Category Archives: Technology

Statess Wants to Stabilize Your State of Flux (Part I)

These days an average organization has a lot of uncertainty to deal with as a result of sustainability, regulatory, and risk headaches that plague it on a daily basis. These headaches range from paperwork headaches to regulatory migraines to minor delivery hiccups to major supply chain disruptions depending on whether an import form wasn’t received on time, certification requirements for key personnel were not completed, a strike erupted at a major port, or an earthquake destroyed a major production plant.

However, that uncertainty can be reduced with good planning, monitoring, and execution. Somewhat ironically, achieving this requires proper planning to identify the right processes and technologies that can be used to not only monitor the supply chain for events that can cause disruptions, but create mitigation and continuity plans that can be executed at the right time. And while it’s not always easy to identify the best processes, it’s a bit easier to identify the right kind of technologies. An organization that wants to reduce uncertainty needs to implement systems that monitor for events outside of its control that could increase its organizational risk and cause unexpected disruptions and it needs to implement systems that monitor for issues inside of its control that, if left unchecked, could increase risk or decrease effectiveness. One of the most important systems in this latter category is a SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) system because an organization’s suppliers, that often are the recipients of up to 80% of organizational spend, represent one of the biggest known, and manageable risks, to the organization.

While SRM solutions aren’t new, new SRM solutions are still being developed, and one such SRM solution that you likely haven’t heard of that could meet your organization’s needs is Statess. Although it’s a relatively new solution, it’s quite mature for its age as, unlike many solutions that first hit the market, it was not developed by a new software company but originally conceived of over six years ago by State of Flux, a mature, eleven year old provider of Supplier Management consulting, training, and research services (that recently rebranded their technology division as Statess). Even though you may never have heard of them, as they are on the other side of the pond, State of Flux is a leader in best practices and thought leadership for Supplier Management, and has been producing the “Global SRM Research Report” for the last six years. That’s longer than a number of self-proclaimed industry leading research firms on this side of the pond have been around!

As a result of this research, and the consulting they did for their clients, they not only quickly realized the need for a proper tool to manage supplier relationships, but realized that if the tool was not designed to streamline the common operations and adapt to the organization’s needs, it would not be effective. Based on this, they set out to design a tool that would work for the average organization it served and not end up as another piece of shelfware. Such a tool would not only have to help manage relationships and performance, enforce compliance, and mitigate risk, but also promote supplier development, allow for cross-organizational team collaboration, and, most importantly, go beyond just management to encourage true supplier innovation. In addition, depending on organizational need, the platform may need to support and manage contracts and categories, address sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and manage overall supplier development programmes.

It’s a pretty tall order, but the new Statess supplier management platform meets the bill with core modules for relationship management, performance management, contracts management, risk management, innovation management, and sustainability with over 50 uniquely defined sub-modules that address different aspects of contracts, performance, risk, innovation, and relationships.

In our next post we will begin to discuss the capabilities of the solution in detail and how it addresses each of these core issues.

Technology Damnation 82: The Secret Seven

We all think the internet, with its distributed design, open and thoroughly tested encryption and security technologies, and its foundation of our modern public, private, government, and academic culture is, despite regular security breaches (which are often a result of improperly applied security procedures and technologies of corporations that should know better), relatively secure and reliable and will remain outside of any one organization’s control for years to come. Especially since our global business functions, and global procurement functions in particular, rely on it.

And while that is the expected future, as no one corporation, nation, or conglomerate owns the internet, the reality is that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is a private corporation, has an awful lot of power over the internet as it manages the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) that links your domain to the right IP address. In order for a registrar to sell you a domain (to link to an IP that is typically made available to you by your ISP), the registrar has to be accredited by ICANN. In addition, IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which is another private corporation, is responsible for the Internet Protocol Addressing System and allocates IP blocks to the Regional Internet Registries (that allocate, in turn, to National Internet Registries, that allocate, in turn, to the Local Internet Registries that, in turn, allocate IP address to the local ISPs).

This says that if a body managed to gain control of IANA, they control your IP address, and, even worse, if a body managed to gain control of ICANN, they control the mappings, and since everyone uses domain names, and not IPs, they would essentially control who goes where on the information superhighway. This couldn’t really happen, right? Wrong. While not likely, all a villainous/terrorist organization of Bond proportions needs to do is gain control of, or replace, the seven key holders that control the core ICANN DNS system. That’s right. The vault that controls the entire global internet only takes seven keys to open.

