One of the most common misconceptions since "eggs are bad for you" or "England can win the next World Cup" is that, when it comes to selecting an automated purchasing system, an organization must choose between ERP and e-Procurement. A large number of Fortune 500 companies that have implemented best-of-breed e-Procurement systems over the last few years have shelved or are considering shelving their software due to problems pushing enough spend through the system. On the flip side, a considerable number of mid-sized companies (and state governments, who often track the mid-market sector in technology adoption) are, like their Fortune 500 counterparts did in the late 90s/early 2000s, considering the switch to e-Procurement due to its perceived functionality superiority over ERP purchasing applications.
What many Fortune 500 enterprises, mid-market companies and state governments fail to realize (with the exception of a few progressive organizations that I will case study in the weeks ahead) is that your e-Procurement system can peacefully (nay, productively!) co-exist with your ERP purchasing module. The secret lies in what each player brings to the table. Your ERP purchasing application brings purchasing transaction workflow that is, by definition, integrated seamlessly with your accounts payable, general ledger, and inventory systems. Your e-Procurement system on the other hand delivers the best-in-breed catalog and content management capability that ultimately represents the secret sauce for driving maximum potential spend through your preferred supplier contracts.
After making a presentation at my local ISM chapter recently I was talking to a VP of Procurement of a local Fortune 500 company who was relating their use of a "hybrid" e-Procurement/ERP approach (let's call it e-PERP, shall we?) that they had been using successfully for nearly a year. In this company's model, users select the products and services they need from multiple online catalogs all hosted in one consolidated "common look and feel" environment by a best-in-breed e-Procurement provider (at least a provider you would think of as an e-Procurement provider although in this model it is their catalog functionality, not their workflow functionality, that is being taken advantage of). But what is key is that once they have made their selection, the complete requisition through payment workflow is conducted within the ERP application. Sounds a bit like the old e-Procurement punch-out, right? Well it does a bit but with e-PERP there are two critical differences, these being:
1. Punch-out (or "round trip" for those of us who remember CommerceOne!) has historically been a method for bringing catalog item data from a supplier's web site into e-Procurement for PO creation purposes. An organization would then need e-Procurement/ERP integration to bring the item data into ERP for reconciliation, payment, posting and inventory purposes. The e-PERP model brings item data directly into ERP, bypassing e-Procurement workflow which is not being utilized. This accomplished by the best-of-breed e-Procurement/catalog provider implementing XML integration directly with the ERP application (Oracle/PeopleSoft and SciQuest do this today as part of their partnership).
2. Whereas punch-out only worked (effectively) for the larger vendors like Grainger and Corporate Express who had the resources to build punch-out compatible web sites, the e-PERP model works even for "Mom and Pop" vendors. This is because the best-in-breed catalog providers have built core competencies for creating and maintaining web catalogs for any supplier (even small local vendors that have never had a web presence before). This means that by using e-PERP an organization - with the help of its best-in-breed provider - can upload all of its preferred supplier contract content to the web catalogs in as little as 2-3 weeks, leading to rapid and effective utilization of its agreements by users and very high levels of contract compliance. This is in contrast to the ERP-only approach where an organization would have to build and maintain supplier catalogs behind its firewall, a far more lengthy and costly endeavor. And the e-Procurement-only approach? Well here you have the integration issue and the need to explain to your CEO why you are not using the ERP system you spent millions of dollars implementing!
Over the next few weeks I will be researching additional case studies of e-PERP in practice. I will be reaching out to companies, public sector entities, e-Procurement and ERP vendors to validate that I am not "smoking something" in thinking that such historically fierce adversaries can co-exist in value-added harmony. I will be looking for further examples of organizations who have realized that you really can have your ERP Purchasing cake, eat it, and enjoy lashings of e-Procurement ROI for dessert.
Oh, and England's chances in the 2010 World Cup? Not a hope.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Monday, September 8, 2008
Surefire Strategy #8 For Producing a Consulting Train Wreck: “Just Focus on What You Can Control, You Can’t be Blamed for the Actions of Others”
The next of my guaranteed approaches for driving the 4:55 to Deliverable City off the tracks at Milestone Curve is “Just Focus on What You Can Control, You Can’t be Blamed for the Actions of Others”. Strategy #8 typically unfolds something like this –
During the development of your strategic sourcing consulting proposal you include a section, usually somewhere near the back, called “Project Assumptions and Risks” (or something similar) where you lay out all the things that could possibly go wrong on the project and define all the assumptions that must be true for these things not to happen (e.g. business unit buy-in to ensure adequate spend is available to negotiate best possible pricing with suppliers, availability of client resources to support collection of all required data, etc.). You might even define a proactive risk management plan describing actions that can be taken to doubly ensure that the dark events do not occur. This could include steps such as forming executive steering committees, cross-functional project work teams and stakeholder focus groups. You submit your proposal, win the work, and arrive at the client site. You engage first gear and start rolling down the work plan track, confident that (i) you have every possible eventuality covered and (ii) that if something does go wrong it must be some force majeure, the fault for which cannot possibly be laid at your door…..
