Category Archives: Technology

Should the Force(.com) be With You?

These days, it seems that everyone wants a piece of the Force. I’m not sure why. Maybe they think that they’ll be able to jump 20 feet high, survive a thousand meter fall, and move spaceships with their minds. Who Knows? All I know is that vendor after vendor in the e-Procurement space are following the lead of vendors such as Coupa, SupplierSoft, and CVM Solutions and (re)building their application on Force.com.

And I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do. First of all, as I’ve told you many times, the cloud is not a fluffy magic box. It’s just another delivery model, with it’s own advantages and disadvantages (and the biggest disadvantage being that you have zero control over performance).

Secondly, the convenience of having all of your applications and data in one place is just as convenient from a hacker’s point of view as it is from yours — especially if his primary line of employment is corporate espionage. One weakness in the security layer and BAM! … all of your data belongs to him. Plus, he doesn’t even have to social engineer an account from your users to social engineer legitimate platform access … if there’s a weakness in the data access protocols, any account from any customer will do.

Thirdly, what happens when the whole thing goes down, as it recently did for the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles when “a breakdown in the data storage system” (Boston.com) caused them to go offline for days? If the black swan sinks his teeth into the Force, and takes down a primary data center, do you really think there’s enough spare capacity in the system for them to failover without interruption and data loss? And even if they do, will performance be tolerable?

I’m not saying that your vendor shouldn’t do it, or that you shouldn’t do it either, but that you should think about it. Remember, there are two sides to the force — and if you forget about the dark side, you won’t be prepared when it rises up against you.

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Maybe Coupa Should Build a Coupe

I recently gave Coupa a bit of a chastising in a recent series (Part I, Part II, and Part III) for failing to impress me with the rate of innovation ever since Dave Stephens left, as it looks like they’ve spent most of the last year developing flash (UI) and not substance (functionality).

But maybe that would be the right strategy for Coupa. Let’s look at the reality. There’s a large market out there consisting of companies (mostly mid-size, but some large and small) that have never used anything resembling a (modern) e-Sourcing or e-Procurement solution. At most of these companies, they don’t even know the difference between e-Sourcing and e-Procurement. All they know is Google and Amazon, which we all know are not the F-350’s of the B2B world.

At these companies, something that looks like an Amazon, searches like a Google, and connects like a Facebook goes over well. (After all, they’re not cricketers, and don’t know the perfect recipe for B2B canard a l’orange.) They don’t know that real e-Sourcing involves sophisticated analysis and negotiation techniques or that real e-Procurement is actually a nine-step process built around time-tested best practices to insure that the organization orders the right product at the right time in the right quantity off the right contract at the right price. They still think that ordering office suppliers and commodity electronics online is B2B e-Procurement. Forget about the fact that some of the old-time sourcing pros are claiming that strategic sourcing is dead, these companies haven’t even progressed far enough along the commerce curve to know what strategic sourcing is!

In other words, this market has no idea why it needs an F-350 work horse, and would thrilled to be getting a Chevy Cobalt. If Coupa adopts a keep-it-simple strategy, instances of their platform will sell like hot cakes, and Coupa will do great, as long as they don’t discover that there’s a major fault in the power steering five years down the road after almost one million (1M) seats have been sold.

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Sometimes the Cantankerous Supplier is Right!

Even if they are too late with respect to demonstrating their correctness.

But let’s back up. Recently, on the Purchasing Certification Blog, Charles penned a great post on “the real reason buyers don’t want to give suppliers feedback”, which, in his words, were

BECAUSE WE DON’T WANT TO PUT UP WITH THIS CRAP!

where the crap in question was the salesperson effectively saying, with their incessant badgering that no other company can produce the same product of the same quality at the same price with the same service, that you are stupid. You don’t know how to make a good decision and you don’t know how to evaluate prospective suppliers.

As Charles’ points out, it happens all too often, and most of the time, the supplier is full of crap. But sometimes the supplier isn’t — and this is often true in custom manufacturing and services. I see it in IT all the time. The buyer doesn’t really understand what’s involved in building or customizing a piece of enterprise software or system and goes with one of the low bids and ends up getting a stinking pile of crap that not only costs 50% more due to project and budget overruns, but is delivered full of bugs, doesn’t include 20% of the originally specified functionality, and takes three times as much manpower to support as it should. In the end, by the time all of the extra service and support costs are factored in, it costs three times as much as the high bid from the one firm that really understood what it was doing. The same is true in custom manufacturing. There are some corners that can’t be cut, and accepting a bid that does so leads to long term cost ramifications.