And even though the key holders hold traditional safety box keys, the keys that control the internet aren’t regular keys you find on a key ring and are, in fact, smart cards, that can only be accessed by the key holder (with the safety box key) after going though traditional and biometric security screenings that are likely tighter than they have in place at Fort Knox (and the process required to complete the ceremony and gain access to the machine that generates the new master key has over 100 steps). And no key on its own can make changes to the master DNS. All seven keys are required to activate the machine that generates the master key that allows the DNS to be updated. (And whoever holds the master key, just like whoever holds a traditional master key, has access to the entire internet just like a traditional master key gives you access to an entire building.)

But at the end of the day, it only takes the keys and biometrics of 7 people to get the smart cards that activate the machine that generates the new master key for the internet which allows whomever holds it to redirect domains at will. It is true that these 7 people, who are some of the greatest minds in internet security and who are as trustworthy as they come, are spread all over the world, but still, at the end of the day, it would only take 7 samurai to slay the internet.

In other words, no matter how far we progress with technology and security, it all comes down to the trust and nobility of a select few to keep our global supply chains humming.

And if you start to think about this too deeply, you might really believe we’re all damned in the end!

Simply Your Procurement Life and Eliminate the 5 E-procurement Mistakes You Don’t Realize You’re Making

Today’s guest post is from Iyana Lester, a Project Analyst at Source One Management Services who specializes in contract management and negotiation, project evaluation and monitoring, and market assessments.

Along with the boom of internet-based business came the challenges of maintaining an effective supply chain in the digital space. E-procurement offers a seamless solution to streamline processes and improve compliance all while reducing cost. While e-procurement has been around for several years, there still remains several factors that impede businesses from utilizing it fully and attaining maximum savings largely based on their expectations.

A recent Procurement Insights article points out that merely assuring yourself you’re doing everything in your power to maintain supplier relationships isn’t enough. “Even if you are well-versed in procurement and can speak every language in existence, nurturing complex supplier relationships in a global spectrum requires frequent communication that often slips without a system to manage the contact.” So what does this mean for organizations considering the shift?

Inform yourself of what’s out there before committing to one e-Procurement solution. More importantly, become educated on the user short-fallings that lead people to assume that their solutions aren’t optimal. This will allow the largest-scale view of your options without any user-impairment bias. By ensuring your expectations are reasonable, you’re conveniently building yourself a ladder out of a situation coined by Sourcing Innovation as Procurement Damnation. Whether you prefer it as a remix to AC/DC’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Damnation or a procurement state of agitation, you can’t anticipate unrealistic savings and results from an e-Sourcing platform. These solutions are helpful in approaching the challenges of global sourcing, but they are only 100% effective with a strategy that supports them.

Below is a list of several of the most common shortcomings faced in e-procurement. As you develop your e-Sourcing options, keep these organizational glitches in mind:

1. Poorly Implemented Systems

This issue stems from a lack of initial planning. The systems must be integrated with existing corporate systems so that they will be interacting all the way to the end user’s interface experience. They should also be implemented quickly to accomadate any rapidly-developed new technological advancement. Failure to consider any of these focuses can result in systems that aid in one area of the procurement process but cause harmful disruption in others.

2. Partial Implementation

When implementing any large scale change, the change must be adopted and interconnected organization-wide to achieve optimal outcomes. To successfully implement e-procurement, your organization needs to carry out a detailed evaluation of its procurement processes and consider the needs for each division. Roles will continue to depend on effective collaboration between many different organizational players. This will assist in preparing proper agendas and budgets.

3. Uninformed to the Latest Technological Advancements

Monitoring advancements in e-procurement technology will serve as a guide for key risk concerns that should be in your organization’s radar. Observing technological advancements will lessen the chance of your systems becoming outdated.

4. Failure to Develop Performance Metrics

Many organizations have the mentality that once a system is in place, all advantages and will be manually achieved. Considering a comprehensive set of metrics provides a better framework for benchmarking and allows for the procurement process to be more effectively managed. Some metrics areas to consider may include effectiveness, efficiency, quality, and cycle time.

5. Unsuccessfully Identifying the Issues at Hand

A system cannot effectively solve a problem unless the true problem is identified. Organizations often identify sources and causes of the problem and look for fixes that will only temporarily improve the issue. To capture the full potential of your e-Sourcing, never close your eyes to developments and minimize your exposure to Procurement Damnation by following the above steps. The most effective procurement management systems are constantly adapting their capabilities while remaining user-friendly and consistent. Procurement departments should be mindful and eager to pursue new functionalities wherever possible without compromising supplier data quality.

Thanks, Iyana.