About six weeks into the project disaster strikes. One of the client’s largest business units decides it will withdraw from the project and instead renegotiate with its incumbent supplier (who had declined to respond to the RFP), effectively removing over 40% of your spend base. Within 48 hours, five of your shortlisted supplier candidates have got wind of the spend that has “left the table” and not surprisingly become much less willing to extend the type of pricing you were hoping for. At a hastily convened executive steering committee meeting, some key of the key dialogue includes:
CLIENT CFO: Quite frankly I was concerned about something like this happening. The complete value proposition of the sourcing exercise was always questionable if we lost business unit support.
YOU: I have to admit I’m very surprised. Sarah seemed completely on board at the kick-off meeting. I guess their supplier decided to do what it took to keep the business.
CLIENT VP PROCUREMENT: Colin tells me that our five shortlisted suppliers from the RFP first round have rescinded their pricing based upon the lower spend. The average contract savings is now only 3% - hardly the solid business case for persuading the other business units to switch….
CLIENT CFO (turning to you): I thought your risk management plan was designed to address every contingency. Don’t we have a plan B? I put my neck out for this project – really hyped it to the business units and the board.
YOU: Well, we did specify that a major assumption was having full business unit support, and like I said Sarah was saying all the right words at the kick-off. I don’t know what else we could have done...
(CLIENT CFO shakes his head in frustration).
Shortly after this meeting takes place the client cancels the sourcing project, pays your firm for services rendered to date and you are left scratching your head about whether you could have done anything differently. Well, could you have? Sarah turning to the Dark Side was outside of your control wasn’t it? Well, it turns out that you could have done something different and you might even have been able to prevent Sarah succumbing to the siren call of her incumbent’s bargain basement pricing. What? You could (in fact, should) have implemented a Stakeholder Management Plan.
A stakeholder management plan is the only way to deal with those pesky client folks who sneak up on you and drop grenades into your project team’s bunker just as you are all enjoying the idyllic peacefulness of a smoothly unfolding work plan. A stakeholder management plan is an approach to unmask these individuals in the earliest stages of project planning so that you can understand their motivations, their objectives and – most importantly - their ability to derail your engagement. A best practice stakeholder management plan should be incorporated into any consulting project that requires the involvement and support of influential individuals that are not members of the core project team. This will certainly be the case in the majority of strategic sourcing projects, particularly those addressing categories where procurement has not historically enjoyed a strong decision-making role. In these cases the following steps should be taken:
Step 1: Immediately post-sale, work with your client’s project sponsor to map key stakeholders on a matrix of “Influence (low or high)” against “Support (low or high)”. Utilize your sponsor’s knowledge of his/her organization to surface issues that may not be instantly apparent such as Sarah’s long term relationship with her business unit’s largest incumbent supplier and the ease with which her support might crumble if the supplier moved to aggressively protect its business.
Step 2: For stakeholders like Sarah you should work with your sponsor to secure her support by suggesting ways that her objectives could be met by supporting the project. For example this could involve asking her to persuade her incumbent to participate in the RFP, or perhaps to more aggressively market the impact that the sourcing project’s savings will have on her business unit’s P&L.
Step 3: Enlist the help of high influence/high support stakeholders to market the positive aspects of the project to the “Sarahs” of the organization, particularly those in similar situations, e.g. ones that have their own incumbent suppliers who stand to be impacted by the sourcing project. Ask these stakeholders to explain why they are supporting the project – task them to bring Sarah into the “high support” camp.
Step 4: Monitor stakeholders like Sarah closely during the project to make sure they stay committed. If they waver, do the work to understand their concerns and leverage your supportive stakeholders as needed to help her maintain her resolve.
Follow the steps above and you will avoid the derailing of your project by client stakeholders over whom you have no control. In fact, by following the steps above – by proactively identifying and managing these stakeholders – you will in fact have a large measure of control over any individual who could foil the success of your project.
In other words – yes, AVOID AT ALL COSTS Surefire Strategy #8 for Producing a Consulting Project Train Wreck “Just Focus on what You Can Control, You Can’t be Blamed for the Actions of Others”!! Implement the antithesis of Strategy #8 instead! Always include Stakeholder Assessment & Management as a formal, integrated component of your project work plan.
