Author Archives: Jason Busch
Kimberley-Clark on Metrics and Adoption with Ariba
Earlier this month at Ariba Live, Kimberly-Clark’s Richard Roe (Project Lead for e-Invoicing and Ordering) gave some background on his company’s supplier enablement and connectivity program. Kimberley-Clark’s goals are pretty much in line with industry norms – improve cycle times, reduce errors, avoid unnecessary human involvement in the A/P and invoicing process, reduce supplier inquiries when self-service code suffices, etc. From a metrics perspective, Roe noted that their goals are to drive 90% e-invoicing and 98% electronic purchase order adoption by 2015. In terms of scaling their volume with Ariba during this time frame, the company is hoping to put [...]
[More...]
Comments (0)
Invoiceware and Tradeshift Partner: E-Invoicing Goes Global
Last week, Invoiceware and Tradeshift announced a partnership agreement to cross-sell and integrate each other’s solutions in the e-invoicing market. For those that do not know Tradeshift, the provider is somewhat of the e-invoicing and supplier network industry trouble-maker. They are upsetting the status quo with a model that threatens disruption through a platform-based approach to connecting different players in the supply chain and allowing third parties to build their own applications on top of their connectivity services. Invoiceware could not be more different – it is a highly focused specialist in Latin American e-invoicing enablement that is tightly integrated [...]
Comments (0)
Sourcing Managed Services: Not Consulting – Not Outsourcing
I recently connected with an old FreeMarkets colleague who is running a managed services business in the sourcing services area. His firm has roughly 90 (full-time) staff, a number that is expected to expand to 150 in the next few months. On a 4:30 AM shared ride to an airport, I managed to muster up enough pre-coffee energy to ask him a question that was on my mind. I wanted to know how managed services fit into the procurement (and procurement transformation) talent equation, and whether they could actually detract from an organization’s capability to build capabilities and talent that [...]
[More...] Comments (0)
Tackling Tail Spend and Spot Buys (Part 3)
In an analysis of technology for supporting tactical buying requirements, Hackett suggests the following elements to include: tools that review and analyze request patterns, user-friendly interfaces, supplier discovery capabilities and integration of RFX, supplier discovery, and contract creation solutions. While this is a near-complete list, it is our experience that sourcing technology itself matters less than technology integration when it comes to enabling spot-buying success. For example, our research confirms the importance of integrating spot buying activities with req-to-pay technology that can flag potential requisitions (based on a combination of categories, dollar amounts, G/L coding, contract requirements, etc.) and route [...]
[More...] Comments (0)
A Manufacturing Travesty: The Procurement Blind Leading the Blind
KPMG’s 2013 Global Manufacturing Outlook, a fine piece of work conducted in partnership with a survey by the Economist, exposed a dirty secret that all of us with at least one foot in the manufacturing supply chain know to be true: we’re generally flying blind when it comes to activity lower down in our supply chain. In their survey of over 300 companies, KPMG found that 4% of companies have “little to no tier 1 supplier visibility” when it comes to “supply and capacity information” across “suppliers and logistics partners.” In other words, that’s 4 out of every 100 companies [...]
[More...] Comments (0)
Supplier Network Fee Modeler: A Q-and-A With the Inventor (Part 1)
Purchasing Insight’s Pete Loughlin recently published a supplier network fee modeler. We covered its launch last week on Spend Matters. Supplier network fees are an increasingly important factor in calculating the total cost of ownership with indirect supply relationships. Suppliers are beginning to find ways of pushing back on them (both overtly and more discreetly) at their customer’s expense, as we featured in a recent Spend Matters PRO report on the supplier perspective on network fees. This analysis is based on the commentary from multiple suppliers participating in a live panel on the topic earlier this year as, well as [...]
[More...] Comments (0)
Quirky SIG Delights: Politics and Pub Crawls
I spent a day this week at the Sourcing Interests Group (SIG) spring summit in Amelia Island, Florida. It’s been at least a year since I’d been to a SIG event, and the organization has evolved significantly in that time. They have a significantly larger team and a greater focus on regional (city) efforts, plus their twice-a-year summit festivities. SIG is still “clique-y” in that it’s the conference group that feels closest knit, where active members genuinely look forward to seeing each other. But I found the group quite open and friendly to interact with. Above all, SIG is quirky. [...]
[More...] Comments (0)
Back to the Future: Spend Matters [Un]-Plugged
Someone on our team recently invited some tartare feedback from a long-time reader. It gave me pause, and caused me to think about what Spend Matters has become versus what it used to be. The short, and accurate, feedback was that we’ve become too sanitized. That in attempting to disrupt the old media and industry analyst models, we ended up being a bit sterile (and less entertaining) in covering the news. Simply put: as we became the standard, we adopted the stodgy old industry standard. In doing so, we lost much of the original unvarnished and edgy Spend Matters voice. [...]
[More...] Comments (0)
Supplier Network Transparency: Purchasing Insight Does What Ariba/SAP Should Have
Insurance salesmen and stockbrokers have been vilified over the years for taking advantage of uneducated buyers. The variable annuity could be the poster-child for a product that tends to have the most upside for a broker at the potential expense to the client. But the good news for consumers in the financial services industry is that there is a series of regulations, checks and balances designed to protect stupid people from making stupid decisions – or at least to reverse them (and/or to bring censure to those participating in such charades) when salesmanship convinces your geriatric aunt to make a [...]
