a very significant name WAS NOT there. It appeared that the rumors were true and that Sudy Bharadwaj had indeed left Aberdeen. With a little digging, I was able to confirm this. Where did he go? Good Question … I hope to have the answer for you soon. Who will replace him? My guess is that Vance Checketts will assume his position as Vice President, Global Supply Management. Not certain, but it is logical.

The Unique Solution for Travel Procurement

Earlier today we discussed the unique challenges of travel procurement – a nightmare shared by your employees as well as your finance team. After all, when booking a single trip can take an hour by the time you book your flight, rental car, hotel, airport transportation, off-airport parking, and dinner reservations and when finance has to sort through (tens of) thousands of expense reports literally by hand to determine whether their preferred carrier owes them a discount, how could you call it anything but?

Last week I was fortunate enough to see the answer. It’s called the Rearden Commerce Network (rebranded Deem in 2012) For those of you who read Spend Matters regularly, you’ll probably remember Jason more-or-less gushing about them as well in posts such as “Rearden unShrugged”* where he called Rearden the future of “personal” services Spend Management for employees.

Services are tough. They’re calendar-based, time critical, and dynamically priced. There’s a reason there is no Amazon, Google, or Yahoo for services. Even the brightest software engineers cringe at the thought of trying to build a single platform to handle such a diverse array of services. But as far as I can tell, Rearden has done it. Sure the interface still looks Web 1.0, but the capabilities are Web 2.0 all the way. And when they say you can book a complete trip in 10 minutes – they mean it. I saw it – and it works! I’ll tell you one thing – from an applications perspective, few software packages on the market today impress me. Even today, I equate most software applications with undifferentiated organic fertilizer (which is probably why you hear me mention so few companies in this blog – that, or I really am another one of those arrogant PhDs). But Rearden’s solution impressed me.

If you are a mid-size or larger company with a lot of travel related spend, I can not think of a single reason why you should not be using Rearden now! When your employees who travel regularly are probably wasting up to 20% of their time on travel arrangements (instead of a more palatable 5%, or less), when you have no way of easily tracking who you are spending your travel budget on (and if you qualify for discounts) and, more importantly, no way of enforcing that employees are buying against your preferred contracts when possible and sensible when there is this easy to use system that lets your employees do almost everything they need in a one stop shopping experience, allows your finance team to figure out whom you are spending on and in what amount, and allows your procurement team to enforce flexible spending rules. It’s a great addition to your supply chain suite!

Now, I’m not entirely sure whether it will scale up in the future to support all services in a consistent, coherent manner, even though they claim the platform was built to support any service you can imagine, but it is certainly capable of supporting any T&E service you can throw at it, and this is a very significant feat from both a business and a technological perspective. I can’t wait to get some time with their senior technology guys to do a deep dive into the architecture and technology. (After all, I need to use the PhD sometime!) If it’s as impressive as the business capability, I might just be inquiring as to whether or not that Director of Applications Engineering position that they are advertising can be done remotely.

* All posts prior to 2012 were removed in the Spend Matters site refresh in June, 2023.