During the development of your strategic sourcing consulting proposal you include a section, usually somewhere near the back, called “Project Assumptions and Risks” (or something similar) where you lay out all the things that could possibly go wrong on the project and define all the assumptions that must be true for these things not to happen (e.g. business unit buy-in to ensure adequate spend is available to negotiate best possible pricing with suppliers, availability of client resources to support collection of all required data, etc.). You might even define a proactive risk management plan describing actions that can be taken to doubly ensure that the dark events do not occur. This could include steps such as forming executive steering committees, cross-functional project work teams and stakeholder focus groups. You submit your proposal, win the work, and arrive at the client site. You engage first gear and start rolling down the work plan track, confident that (i) you have every possible eventuality covered and (ii) that if something does go wrong it must be some force majeure, the fault for which cannot possibly be laid at your door…..
About six weeks into the project disaster strikes. One of the client’s largest business units decides it will withdraw from the project and instead renegotiate with its incumbent supplier (who had declined to respond to the RFP), effectively removing over 40% of your spend base. Within 48 hours, five of your shortlisted supplier candidates have got wind of the spend that has “left the table” and not surprisingly become much less willing to extend the type of pricing you were hoping for. At a hastily convened executive steering committee meeting, some key of the key dialogue includes:
CLIENT CFO: Quite frankly I was concerned about something like this happening. The complete value proposition of the sourcing exercise was always questionable if we lost business unit support.
YOU: I have to admit I’m very surprised. Sarah seemed completely on board at the kick-off meeting. I guess their supplier decided to do what it took to keep the business.
CLIENT VP PROCUREMENT: Colin tells me that our five shortlisted suppliers from the RFP first round have rescinded their pricing based upon the lower spend. The average contract savings is now only 3% - hardly the solid business case for persuading the other business units to switch….
CLIENT CFO (turning to you): I thought your risk management plan was designed to address every contingency. Don’t we have a plan B? I put my neck out for this project – really hyped it to the business units and the board.
YOU: Well, we did specify that a major assumption was having full business unit support, and like I said Sarah was saying all the right words at the kick-off. I don’t know what else we could have done...
(CLIENT CFO shakes his head in frustration).
Shortly after this meeting takes place the client cancels the sourcing project, pays your firm for services rendered to date and you are left scratching your head about whether you could have done anything differently. Well, could you have? Sarah turning to the Dark Side was outside of your control wasn’t it? Well, it turns out that you could have done something different and you might even have been able to prevent Sarah succumbing to the siren call of her incumbent’s bargain basement pricing. What? You could (in fact, should) have implemented a Stakeholder Management Plan.
A stakeholder management plan is the only way to deal with those pesky client folks who sneak up on you and drop grenades into your project team’s bunker just as you are all enjoying the idyllic peacefulness of a smoothly unfolding work plan. A stakeholder management plan is an approach to unmask these individuals in the earliest stages of project planning so that you can understand their motivations, their objectives and – most importantly - their ability to derail your engagement. A best practice stakeholder management plan should be incorporated into any consulting project that requires the involvement and support of influential individuals that are not members of the core project team. This will certainly be the case in the majority of strategic sourcing projects, particularly those addressing categories where procurement has not historically enjoyed a strong decision-making role. In these cases the following steps should be taken:
Step 1: Immediately post-sale, work with your client’s project sponsor to map key stakeholders on a matrix of “Influence (low or high)” against “Support (low or high)”. Utilize your sponsor’s knowledge of his/her organization to surface issues that may not be instantly apparent such as Sarah’s long term relationship with her business unit’s largest incumbent supplier and the ease with which her support might crumble if the supplier moved to aggressively protect its business.
Step 2: For stakeholders like Sarah you should work with your sponsor to secure her support by suggesting ways that her objectives could be met by supporting the project. For example this could involve asking her to persuade her incumbent to participate in the RFP, or perhaps to more aggressively market the impact that the sourcing project’s savings will have on her business unit’s P&L.
Step 3: Enlist the help of high influence/high support stakeholders to market the positive aspects of the project to the “Sarahs” of the organization, particularly those in similar situations, e.g. ones that have their own incumbent suppliers who stand to be impacted by the sourcing project. Ask these stakeholders to explain why they are supporting the project – task them to bring Sarah into the “high support” camp.
Step 4: Monitor stakeholders like Sarah closely during the project to make sure they stay committed. If they waver, do the work to understand their concerns and leverage your supportive stakeholders as needed to help her maintain her resolve.
Follow the steps above and you will avoid the derailing of your project by client stakeholders over whom you have no control. In fact, by following the steps above – by proactively identifying and managing these stakeholders – you will in fact have a large measure of control over any individual who could foil the success of your project.
