Category Archives: Technology

Want Real Progress? Disrupt Your Procurement!

Today, TechCrunch Europe kicks off in London. Designed to highlight up-and-coming technology start-ups, it pits them against each other in a start-up battlefield where the top fifteen, chosen from the hundreds that attend, get to pitch their products live in front of a a panel of expert judges and a live audience of thousands. After demos, pitches and questions, the judges select six to do it again the next day. The top company then takes home £30,000 (about $50,000 US on a good day) to try and take their start-up to the next level.

While the doctor doesn’t know how productive it is for hundreds of start-ups to waste tens of thousands of hours battling it out for a mere £30K, the fundamental idea of disruption could be very beneficial to your Supply Management organization if it truly wants to get to the next level on its Supply Management journey.

It’s time to get real. The reason 92% of organizations are not in the Hackett top 8%, and on their way to strategic business enablement, which is the third level of organizational maturity (as defined in Sourcing Innovation’s white-paper on Taking the First Step on Your Next Level Supply Management Journey), is because they don’t have the right Ts. Talent, Technology, Transition, Tracery (and two more Ts that will only come into play when they have the first 4 Ts down, which will be revealed in the sequel white-paper series).

The organization doesn’t have the right technology in place to help it automate the tactical and focus on the strategic. It hasn’t transitioned to the right process to maximize its efficiency. And its talent doesn’t have the knowledge and skills required to compete at a higher level of achievement. The status quo has to be disrupted for progress to be made.

Of course, since a primary precept of risk reduction is disruption elimination, disruption will be strongly resisted. That’s why you will have to provide the team incentives to support it.

Get permission from the C-suite, and a bit of a budget, and take a lesson from Disrupt and offer incentives to the team members who come up with the best ideas for process improvements, technology upgrades, and knowledge improvement. It doesn’t have to be large cash rewards — it could be public recognition (in an awards ceremony), extra time off, or even a bigger bonus if the effort generates a Return on Investment and extra realized savings at Procurement time. It doesn’t have to be a big cheque up-front. Most Supply Management professionals want to make things better, and if you give them a good incentive, they will go against the grain and disrupt their daily routine in an effort to make it, your Supply Management department, and your organization better.

So get disruptive.

60 Years Ago Today TI Launched the Mobile Music Revolution

Steve Jobs may have wanted you to think that the iPod launched the Mobile Music Revolution, but it was just a new-and-improved mobile MP3 player which replaced the portable CD player which replaced the portable cassette player which replaced the portable 8-track player which replaced the portable radio.

And guess what made radios portable — the transistor. Before transistors, invented in 1947, revolutionized computing for the masses, these semiconductor devices used to amplify and switch electronic signals and electrical power, revolutionized the portable music industry with the transistor radio that was announced by Texas Instruments 60 years ago today. Before the transistor radio, the average small vacuum tube radio weighed about 20 pounds or so and didn’t fit in a pocket, whereas a small transistor radio weighed less than a pound and fit in a (large) pocket.

And those who were Young at Heart could take music with them wherever they went.

50 Years Ago Today Russia Took Us One Step Closer to Inter-Planetary Supply Management

But we still aren’t there yet!

I know I keep ranting and raving about this, but considering that 51 years ago General Dynamics told us that a mission to Mars could be launched in 1975, and yet, we still haven’t gone beyond the moon, it is more than a little disheartening. But then what can one expect when the budget allocated to NASA in 1971 was less than one half of the budget in 1966 and NASA’s funding dropped from 4.41% of the federal budget to 1.61% in a mere five years, and has been on the decline since. (By 1975 it was under 1% and only broke 1% three times since, reaching 1.05% in 1991, before dropping back down to 0.94% in 1994.) In comparison, the defense department consistently gets about 18% of federal spending, which is not only, relatively speaking, about 4 times the amount spent by most countries on defense but 18 times what NASA gets. (I’m not saying the US shouldn’t spend at least as much on defense as anyone else because it should even if your goal is peace as you never want to be caught with your pants down. I am saying that maybe some of that R&D research budget should be redirected to more useful pursuits. We’re running out of rare earth minerals and other raw materials here on earth. Maybe we can mine Mars and, someday, with enough advances in technology, build bio-domes that will allow us to live there as well.)

So what happened 50 years ago today? The Soviet Union launched the Voskhod 1. While the seventh manned Soviet space flight might not be a memorable one for most people, it was the first flight to carry more than one crewman into orbit, the first flight without the use of spacesuits, and the first flight to carry either an engineer or physician into outer space. It also set the manned spacecraft altitude record of 336 km (209 mi). It was another step towards GD’s goal of a manned mission to Mars … which never happened. Sigh.

Why Are There No World Class Procurement Organizations in Asia Pacific?

A recent brief by Bain on Winning With Procurement in Asia, released last December, in which they summarize the results of interviews conducted with 60 business heads and CPOs throughout Asia-Pacific, stated that while many of these business heads and CPOs report their Procurement capabilities as fair, or even good, none report their Procurement capabilities as great. Why?