However, the supplier should still back off once the buyer has made an award decision, even if it is the wrong one. Because it is not the buyer who made the stupid decision, but the supplier. If the supplier truly had a better product of a better quality at a better price and service level, then the supplier should have taken the time to provide the buyer with the education she needed to understand that when the supplier had the opportunity. Instead of chest thumping about how great they are and how they are so much better than the competition, the supplier shouldn’t have even tried to sell at all. They should have said “we know we can meet your needs better than any of our competitors, but that’s not important. What’s important is that you understand why we can do that. For you to truly understand how we are better, you need to understand what the major drivers of cost, quality, and service are around this product. So we’re going to help you with that.” And if they truly were the best solution, then the buyer should be able to see that and choose them. (And if they truly were the best solution and the buyer didn’t see it, is that a buyer the supplier really wants to be working with?)

And regardless of whether or not the supplier has the best solution or not, once the buyer makes her decision, the supplier has to back off, and this is the only appropriate response from the supplier.

“We’re very sorry to hear that you chose someone else. We still believe we could provide you the best overall value with respect to your needs and would appreciate the opportunity to try again at the appropriate time. Could you let us know when you expect to be going out to market again for this product so we can contact you again at the appropriate time to request the RFP? Also, if your chosen supplier proves unable to meet all of your needs, please feel free to reach out to us at any time. Thank you again for the opportunity and we hope to have another opportunity to compete for your business again in the future.”

Anything more and the buyer has every right to blacklist the supplier.

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FieldGlass is Determined To Take Off In the Tens

FieldGlass, which provides a unified platform for contingent workforce management, service provider management, and direct hires, is determined to tear forward through the tens, which also happen to correspond to its second decade of corporate existence. Founded in Chicago in 1999, it celebrated its tenth birthday with a bang by adding 33 new customers in 2009 before tearing into 2010 and adding over 30 new customers year-to-date to double its customer base in less than two years.

With localized support for sixty-three (63) countries and counting, over one third (33%) of the new customers it has added in the past year were from outside the US — and they expect this number to rise over time as they add more satellite offices in various countries and continue to add localized support for more countries. And like Coupa, which happens to be one of the many enterprise platforms their solution can peacefully exist with, they plan to keep up the fervant pace of customer acquisition for some time to come.

So how are they pulling this off? It’s a combination of

  • persistence like the little engine that could, they just won’t quit,
  • technology they have a solid platform which gets better every year,
  • limited competition Google might return over 100K hits for contingent workforce management, but only a few players (like IQ Navigator and Taleo) have platforms in the same class,
  • a truly global focus their localized support (which includes local laws, regulation, and policy) for 63 countries and counting is a differentiator, and
  • the economy since no one wants to hire direct full time employees anymore.

So what have they done since our last update last April (which followed the incredibly deep coverage brought to us by the Sourcing Maniacs in their 2008 vendor tour)? Two things of note: they finished flushing out their core BI suite and started working on Active Guidance. And while the latter is still in its infancy, it will be very useful when taken to the next level.

Their BI offering consists of three core capabilities:

  • intelligent benchmarkingacross equivalent job categories in equivalent locations,
  • drill down reporting which lets the user drill through the various spend cubes maintained by the application, and
  • visualization which presents the user with innovative graphs, comparative dashboards, and informative trends.

Most of the work has went into improving the benchmarks, to make sure the industry averages presented are for equivalent jobs in equivalent locales, and extending the visualizer, to try and find the best ways to present a lot of information in an easy to understand, but yet impactive, manner. In a few cases, they’ve really hit the mark. The first case is the country-based graphs which allow a user to see relative spending by state on a geographically correct map. These graphs take the concept of Shneiderman diagrams (or visual crosstabs) to a whole new level. The second case is the integrated trend graphs that allow you to simultaneously see the trends across contingent worker, service worker, and direct hire for any job position or category. This is important because whenever spending drops sharply in one category, it tends to increase significantly in another. (Can’t hire any new workers? Service workers. Can’t sign another long term contract with a service provider? Contingent workers. Contingent workers been here too long? New hires.) The third case is the comparative rate-range graphs which simultaneously present the average rate, the range, and the market average for a set of related positions — it makes it really to easy to see where the company is likely spending too much for its contingent and service labor.

However, what is really interesting is their new focus on “active guidance”. Having deep insight from meaningful benchmarks and comprehensive spend reports is one thing, but knowing what to do — and when to do it — is another. For an organization with thousands of contingent and service workers, this can be a challenge. To this end FieldGlass has launched new capabilities that is has bundled under the heading of “active guidance” with more in development. The three capabilities it has launched to date are:

  • Rate Guidanceusing the benchmark data and spending history, the platform will advise the user on the recommended rate range to associate with a contingent or service position,
  • FieldGlass Advisorbuilt on top of their alert functionality, the advisor will let a user know when a certain action should be taken (such as initiating a request for additional funds or to extend a current position), and
  • The Project Management Office Dashboarda quick summary into the past due, current, and forthcoming tasks that require the users attention with respect to payment and procurement, the dashboard is built on top of dozens of user configurable thresholds relating to processes, documents, and spend tracked by the system.

As FieldGlass continues its quest to automatically identify trends and associate them with suggested behaviors,this role-based feature should get quite interesting. The holy grail of performance analysis lies in the ability to take tactical data and derive meaningful strategy.

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