In other words – yes, AVOID AT ALL COSTS Surefire Strategy #8 for Producing a Consulting Project Train Wreck “Just Focus on what You Can Control, You Can’t be Blamed for the Actions of Others”!! Implement the antithesis of Strategy #8 instead! Always include Stakeholder Assessment & Management as a formal, integrated component of your project work plan.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
A Cautionary Tale of Zero Investment (Originally Released in England Under the Title: "I Didn't Do a Spend Analysis But I Sourced Anyway")
(Note: the names, client details and even spend categories in this post have been changed to protect the “not so innocent”!)
Following on the heels of my posting “Can a Spend Analysis Have an ROI?” I feel obligated to provide a living breathing example of a situation where someone – in this case a consulting firm - decided NOT to do a spend analysis but plow ahead with sourcing. Okay, it wasn’t just any consulting firm – it was the firm that yours truly was working for at the time (but I’ve worked for so many you’ll never guess which one). And okay, it wasn’t just any project at this consulting firm but it was the project that I was working on at the time. Shame on you, Mark. But hey - I was young and I definitely needed the money!
Anyway here’s the back-story. Our firm had just won a major strategic sourcing project for a $5B consumer products company. Big – about $1.5M in total fees for sourcing of seven spend categories including office supplies, MRO, temps, janitorial services, PCs, corrugated packaging, and travel. How do you think we picked the Magnificent Seven? They sound the typical band of villains, right? Well, it was a very scientific process that unfolded late one Thursday afternoon in the middle of a mid-west summer. I know it was a Thursday afternoon because we would fly in to the client on Monday mornings and fly home Thursday night, and I remember the meeting where the Seven were picked took place just before we all grabbed our taxis for the airport. My Partner and I were sitting with the client’s VP Procurement and a snippet of the conversation went something like this:
CONSULTING FIRM PARTNER: Well Chris, looking at the GL numbers from Charlie (Charlie was a Financial Analyst in Accounting) I’d say we have seven candidates that look perfect for strategic sourcing.
CLIENT VP OF PROCUREMENT: What’s the rationale, Brian?
CONSULTING FIRM PARTNER: Well we usually find that the best categories to pursue are the ones with reasonable spend that haven’t been sourced – that means higher savings – and ones that also don’t present too much of a challenge from a complexity or stakeholder resistance point of view. That way you stand the best chance of capturing some decent benefits while also building the skills and confidence in your organization for taking on more challenging categories later.
CLIENT VP OF PROCUREMENT: Makes sense. So these are the categories? (Looks at the list of the Magnificent Seven). Total spend about $100 million…….that would net us about $10-15 million savings from your estimates, right? I like it. What’s next? Your team will create the detailed work plan?
CONSULTING FIRM PARTNER: Mark’s on it.
What happened next? Well it turned out that three of the categories proved to be massive disappointments after we found that the spend available for sourcing in each of these categories was much less than what had originally been thought. Embarrassingly less, in fact. The reason for this was very simple – the accounting data used to make the sourcing decisions (spend by general ledger code with a few cuts of spend by supplier) had failed to provide the necessary detail and accuracy to make an informed decision. What should have happened? We should have conducted a spend analysis to cleanse the accounting data and classify it into commodity groups based on all the clues available such as vendor name, GL code and cost center. Where we didn’t have enough clues in the data to break out a commodity we should have asked the using departments to help clarify what had been spent with whom. Oh, and we should also have asked whether there were any planned reductions in usage in any of the categories. If we’d done that we would never have picked three of the Magnificent Seven, would never have wasted months of our time and the client’s time chasing minuscule benefits (one category was canned early on, but the other two were continued largely to save face) and – most important – would not have disappointed our client.
What really happened in this case? We believed Charlie from Accounting! Now Charlie is a good guy and does good work. His accounting data works fine for financial reporting and budget planning. But in its raw form it just doesn’t cut it for making effective major resource deployment decisions during the planning of a strategic sourcing program. To accomplish this you need to invest in a spend analysis to transform Charlie’s numbers into meaningful purchasing intelligence. Ignore this advice while recruiting your next “Magnificent Seven” and you may find yourself riding into Sourcingville firing blanks with Charlie watching safely from the saloon.
Following on the heels of my posting “Can a Spend Analysis Have an ROI?” I feel obligated to provide a living breathing example of a situation where someone – in this case a consulting firm - decided NOT to do a spend analysis but plow ahead with sourcing. Okay, it wasn’t just any consulting firm – it was the firm that yours truly was working for at the time (but I’ve worked for so many you’ll never guess which one). And okay, it wasn’t just any project at this consulting firm but it was the project that I was working on at the time. Shame on you, Mark. But hey - I was young and I definitely needed the money!
