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.

Tackling Tail Spend and Spot Buys (Part 2)

Jason Busch - May 16, 2013 8:10 AM | Categories: Commentary

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 [...]

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GEP: Procurement Services, Software, and BPO Under One Roof

Jason Busch - May 15, 2013 3:02 PM | Categories: Commentary

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 [...]

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Will SAP Scale the Customer Side of the Network Effect With Business One + Ariba Integration?

Jason Busch - May 15, 2013 1:12 PM | Categories: Commentary

“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 [...]

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Tackling Tail Spend and Spot Buys (Part 1)

Jason Busch - May 15, 2013 8:06 AM | Categories: Commentary

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 [...]

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Scenarios for ISM/Member Organizations in 2020: 5 Paths and 5 Value Propositions

Jason Busch - May 14, 2013 3:25 PM | Categories: Commentary

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 [...]

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Ariba News: Product Rationalization, Integration, and Spend Visibility Hot ‘Rodding

Jason Busch - May 14, 2013 9:01 AM | Categories: Technology

speed 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): [...]

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Bangladesh Global Sourcing Blowback

Jason Busch - May 14, 2013 8:02 AM | Categories: Commentary

Following the building collapse accident that is now estimated to have claimed over a thousand lives, the Bangladesh government shut down eighteen factories last week. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, “the government said…it was temporarily closing 18 factories until safety improvements were made, without providing details. A Labor Ministry document…showed that three of the factories belong to the Nassa Group, while the other 15 are owned by smaller companies.” The article also suggests that Nassa Group has been an historic supplier to Wal-Mart, Kmart and Sears, among others. In the past, the company was even named [...]

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Catch Spend Matters on the Road: Conference Season Continues

Jason Busch - May 14, 2013 6:12 AM | Categories: Industry News

It’s been a whirlwind few weeks for the US Spend Matters research and analyst team this spring conference and event season. All three members of the US coverage team attended the ISM’s Annual International Supply Management Conference in Dallas earlier in the month. And the same crew presented and led discussions at the joint Spend Matters / MetalMiner Conflict Minerals Edge event in Chicago last week. We had the chance to stop by and present at Corporate United’s Synergy event as well, only a few blocks away from our own event a day earlier. Last month, Thomas Kase attended Concur’s [...]

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Ariba News: Network, Discovery, and Spot Buy Integration

Jason Busch - May 13, 2013 6:06 AM | Categories: Technology

Over the past few months, Ariba (and SAP) have actively shared a number of procurement technology and infrastructure roadmap elements with clients, prospects, and partners. This includes focusing on, among other areas, the continued delivery and development on many (but not all) common products, platforms and application environments (e.g., cloud vs. on-premise) between the two companies. At LIVE last week, Ariba shared several specific areas of investment and development in the their network and application offerings, including leveraging SAP’s in-memory database, HANA, to power its own spend analytics application. Many other announcements surrounding LIVE represent incremental improvements leveraging existing Ariba [...]

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When Will Banks & Financial Institutions Get P2P Right? Has Ariba Discover[ed] the Trick?

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

amex The history of banks and related financial institutions (e.g., American Express) getting into anything having to do with purchase-to-pay (P2P) is a road paved with the best of intentions — and absolutely abysmal execution. Jimmy Carter arguably had far greater success controlling inflation, driving the economy forward, getting gas prices in line and making Americans feel good about themselves than either Chase or AMEX have had with their various efforts (Xign, MarketMile, etc.) serving the procurement and AP communities as trusted, consistent partners, aside from offering standard treasury, checking/lock-box, FOREX, and typical banking services. But unlike Jimmy, it’s hard for [...]