Technological Damnation 81: Social Media

While there may be a dirty dozen of risk categories that we need to address in order to adequately address the Procurement Damnation we have willingly placed ourselves in as we try to collectively forge a new frontier, the largest category of risk that we need to address is that of Technology. Almost one fifth of all damnations that plague us fall into the technology category. Mobility, e-Currency, and Social Media are just the tip of the technology iceberg.

However, social media might be the most damning of all. Besides the obvious facts that we collectively as a society waste enough time on a single video to double the size of Wikipedia (Source), that social media is literally making us stupid (Source), and that every marketer and their dog is doing their best to convince you that your company has to be on every social network in existence (including the dozen that are literally here today and gone tomorrow as Facebook and Twitter have pretty much won the social media war in the English speaking world for the time being), there is the simple fact that social media takes more than it gives.

Social Media is called social media for a reason. It was designed for people to be social with each other, not for businesses to sell wares to consumers, certainly not for businesses to sell goods to each other, and definitely not for businesses to conduct important, strategic, operations. But yet you are constantly bombarded with requests from marketing for information about your supply chain efficiency, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, or other operations and practices that can be used to boost corporate image, brand reputation, or product differentiation on these outlets. You’re working hard to define and implement proper category management techniques on dozens of strategic and high-value categories but all marketing cares about is which supplier will get the organization the most free press, whether the “in vogue” corporate social responsibility practice of the day is getting enough attention, or if the new product being sourced will have enough bell-and-whistle features to allow for one dozen unique messages for each social media channel of interest. Is it insane or is it inane? Or is it both?

And then, to make matters worse, rather than use your supplier portal, your suppliers want to message you on the social network they are signed into 24/7, your partners are checking the never updated Facebook company page instead of the official contact directory, and eliminated vendors keep messaging your organization’s Facebook and Twitter accounts asking marketing why they are no longer being considered, rather than read the detailed explanation in the vendor management portal you provided them.

Where Procurement is concerned, social media is a menace that puts poor old Dennis to shame. And now even the “don’t be evil” Google, as per yesterday’s post on who wins and loses in the Twitter/Google deal, is going to index the biggest trove of inanity that exists on the internet. When will the chaos cease?

Who Wins, Who Loses in the Twitter/Google Deal?

A recent post over on VentureBeat on who wins, who loses in the Twitter/Google deal attempted to analyze the Twitter/Google deal to make sense of it. In the deal, Google is allowed to index all tweets and Twitter gets revenue in addition to more traffic from Google. According to the author, Google is getting really valuable time-sensitive content to put ads against which will help it super-serve its users and, as such, acquires a real-time pulse of the world because Twitter remains the only place you can connect with smart, influential people on things you care about.

At this point SI has to say WTF? While there are some smart, influential people on Twitter, there are a number of fallacies to this statement. First of all, not every smart, influential person is on Twitter. Not even close. And many of the smartest, most influential people on Twitter barely tweet, and if they do, due to the 140 character limit, they aren’t saying much. Secondly, what kind of idiot do you have to be to believe that Twitter remains the only place you can connect with smart, influential people? Not only are Facebook and LinkedIn still mega-big (unlike Google Plus), but there is one location that trumps them all when it comes to connecting with smart, influential people. The Real World. (And not the MTV show. I mean offline where you’ve been able to, in the right forums, find smart, influential people for tens of thousands of years.)

As a result, since SI assumes that any conclusions made by the author are all hogwash as the assumptions from the get-go are wrong, SI is going to tell you who really wins, who really loses — and why.

Biggest Winner: Sentiment Analysis Companies

Social media marketers have corporate marketers convinced social media marketing and, more importantly, social media reputation is the most important thing and that these corporate marketers have to track that daily. And how are these corporate marketers supposed to do this? By way of sentiment analysis which can, of course, only be done by web-scouring sentiment analysis software offered by a handful of companies. And once they can get real-time data through Google, their analysis will, of course, be more current and relative than ever (and, as such, their prices will justifiably go up). Or at least that’s what they’ll claim.

Next Biggest Winner: Twitter

Twitter has struggled to monetize it’s network since the beginning. A regular, big, check from Google is a really good thing. First of all, it’s money in the bank. Secondly, in Twitter’s view, it’s verification to investors that it is the social network of choice because Google has deemed it worthy of payment for its data. And it’s likely that its investors will believe this spin, praise Twitter’s executive team, and continue to support its growth.

Biggest Loser: US!

When we do a search, Google will now be inundating us with useless Tweets in our search result. Twitter decreases our IQ and makes a twit out of all of us (proof). Twitter may even be downfall of the western world. (There’s a reason why SI hails the fail whale.) At the end of the day, we all lose.