Anyway here’s the back-story. Our firm had just won a major strategic sourcing project for a $5B consumer products company. Big – about $1.5M in total fees for sourcing of seven spend categories including office supplies, MRO, temps, janitorial services, PCs, corrugated packaging, and travel. How do you think we picked the Magnificent Seven? They sound the typical band of villains, right? Well, it was a very scientific process that unfolded late one Thursday afternoon in the middle of a mid-west summer. I know it was a Thursday afternoon because we would fly in to the client on Monday mornings and fly home Thursday night, and I remember the meeting where the Seven were picked took place just before we all grabbed our taxis for the airport. My Partner and I were sitting with the client’s VP Procurement and a snippet of the conversation went something like this:
CONSULTING FIRM PARTNER: Well Chris, looking at the GL numbers from Charlie (Charlie was a Financial Analyst in Accounting) I’d say we have seven candidates that look perfect for strategic sourcing.
CLIENT VP OF PROCUREMENT: What’s the rationale, Brian?
CONSULTING FIRM PARTNER: Well we usually find that the best categories to pursue are the ones with reasonable spend that haven’t been sourced – that means higher savings – and ones that also don’t present too much of a challenge from a complexity or stakeholder resistance point of view. That way you stand the best chance of capturing some decent benefits while also building the skills and confidence in your organization for taking on more challenging categories later.
CLIENT VP OF PROCUREMENT: Makes sense. So these are the categories? (Looks at the list of the Magnificent Seven). Total spend about $100 million…….that would net us about $10-15 million savings from your estimates, right? I like it. What’s next? Your team will create the detailed work plan?
CONSULTING FIRM PARTNER: Mark’s on it.
What happened next? Well it turned out that three of the categories proved to be massive disappointments after we found that the spend available for sourcing in each of these categories was much less than what had originally been thought. Embarrassingly less, in fact. The reason for this was very simple – the accounting data used to make the sourcing decisions (spend by general ledger code with a few cuts of spend by supplier) had failed to provide the necessary detail and accuracy to make an informed decision. What should have happened? We should have conducted a spend analysis to cleanse the accounting data and classify it into commodity groups based on all the clues available such as vendor name, GL code and cost center. Where we didn’t have enough clues in the data to break out a commodity we should have asked the using departments to help clarify what had been spent with whom. Oh, and we should also have asked whether there were any planned reductions in usage in any of the categories. If we’d done that we would never have picked three of the Magnificent Seven, would never have wasted months of our time and the client’s time chasing minuscule benefits (one category was canned early on, but the other two were continued largely to save face) and – most important – would not have disappointed our client.
What really happened in this case? We believed Charlie from Accounting! Now Charlie is a good guy and does good work. His accounting data works fine for financial reporting and budget planning. But in its raw form it just doesn’t cut it for making effective major resource deployment decisions during the planning of a strategic sourcing program. To accomplish this you need to invest in a spend analysis to transform Charlie’s numbers into meaningful purchasing intelligence. Ignore this advice while recruiting your next “Magnificent Seven” and you may find yourself riding into Sourcingville firing blanks with Charlie watching safely from the saloon.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Can a Spend Analysis Have an ROI?
Would a private equity firm ever think about investing in a company without conducting a comprehensive analysis of its ability to generate an attractive future return? Of course not! A friend of mine in private equity once told me that for every one hundred million dollars a PE firm invests it has spent a million dollars in internal salaries and due diligence consulting fees analyzing the deal prior to pulling the trigger.
In a somewhat similar vein, would you ever think about buying a new or used car without carrying out at least a rudimentary analysis of the comparative reliability and performance of the various models? I didn’t think so. If you’re like me, in addition to burying yourself in Consumer Reports you also spend all the weekends between February and July test driving every vehicle under the sun until your significant other finally explodes “enough already – make up your mind!”
What about hiring someone for your company? You wouldn’t make an offer to a person without a rigorous evaluation of their capability to perform the job would you? You pick apart resumes, fly candidates in for interviews, give them case studies, call their references, and conduct drug screens and background checks before extending an offer.
What’s the common theme in each of the above examples? It’s that in each case someone is making an investment of money (the due diligence consulting fees, the job candidate travel expenses) or time (lost family time at weekends doing test drives, lost work time interviewing candidates) to gather information critical to a particular decision making process. The return on the investment is an increased probability of a favorable outcome from the decision – a higher profit when the PE firm sells the company three years later, a pleasurable ownership experience for the car buyer, and a high performing employee for the hiring company.
So Mark, I hear you all saying exasperatingly, what the Sam Hill does all this have to do with spend analysis? Quite simply, numerous companies of all sizes across many industries are making high dollar resource deployment decisions in procurement while having little or no access to a piece of information that is critical to the procurement decision making process. That piece of information would be about SPEND. Information providing answers to massively important questions such as: What is total spend? What is spend by commodity, supplier, and department? How much spend is currently under contract, in total and within each commodity? How many suppliers account for the top 80% of spend in each commodity? With how many different departments are your highest spend suppliers doing business? How much spend in each commodity is with non-approved suppliers? Which departments are responsible for the non-approved spend? Only by having answers to these type of questions will an organization be able to identify those commodities, suppliers and departments where the application of scarce procurement resources will yield the highest return.
