Category Archives: Technology

Thirty Five Years Ago Today

Europe made its bid to get in on the space race and prepare for inter-planetary supply management with the first successful launch of the Ariane rocket. Developed by the European Space Agency, it was a four stage vehicle designed to put two telecommunications satellites at a time into orbit.

While it wasn’t a big step forward, like the Voskhod 1 which was launched 50 years ago on October 12, it put a new player in the inter-planetary game (as communication relay stations are going to be necessary, and that is going to be accomplished by way of satellites), and a player that would contribute to the International Space Station.

It may have been Christmas eve, but dedicated scientists kept working. It’s unfortunate that corporations, including General Dynamics, who promised us a convoy to Mars in 1975 back in 1963, didn’t show the same dedication.

Procurement Trend #12. BYOD Mobile Procurement

Nine trumped-up trends still haunt us, and it’s probably best that LOLCat has been trapped in a box by the Futurists as these are nine trends he doesn’t want to waste any of his nine lives thinking about. Plus, at some point we’re probably going to have to call in Scooby Doo to sniff out whatever it is that the futurists have been smoking because it’s hard to believe that anyone lucid would utter such statements.

So why do so many historians keep rambling on about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) Mobile Procurement? Did they all upgrade their old Nokia flip phones to iPhone 6s and Sony XPerias all at once and realize that you could do more on a digital phone than just send a text? I don’t know, but I do know that:

  • everybody in the corporate world has at least one portable device
    and most people have 2 or 3 (that they carry everywhere)
  • modern smart phones and tablets have more power than early laptops
    and much higher screen resolutions to boot
  • software providers have contracted mobile fever
    and this isn’t necessarily a good thing

So what does this mean?

A plethora of portables

Go mobile where mobile makes sense and go wired where it does not. What do I mean by this? The software, and the device it runs on, should support the workflow and not the other way around. For example, inventory and procurement software should support the creation of goods receipts on a mobile device in the hands of a warehouse worker on the floor and the creation of new spend cubes by an analyst at her desk with a big screen monitor, not the other way around. Busy executives need the ability to approve requisitions and invoices on their mobile devices when they are on the go and have five minutes, but I wouldn’t let a payable clerk set up ACHs on her smartphone just because she can (for many, many reasons).

Portable power

Portables are powerful, and you can take advantage of that to allow a team member visiting a supplier to take notes on her tablet as she walks the plant, view reports that need to be discussed with the supplier, use the collaboration components of the software to message and video conference with her peers, and so on. But, as per the last paragraph, only use the power when it makes sense to do so. Just like power often drives people mad, overengineering the software just because you can leads to a maddening experience for the end user. When I want to see the shipment error rate I just want to see the $%^&* shipment error rate — I don’t want a 3-D spinning infographic that I have to twist and twirl to try and find the one number I need.

Mobile Madness

Every time your employee gets a shiny new mobile device, he’s going to want every excuse to play with his shiny new toy. Don’t give it to him. Stick to your guns and make sure the software you use only supports mobile interfaces where those interfaces make sense. Your employees aren’t paid to play on mobile devices, they’re paid to get the job done in the most efficient way possible. Sometimes that’s on the phone. Sometimes that’s on the tablet. And sometimes that’s on the old-school desktop box hardwired into the LAN that is at, of all places, the employee’s desk! Imagine that!

Procurement Trend #13. The Cloud

Ten time tripping trends from the eighth dimension still remain, and as much as we’d like to assume that string theorists aren’t right and that those dimensions don’t all curl up and trap LOLCat in a box, we can’t. Thus, we must continue to follow the lead of the MythBusters and attack each claim made by the futurists, who are so deeply despised by LOLCat, one by one.

So why do so many historians identify The Cloud, which, to be blunt, has to be the single biggest piece of marketing malarkey of the past decade, as a future trend? Is it because they are dumb enough to believe that anything repeated enough times must be true? I don’t know, but I do know that:

  • computing is becoming ubiquitous

    and just about anything that can have a microprocessor shoved into it has one

  • on-demand computing can be bought with a credit card

    and can be bought from the same online store that you buy your books, clothes, and groceries from

  • cloud marketing is ubiquitous

    and even Oracle was crushed under the weight of the cloud craze and eventually buckled to the trend

So what does this mean?

