Author Archives: Jason Busch

About Jason Busch

Jason Busch is the founder and executive editor of Spend Matters. He has significant firsthand experience creating and launching new products and solutions in the supply chain and sourcing sectors and has also helped hundreds of companies save money through strategic sourcing and related initiatives, including finding the right technologies to kick their organizations into overdrive.

Private Equity and Procurement: Context and Introduction

Jason Busch - May 24, 2013 3:09 PM | Categories: Commentary

At Sourcing Interest Group’s Spring Summit, Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe’s (WCAS) Jeff Gallant gave a fact-packed, fast-paced hour-long introduction to the world of private equity and procurement in a talk titled Procurement as critical resource: creating value through private equity portfolio management. I came away from the presentation with a strong appreciation for the opportunities of a relatively new position that is emerging for former CPOs and procurement leaders: serving as operating partners within the private equity world. However, the lessons that Jeff shared are not just relevant to those transitioning into the world of leveraged buyouts – they are [...]

[More...]
 

The Start of Summer: Soldier Field 10, G&Ts and Reverse Auctions

Jason Busch - May 24, 2013 8:29 AM | Categories: Commentary

ginandtonic I’m running a 10-mile race tomorrow, hoping to dash to a personal best (“PR” among the racing obsessed) during the Soldier Field 10. For those in Chicago, this race is truly awesome. Not only is it not over-crowded (a field of just over 10,000 or so, and you pick up your race packet at a running store, not the massive McCormick conference center) you start next to Soldier Field, and you actually finish on the fifty yard line. And you honor the memory of those who served (and for which the stadium is named after) before the starting gun goes [...]

[More...]
 

BravoSolution’s Customer Event: Procurement Health and the Dangers of WebMD!

Jason Busch - May 23, 2013 10:43 AM | Categories: Commentary

Bravo’s Mickey North Rizza facilitated a great discussion yesterday with the metaphor of “health” as a means for diagnosing the state of today’s procurement patient. The entire discussion was a backdrop for introducing Bravo’s new procurement benchmark, diagnosis, and improvement program (more on this later). In the meantime, her points that compare patient health to procurement organizational health are worth sharing – and spot on. Live at the BravoSolution Event Mickey began by questioning how we know whether procurement is healthy or unhealthy in our companies: sourcing, procurement, supplier relationship management, risk, quality, transactional/compliance activities, etc. Some audience members suggested [...]

[More...]
 

BravoSolution’s Customer Event – Learning To Drive Fast

Jason Busch - May 23, 2013 9:01 AM | Categories: Commentary

When people purchase anything but a boring econobox of a car – or the Prius, which is really just Toyota’s excuse to find a way to charge close to $30K for something that without the eco-weenie component should cost half, judged on performance – it’s unlikely that they’ll ever drive the thing near the limits. Yet even my trusty Honda Odyssey is capable of doing some pretty spectacular things if you know how to push it. This is true of so many procurement tools as well, especially on the sourcing side. One common theme at Bravo’s customer event so far is that a number of the [...]

[More...]
 

BravoSolution’s Customer Event — Touching Down

Jason Busch - May 23, 2013 5:57 AM | Categories: Commentary

new-orleans I touched down in New Orleans yesterday morning to attend the BravoSolution customer conference. I confess I missed the “procurement history walking tour of the French quarter” in order to do one final set of intervals on the treadmill before a race this weekend. Alas, the running/racing lifestyle is somewhat in opposition to the culture of New Orleans – unless of course you want to sip a Hurricane to continue last night’s buzz while running at a 10.0 pace with your plastic “to go” cup sitting where the water or Gatorade bottle should go on the treadmill cup holder. Not [...]

[More...]
 

Transactional Data Interchange: The Large/Small Company Disconnect

Jason Busch - May 22, 2013 10:01 AM | Categories: Commentary

KPMG’s 2013 Global Manufacturing Outlook features a diagram that immediately caught my attention when I saw it. It shows the variance of how large (companies over $5B in revenue) and smaller companies (companies under $5B in revenue) transact and share information with supply chain partners. Note: the data contained in the study is based on a survey conducted with The Economist with a decent sample size (300+ companies). KPMG’s findings suggest that the dominant form of data-sharing for large companies are web-based partner portals (coming in at 40%) when it comes to transmitting information across the supply chain. 39% of [...]

[More...]
 

Supplier Network Fee Modeler: A Q-and-A With the Inventor (Part 2)

Jason Busch - May 22, 2013 8:09 AM | Categories: Industry News

Please click here for the first part of this interview. Spend Matters:  Ariba’s fees look inexpensive compared with p-cards. What’s the difference for suppliers? Purchasing Insight: This is a good point. Anyone who wants to criticize Ariba should look at merchant fees. But it is fair to say that merchant fees are based on a percentage of the value of a sale where there’s a margin that is also proportionate to value of the sale. This logic doesn’t apply with invoicing. Spend Matters:  How do supplier network fees compare to the process improvements savings companies realize through A/P automation and [...]

[More...]
 

E-Sourcing: What’s Changed in the Past Five Years?

Jason Busch - May 21, 2013 3:14 PM | Categories: Industry News

This post discusses the capabilities and mentions vendors like MyBiz, Ivalua, Pool4Tool, Zycus, Fullstep, b-pack, CombineNet, BravoSolution, Trade Extensions, Ariba, and more!   We’re knee deep in our e-sourcing deep-dive analysis of over thirty vendors: Thomas has been sitting through 90-minute demonstrations during most waking hours. I’ve been talking with all of the references provided (and some additional ones as well). Pierre, our head of research, is helping us stitch it all together as we all wade through the large RFP we sent out that kicked off the research phase of our analysis. In June, it will all come together. [...]

[More...]
 

Kimberley-Clark on Metrics and Adoption with Ariba

Jason Busch - May 21, 2013 8:18 AM | Categories: Commentary

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...]
 

Invoiceware and Tradeshift Partner: E-Invoicing Goes Global

Jason Busch - May 21, 2013 6:12 AM | Categories: Industry News

cosmic 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 [...]

[More...]
 

Sourcing Managed Services: Not Consulting – Not Outsourcing

Jason Busch - May 20, 2013 2:44 PM | Categories: Commentary

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...]
 

Tackling Tail Spend and Spot Buys (Part 3)

Jason Busch - May 20, 2013 10:07 AM | Categories: Commentary

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...]
 

A Manufacturing Travesty: The Procurement Blind Leading the Blind

Jason Busch - May 20, 2013 8:04 AM | Categories: Commentary

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...]
 

Supplier Network Fee Modeler: A Q-and-A With the Inventor (Part 1)

Jason Busch - May 20, 2013 6:24 AM | Categories: Industry News

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...]
 

Quirky SIG Delights: Politics and Pub Crawls

Jason Busch - May 17, 2013 2:13 PM | Categories: Commentary

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...]
 

Back to the Future: Spend Matters [Un]-Plugged

Jason Busch - May 17, 2013 9:09 AM | Categories: Commentary

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...]