How does an organization get these answers? By conducting a SPEND ANALYSIS, a process for producing a consolidated and accurate view of an organization’s purchasing expenditures by commodity, supplier and department. I won’t go into the intricate details of the spend analysis process here or the various tools available in the market to conduct one but, yes, to perform a spend analysis you will need to….make an investment! Depending on the approach you take the investment will take the form of people cost to conduct an internal analysis, software license fees for a tool, consultant fees, or a combination of all of these. The key is to perform an effective spend analysis that allows your procurement organization to focus its people, processes and technologies in the areas that will yield the greatest benefits. Examples of such areas are commodities with the highest total spend across the enterprise, commodities with too many suppliers, suppliers doing high volumes of business with different departments, and departments spending large amounts with non-approved vendors.
One of my clients with $500M of total spend recently conducted a spend analysis that identified just over $100M of spend with opportunities for sourcing, incumbent renegotiation and maverick spend reduction. Following the spend analysis this company focused its best and brightest commodity managers exclusively on this $100M and realized $28M of annualized cost savings. Without the spend analysis the same talent would have been wandering blind amongst the $500M and would have been very lucky to have found half of the $28M. Let’s say they were very lucky and found over half, say $18M. That would still mean that conducting the spend analysis had led to an additional $10M of savings. And what did the spend analysis cost? Less than $100K in software and services. Guess what, there’s a spend analysis ROI. And an attractive one at that.
You would be surprised (unless you get to see as many procurement departments as I do) just how many companies today are not able to identify the opportunity areas described above, and by inference are not able to prioritize the deployment of their procurement resources. Many of these companies will tell you they know where the cost savings are. They’ll tell you they know their business and that they know where to look. But they don’t really. They guess where to focus their people. They roll the dice on where to conduct a reverse auction. And they come up with dry holes again and again. Why? Because they haven’t invested. They haven’t done the due diligence. They haven’t test driven the commodities. They haven’t fully evaluated the candidates. They haven’t done a spend analysis.
In a somewhat similar vein, would you ever think about buying a new or used car without carrying out at least a rudimentary analysis of the comparative reliability and performance of the various models? I didn’t think so. If you’re like me, in addition to burying yourself in Consumer Reports you also spend all the weekends between February and July test driving every vehicle under the sun until your significant other finally explodes “enough already – make up your mind!”
What about hiring someone for your company? You wouldn’t make an offer to a person without a rigorous evaluation of their capability to perform the job would you? You pick apart resumes, fly candidates in for interviews, give them case studies, call their references, and conduct drug screens and background checks before extending an offer.
What’s the common theme in each of the above examples? It’s that in each case someone is making an investment of money (the due diligence consulting fees, the job candidate travel expenses) or time (lost family time at weekends doing test drives, lost work time interviewing candidates) to gather information critical to a particular decision making process. The return on the investment is an increased probability of a favorable outcome from the decision – a higher profit when the PE firm sells the company three years later, a pleasurable ownership experience for the car buyer, and a high performing employee for the hiring company.
So Mark, I hear you all saying exasperatingly, what the Sam Hill does all this have to do with spend analysis? Quite simply, numerous companies of all sizes across many industries are making high dollar resource deployment decisions in procurement while having little or no access to a piece of information that is critical to the procurement decision making process. That piece of information would be about SPEND. Information providing answers to massively important questions such as: What is total spend? What is spend by commodity, supplier, and department? How much spend is currently under contract, in total and within each commodity? How many suppliers account for the top 80% of spend in each commodity? With how many different departments are your highest spend suppliers doing business? How much spend in each commodity is with non-approved suppliers? Which departments are responsible for the non-approved spend? Only by having answers to these type of questions will an organization be able to identify those commodities, suppliers and departments where the application of scarce procurement resources will yield the highest return.
How does an organization get these answers? By conducting a SPEND ANALYSIS, a process for producing a consolidated and accurate view of an organization’s purchasing expenditures by commodity, supplier and department. I won’t go into the intricate details of the spend analysis process here or the various tools available in the market to conduct one but, yes, to perform a spend analysis you will need to….make an investment! Depending on the approach you take the investment will take the form of people cost to conduct an internal analysis, software license fees for a tool, consultant fees, or a combination of all of these. The key is to perform an effective spend analysis that allows your procurement organization to focus its people, processes and technologies in the areas that will yield the greatest benefits. Examples of such areas are commodities with the highest total spend across the enterprise, commodities with too many suppliers, suppliers doing high volumes of business with different departments, and departments spending large amounts with non-approved vendors.