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Teaching Salespeople to Better Serve Procurement Organizations (Part 1)

Jason Busch - May 9, 2013 10:09 AM | Categories: Commentary

Earlier this week, my colleague Pierre Mitchell presented to a group of suppliers within the Corporate United Group Purchasing Umbrella. The topic of his presentation centered on helping sales and commercial organizations of suppliers better service and manage the expectations and requirements of procurement teams in the future. Much of the talk centered on providing a set of broader set of KPI and related information to help the suppliers in attendance understand the current state on which procurement organizations are measured, as well as where they’re focusing efforts. However, Pierre also offered advice to the supplier organizations on overcoming the [...]

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Procurement as Architect: Think Mies, Not Some IT Geek (Part 1)

Jason Busch - May 9, 2013 8:04 AM | Categories: Commentary

Earlier this week, I gave a presentation at Corporate United’s Synergy event in Chicago titled: How Technology Drives Spend Under Management. The topic, refrain and storyline from the talk are ones that Spend Matters readers are likely already familiar with. To wit, I focused on technology’s important role in procurement and compliance and how other functions beyond procurement, including accounts payable, treasury and internal audit/risk management, can help capture benefits from investments as well. I took a thin slice of our overall technology coverage to focus on a range of new eProcurement, e-invoicing/invoice automation, contract management, spend analytics/budgeting/planning, sourcing and [...]

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CEB Procurement Transformation Leadership Metrics (Part 2)

Jason Busch - May 9, 2013 6:47 AM | Categories: Commentary

chess Continuing with lessons from CEB’s Ben Federlein on procurement transformation success – comparing top and bottom performers – let’s turn our attention to the types of investments that have maximum impact on a procurement organization’s ability to find new sources of value and drive transformation towards higher-value opportunities (and what areas don’t).  Beginning with those that don’t, while reverse auctions, eRFX, P-card, and outsources procurement can certainly create efficiencies and savings, they are not associated with driving transformation of procurement’s project portfolio (they came in at 0% in the CEB study). In contrast, areas such as SRM skills, internal relationship [...]

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Conflict Minerals Analysis: Readiness, Technology and Questionable Practices

Jason Busch - May 8, 2013 2:55 PM | Categories: Commentary

In this analysis, Lisa Reisman summarizes the key takeaways and compliance recommendations from the Spend Matters/MetalMiner event: Conflict Minerals EDGE. How prepared are most companies to tackle conflict minerals compliance based on what you heard and saw? One point that I came away with was that many companies have greater capability than they think to pursue conflict minerals compliance initiatives. For example, if you’re in pharmaceutical or aerospace, you’re likely doing part or lot level traceability already. Some companies might be able to piggy-pack on these initiatives. The audience was a self-selecting bunch of over 50 from the manufacturing world [...]

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Ingredient/Materials Centric Supplier Management: Solution Priorities

Jason Busch - May 8, 2013 8:05 AM | Categories: Commentary

When it comes to supply chain compliance and risk management at the material/ingredient/substance level, companies have diverse sets of priorities in choosing software-centric solutions. In a previous survey on the subject, respondents suggested the highest priority item was making sure that these approaches were not done in a silo, with 70% stating that “integration with existing systems” was important. Supplier self-service (i.e., “the ability for suppliers to provide data themselves”) also saw a majority of respondents (64%) suggesting the need for solutions that enabled capability in this area. 61% suggested the need to effectively balance transparency with confidentiality. Lower on the list [...]

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CEB Procurement Transformation Leadership Metrics (Part 1)

Jason Busch - May 8, 2013 5:38 AM | Categories: Commentary

butterfly Ben Federlein, Senior Director at the CEB’s Procurement Leadership Council, gave a metrics-packed presentation at Corporate United’s Synergy event in Chicago yesterday. In a two-part series examining his presentation and some takeaways from it, I’ll share some of the more insightful metrics and observations. If you haven’t seen Ben speak before, he brings a keen sense of procurement empathy and humor, and is equally at home trading up numbers and anecdotes – in other words, we highly recommend him. One of the first sets of metrics that Ben shared focused on overall measurement of procurement organizations. CEB suggests that the bottom [...]

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