Computing is not the Problem, Modelling is

These days, the average person has more computing power in her smartphone than she knows what to do with. Because so much computing power is wasted on unnecessary graphics and very poor algorithms, she may not know it, but the dual-core 1.4 GHz Apple A8 processor in your iPhone 6 with over 2 billion transistors can process hundreds of billions of instructions per second. This is 100 times faster than the first Pentium that revolutionized Procurement!

Computing is not expensive, Mindsets are

Computing used to be expensive, but it’s not anymore. You don’t need expensive Sun, IBM, or HP racks for most day-to-day business processing, and you certainly don’t need expensive machines for high-power computing. Remember, analysis and optimization is running data sets and models over and over again until you find a result. If you burn out a core, you can just buy a new one. The only place you really need to invest in redundancy and reliability is in the SAN (Storage Area Network) — you need multiple backups of raw data — not of temporary data sets.

Many Marketers are Morons, or, at the very least, think we are

The cloud is as vacuous as the real thing. It’s all about access to the software you need when you need it, not what you call it or where the application is hosted (and whomever is cutting the cheque should know where it is hosted). If you want to buy infrastructure as a service, with all the pros and cons, go for it. But it’s the applications and what you need to do with them that matters.

Procurement Trend #14. Shorter and More Complex Product Life-Cycles

Eleven anti-trends from the pre-internet pundits still remain, and as much as we’d like to not give yet another reason for LOLCat to hate futurists, we must continue to make sure that no good deed goes unpunished and since the futurists’ advice is still as good as it gets, we must break it all down until you can look past the shiny new paint job and realize that it’s still a twenty year old Skoda you are being sold.

So why do so many historians keep pegging shorter and more complex product life-cycles as a future trend? I honestly can’t fathom this as the video console, cellphone, and apparel industries have been in this mindset for over two decades, but maybe it is because the futurists, who finally realized that the internet has given everyone a need for speed, are finally catching on or because:

  • consumers in some verticals, like electronics, expect major new releases each year
    because they’ve been conditioned by the manufacturers and the marketers to, and
  • they expect every release to contain more new and exciting features than the last one
    even though they don’t even use half of the current features, and
  • they also expect each new product to be smaller, lighter, faster, and more powerful than the one before …
    even though they’ll then complain about lack of battery life, screen resolution, or something else when you have are faced with an impossible choice between two incompatible feature requests.

So what does this mean?

Annual Release Cycles

No matter how good Procurement is doing, it has to do it better, faster, cheaper and keep doing it better, faster, and cheaper (relatively speaking) every year. To do this, it’s going to have to institutionalize its knowledge and process in a workflow driven sourcing suite with integrated analysis and optimization that will tell it if its method is still appropriate, the market is ripe for the preferred event structure, and the costs are optimized.

Constant Innovation

The product has to keep improving, which means the organization and its suppliers have to keep innovating and Procurement needs to manage that innovation. Knowledge management, team management, and project management is just the beginning. When the team hits a dead end, Procurement is going to have to bring an innovation methodology like TRIZ, FORTH, or Design Thinking to the table to help it get past the finish line.

New Market Identification

At some point the incremental improvement in the new product is going to be so minimal that it’s going to lose value to the market and if the organization doesn’t phase the product out, the market will. So the organization not only has to constantly identify potential new versions of its products, but new markets for which it can design new products for. Preferably blue oceans, but open seas are a good start.

One Hundred and Twenty Five Years Ago Today

And over 60 years before they would line the walls of diners everywhere (and become staples in hundreds, if not thousands, of movies about the swinging ’50s), the first jukebox, built by the Pacific Phonograph Company, went into operation at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco and launched the Music-on-Demand revolution. (See the Wired obituary.) Unlike a modern jukebox, which blasted music though built in speakers, this early version required the listener to use a stethoscope-like tube that was attached to an Edison Class M electric phonograph to hear the recording.

And then a mere sixty-five years later, as chronicled in our post last month, TI would launch the mobile music revolution. Forget Apple. Forget Sony. Forget RCA. The real revolutionaries that made music on demand are long out of the music business.