One of my clients with $500M of total spend recently conducted a spend analysis that identified just over $100M of spend with opportunities for sourcing, incumbent renegotiation and maverick spend reduction. Following the spend analysis this company focused its best and brightest commodity managers exclusively on this $100M and realized $28M of annualized cost savings. Without the spend analysis the same talent would have been wandering blind amongst the $500M and would have been very lucky to have found half of the $28M. Let’s say they were very lucky and found over half, say $18M. That would still mean that conducting the spend analysis had led to an additional $10M of savings. And what did the spend analysis cost? Less than $100K in software and services. Guess what, there’s a spend analysis ROI. And an attractive one at that.
You would be surprised (unless you get to see as many procurement departments as I do) just how many companies today are not able to identify the opportunity areas described above, and by inference are not able to prioritize the deployment of their procurement resources. Many of these companies will tell you they know where the cost savings are. They’ll tell you they know their business and that they know where to look. But they don’t really. They guess where to focus their people. They roll the dice on where to conduct a reverse auction. And they come up with dry holes again and again. Why? Because they haven’t invested. They haven’t done the due diligence. They haven’t test driven the commodities. They haven’t fully evaluated the candidates. They haven’t done a spend analysis.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
A State Gets Smart
Those of you who follow the public sector space may know that the State of Georgia recently selected SciQuest's e-procurement tool. State agency employees in Georgia who need to buy anything from pens to asphalt will shop in SciQuest's web-hosted electronic catalogs which will be populated with pre-priced goods and services from the State's existing supplier agreements. This decision by the State of Georgia is notable for two reasons - (i) it is another example of an organization electing to carry out its purchasing transactions in a best-of-breed e-procurement tool as opposed to the purchasing module its existing ERP system (numerous Fortune 500 companies have gone the EP route following sunk ERP investments and the State of Georgia already has PeopleSoft) and (ii) it is also an example of another state government that is moving ahead strongly with a strategic procurement initiative (other states moving to transform their procurement function include Virginia and Indiana to name just two).
The shunning of ERP's historically much-maligned inbuilt purchasing functionality in favor of e-procurement is a trend that I would expect to continue both in the private and public sectors. Not so much due to application functionality (a gap that that I would say doesn't really exist anymore since the ERP vendors have refined the workflow in their own e-procurement modules) but due to the fundamentally different way that the best-in-breed providers and ERP vendors handle catalog content. All of the e-procurement providers utilize web-hosted catalogs pre-populated with many of the vendors and products that most buying organization will need (and with the capability to have the organization's specific contract pricing built in). And if a customer has vendors that are not already in the pre-populated catalog it is a simple task for the e-procurement provider to request product and pricing from those vendors and load them into their web catalog. With an ERP provider's e-procurement solution, however, you are most likely going to have to build your catalogs behind your firewall, involving considerably much more time and expense. And now that the best-in-breed e-procurement providers all integrate so perfectly with ERP (e.g. with accounts payable to enable payment reconciliation), why would you ever go the ERP purchasing route? I wouldn't.
As regards Georgia's general procurement transformation initiative, expect to see a lot more of this from state governments in the next 2-5 years. State governments have long presented a massive challenge for creating value from procurement due to their extreme decentralization. Often hundreds of state agencies within a state making their own procurement decisions and developing their own price agreements with suppliers. To complicate matters even more, agencies usually have their own financial and purchasing systems meaning there is no centralized store of data from which to build a consolidated picture of total state spend by category, supplier and agency - key information for identifying and developing aggressively discounted price agreements with suppliers. Rounding out the challenges for states in the this area are a lack of a strong mission/vision/strategy for a center-led approach to procurement and a shortage of strategic sourcing skills among current state procurement staff.
As regards my state procurement crystal ball I would expect to see (or would HOPE to see) state governments address the following five areas:
- Develop and broadly communicate a center-led strategy for procurement in the state with the centerpiece being a strategically focused, "center of excellence"-based central procurement group
- Conducting a best practice spend analysis to develop a consolidated cross-state picture of spend by agency, supplier and agency
- Based on the spend analysis, develop and implement a sourcing roadmap with the objective of maximizing the amount of state spend under cross-agency ("state-wide") leveraged price agreements
- Upskill the central procurement group with the required training in best practice strategic sourcing methods (or hire where needed)
- Implement a state e-procurement system with web-hosted electronic catalogs to drive maximum spend through the new price agreements
The shunning of ERP's historically much-maligned inbuilt purchasing functionality in favor of e-procurement is a trend that I would expect to continue both in the private and public sectors. Not so much due to application functionality (a gap that that I would say doesn't really exist anymore since the ERP vendors have refined the workflow in their own e-procurement modules) but due to the fundamentally different way that the best-in-breed providers and ERP vendors handle catalog content. All of the e-procurement providers utilize web-hosted catalogs pre-populated with many of the vendors and products that most buying organization will need (and with the capability to have the organization's specific contract pricing built in). And if a customer has vendors that are not already in the pre-populated catalog it is a simple task for the e-procurement provider to request product and pricing from those vendors and load them into their web catalog. With an ERP provider's e-procurement solution, however, you are most likely going to have to build your catalogs behind your firewall, involving considerably much more time and expense. And now that the best-in-breed e-procurement providers all integrate so perfectly with ERP (e.g. with accounts payable to enable payment reconciliation), why would you ever go the ERP purchasing route? I wouldn't.