According to the article, procurement teams in Asia-Pacific often
(1) lack organizational support and prominence,

(2) tend to focus on short-term activities,

(3) rely on inadequate demand management processes, and

(4) struggle with underdeveloped supply bases and insufficient core procurement processes such as category management.

In addition, they lack

(5) systematic supplier management processes,

(6) reliable data systems and

(7) strong procurement talent. Moreover, even though some companies make a point of investing in procurement talent, they fail to take the critical move of defining a clear career path for procurement professionals.

In other words, it’s the classic Triple-T Problem — a lack of talent, technology, and transition management. If we go through the list, we see that (7) is the talent problem, (6) is the technology problem, and (1) though (5) are an example of a lack of transition management.

The lack of systematic supplier management processes in (5) is a result of not transitioning to modern supplier management processes driven off of modern supplier management systems.

As a result of the lack of systematic supplier management processes, which is a direct result of poor, or nonexistent, transition management, these organizations are (4) struggling with underdeveloped supply bases and insufficient core procurement processes.

As they haven’t transitioned to newer Supply Management processes, these organizations are still suffering from (3) inadequate demand management processes.

Furthermore, as a result of not transitioning to newer Supply Management processes, with a longer term outlook, they (2) tend to focus on short term activities.

And, finally, as they have not helped the organization as a whole transition to better supply-management inspired business processes, they still have to deal with (1) a lack organizational support and prominence.

At home or abroad, good Procurement and Supply Management starts with the 3 T’s — talent, technology and transition (management). Without meeting this necessary condition, an organization will never be great.

What Idiot(s) Brought Back Infinite Scrolling Websites?

the doctor really wants to know because that (collective of) individuals should be tarred and feather!

What is the doctor ranting about now?

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web when HTML was in version 1.0, when Mosaic and Netscape ruled the web (before Microsoft released the horror called Internet Explorer upon the web), websites were relatively simple web pages that scrolled and scrolled and scrolled (as frames, which hadn’t yet been invented, were two years off and tabs further off still). CGI was still being invented (by the NCSA team) and it would be three more years before version 1.1 was formally defined (which would make dynamic web sites truly feasible and lay the framework for proper, real-time, pagination).

Then HTML, CGI, and browser technology matured and we got well structured, properly paginated, well-designed web-sites. And these got better and better over time. And for those who kept up to date, mouse-overs, drill-down menus, dynamic animations, and even time-delayed responses. And properly used, these were all good improvements (as long as you could stop the animation or sound if you didn’t want it) and made the web experience better.

But now, almost every fourth site is an infinite scrolling site, just like at the beginning of the web! And it’s driving me nuts. Once frames and pagination became common, only amateur sites were infinite scroll. Because who wants to scroll and scroll and scroll looking for the information they want? No one in their right mind!

And for those of you jumping to the defense of these sites because they’re not really infinite scroll as you can expand and collapse the page dynamically with arrows and gestures, they’re still websites on one page! And with all of the progress we’ve made over the last 20 years, it’s ridiculous. I know it’s the newest fad, but it’s pathetic. Why?

Because it represents an utter lack of imagination and innovation. And, in particular, on the part of the big web shops selling these sites.

You see, these shops stay in business not by selling new companies websites, as it doesn’t take that much time or effort to throw up a web-site for a start-up (who won’t pay much for it anyway) because it can be quickly put together with a bit of custom imagery and provided content using a plethora of free open source blog, wiki, CRM, and even social network platforms. They make money by selling existing clients maintenance services and, more importantly, regular web-site upgrades because, every year, new technology is developed and a website that isn’t continually updated to use that technology looks antiquated and possibly abandoned (which, if you are a technology company, could make you, by association, look antiquated and possibly on the decline).

So, every year or so, they have to come up with a must-need piece of technology that the web-sites of the majority of their clients must have so that they can sell upgrades and stay very profitable.

But we have reached the point where we are at an inflection point. For the last few years, there have been no revolutionary new developments in web technology, just evolutionary ones, and we have reached the point where most technology solution providers have very modern, extremely powerful, web-sites and don’t need complete overhauls, just minor, regular maintenance. This is not very profitable, so these web site development companies need to either develop a new innovation, or, like a traditional consulting company when their business and attention is on the decline, come up with a new gimmick to get more work and increase their profit margin. And in this case, this is undeniably 100% gimmick. And, by definition, a 100% rip-off to their clients who, for the most part, probably already had great sites that just needed a little graphic touch-up, a slightly-streamlined information flow, and a little bit more social media technology.

But even though I said otherwise, from a sales and marketing perspective, it is very imaginative — because it’s netting these web development companies not just one, but two — that’s right — two website upgrades. You see, just like in the early days of the web, it’s not going to take long before people realize that the infinite scrolling (web) site is the most annoying development to hit the web since … wait for it … the first infinite scrolling (web) site two decades ago! Once the web realizes en-masse that it was insanely stupid to bring back the infinite scrolling web-site, these web development companies will get an overload of web-site redesign requests for something … anything … better.

And for this as well, they deserve to be tarred and feathered. Technology is about evolution and revolution, not devolution. the doctor‘s gears have really been ground to the point where he wants to go on TV and complain like Peter Griffin.