Comments (2)
Webinar: A Business and Supplier Network Smack Down
Join us for The Great Debate: Will Supplier Networks Thrive, Implode, or Evolve? On Tuesday, May 21 from 9-10am CDT. The future of supplier networks and platforms is clearly open for debate. Ariba, TradeShift, Hubwoo, GXS, IBM, IBX, Perfect, OB10, InvoiceWare, Basware and many others are competing in a daily changing world. Moreover, the value proposition and capabilities of providers are often quite different, with overlapping and substitute capability being the norm versus true apples-to-apples functional similarity (this can create great confusion among procurement and A/P organizations). Users of various solutions also need to contend with “lock-in”, potentially, based on [...]
[More...] Comments (1)
Tackling Tail Spend and Spot Buys (Part 2)
Hackett suggests that the largest opportunities for improving process effectiveness for spot, tactical and tail spend buying focus on four areas: complexity and compliance, supplier participation, technology, and contracting. In the area of complexity and compliance, opportunities include simplifying the bidding process, standardizing the template for collecting bids from suppliers, identifying and tracking cycle time delays and establishing “clear targets for each phase of the bidding process.” From a supplier participation perspective, Hackett suggests that both “identification of suppliers that are going to comply with policy and process” and “establishment of clear objectives and expectations” with suppliers are opportunities for [...]
[More...] Comments (0)
GEP: Procurement Services, Software, and BPO Under One Roof
Background and Direction Earlier this spring, Pierre Mitchell and I had the chance to sit down with GEP at their global headquarters in New Jersey. During the discussion, we learned quite a bit about this unique firm’s offerings, market positioning, and strategic direction. Because GEP is attempting to go where few have successfully gone before – combining significant proprietary software assets in an end-to-end procurement suite with both BPO and consulting services – it is worth stepping back to understand a bit about the provider’s offerings, history, and current go-to-market approach. Later we’ll offer our analysis about how GEP stacks [...]
[More...] Comments (0)
Will SAP Scale the Customer Side of the Network Effect With Business One + Ariba Integration?
“If you build it, they will come” has been a frequent refrain since the early days of supplier (and business) networks, going back to Commerce One MarketSite. Unfortunately, it’s simply not true. Getting suppliers to register and transact through a network is all but impossible unless there is a critical mass of buyers or one customer in particular requires their participation. However, Intuit, Microsoft (and now SAP) are hoping to change this. In the case of the former two, it involves partnerships to wire-in suppliers directly into a network ecosystem through tight general ledger/financials integration with Tradeshift and Hubwoo, respectively [...]
[More...] Comments (1)
Tackling Tail Spend and Spot Buys (Part 1)
Spot buys and tail spend represent a large and potentially untapped opportunity for savings for moderately mature procurement organizations that have already invested in other areas of sourcing, compliance and supplier/risk management. At Ariba LIVE last week, The Hackett Group’s Kurt Albertson presented during a panel discussion session exploring, among other areas, factors that are correlated with purchased cost reduction savings for tactical buying. The fundamental challenge with tactical spend, as Kurt points out, is that it is “not transactional, but is often managed through transactional buying channels – if at all.” In other words, it is the type of [...]
[More...] Comments (2)
Scenarios for ISM/Member Organizations in 2020: 5 Paths and 5 Value Propositions
In the first installment of this series, Scenarios for ISM/Member Organizations in 2020: Introduction and Context, we introduced five scenarios for member organizations such as ISM in 2020: Scenario A: Trusted Point of Reference and Industry Standards Scenario B: Embedded Organizational Extensions Scenario C: Custodians of Data and Knowledge Scenario D: Activism and Influence Scenario E: Social Connectivity, Coaching and Networking Today we’ll work with the first two of these scenarios in more detail. Scenario A: Trusted Point of Reference and Industry Standards Overview: Member organizations set the “gold standard” not only for certifications and credentialing but also serve as trusted references [...]
[More...] Comments (0)
Ariba News: Product Rationalization, Integration, and Spend Visibility Hot ‘Rodding
At Ariba LIVE last week, Ariba shared the latest about its joint efforts with SAP in spend analysis. We previously covered some of the platform consolidation announcements that occurred on Spend Matters PRO – here’s a snippet (with full links to PRO coverage at the end of this story): “It is important to understand exactly how quickly the organization has moved to rationalize specific product areas. In less than two quarters since closing the acquisition, SAP has made the following decisions (our analysis of these actions and comparative product capabilities will follow in a forthcoming PRO research and webinar series): [...]
Comments (0)
- US and Chinese Comparative PVC Price : Jake said: I can also see this trend continuing, and i also think the west as a whole will struggle t... more
- SAP Sapphire: Moving to Frictionless AND Sticky Commerce : Jason Busch said: Pierre, Great stuff ... I personally think the proprietary network / apps approach t... more
- Three Lessons from LeBron James for Procurement Organizations : bitter and twisted said: I despise these sporting analogies.... more
- Procurement Inertia: When Did You Last Run Through the Seven Steps? : US Army M1A2 SEP - Voyager PE35557 US Army said: [...] Procurement Inertia: When Did You Last Run Through the Seven Steps? (spendmatters.co... more
Spend Matters Compass research is based on a year-long editorial calendar, exploring bigger picture areas and issues
Next Level Sourcing and Commodity Management
New Paper P2P and Working Capital
Services Procurement Innovation
ERP Procurement and Spend Management Applications
Spend Matters Perspectives research is focused on targeted topics that impact specific areas in procurement