As regards Georgia's general procurement transformation initiative, expect to see a lot more of this from state governments in the next 2-5 years. State governments have long presented a massive challenge for creating value from procurement due to their extreme decentralization. Often hundreds of state agencies within a state making their own procurement decisions and developing their own price agreements with suppliers. To complicate matters even more, agencies usually have their own financial and purchasing systems meaning there is no centralized store of data from which to build a consolidated picture of total state spend by category, supplier and agency - key information for identifying and developing aggressively discounted price agreements with suppliers. Rounding out the challenges for states in the this area are a lack of a strong mission/vision/strategy for a center-led approach to procurement and a shortage of strategic sourcing skills among current state procurement staff.
As regards my state procurement crystal ball I would expect to see (or would HOPE to see) state governments address the following five areas:
- Develop and broadly communicate a center-led strategy for procurement in the state with the centerpiece being a strategically focused, "center of excellence"-based central procurement group
- Conducting a best practice spend analysis to develop a consolidated cross-state picture of spend by agency, supplier and agency
- Based on the spend analysis, develop and implement a sourcing roadmap with the objective of maximizing the amount of state spend under cross-agency ("state-wide") leveraged price agreements
- Upskill the central procurement group with the required training in best practice strategic sourcing methods (or hire where needed)
- Implement a state e-procurement system with web-hosted electronic catalogs to drive maximum spend through the new price agreements
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Guest Starring on E-Sourcing Forum
Just a heads up to my global audience that for a while I will be guest blogging regularly on E-Sourcing Forum, one of the most widely read blogs on procurement and spend management. E-Sourcing Forum is written by my friend David Bush, CEO of Iasta. Iasta is one of the leading providers of e-sourcing software and services, providing solutions for spend analysis, strategic sourcing and contract management. I'm not sure that Dave knows what he's letting himself in for, and I fully expect to be fired when Dave realizes how much my posts are lowering the tone of the place. Nevertheless, ESF will be where you can find me. Some of my upcoming posts will include:
Can Spend Analysis Have an ROI?
".....Numerous companies of all sizes across many industries are making high dollar resource deployment decisions in procurement while having little or no access to a piece of information that is critical to the procurement decision making process....."
A Cautionary Tale of Zero Investment (Released in the UK under the title "I Didn't Do a Spend Analysis but I Sourced Anyway")
A tale of dry holes and those who drilled them.
Surefire Strategy #8 For Producing a Consulting Train Wreck: "Just Focus on what You Can Control, You Can't be Blamed for Someone Else's Actions"
The pitfalls of assuming that you will not be held accountable for the mis-deeds of those over which you hold no sway.
Can Spend Analysis Have an ROI?
".....Numerous companies of all sizes across many industries are making high dollar resource deployment decisions in procurement while having little or no access to a piece of information that is critical to the procurement decision making process....."
A Cautionary Tale of Zero Investment (Released in the UK under the title "I Didn't Do a Spend Analysis but I Sourced Anyway")
A tale of dry holes and those who drilled them.
Surefire Strategy #8 For Producing a Consulting Train Wreck: "Just Focus on what You Can Control, You Can't be Blamed for Someone Else's Actions"
The pitfalls of assuming that you will not be held accountable for the mis-deeds of those over which you hold no sway.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Can a Spend Analysis Have an ROI?
First of all I hope everyone had a great 4th of July holiday! To those of you who spend much of your work week waiting in airport security lines I also hope you were able to take valuable time out to spend with your loved ones.
This is a just a quick line to give some some early warning that one of the subjects I will be diatribing about next week will be the oft-asked question "how do I quantify the ROI of a spend analysis?". Now come on, admit it, you've asked this question at least as many times as "what happened to the equity in my home?" or "how do I get hold of a Prius?".
See you in the week...
This is a just a quick line to give some some early warning that one of the subjects I will be diatribing about next week will be the oft-asked question "how do I quantify the ROI of a spend analysis?". Now come on, admit it, you've asked this question at least as many times as "what happened to the equity in my home?" or "how do I get hold of a Prius?".
See you in the week...
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