The motion stands thus: This house believes that robots will run (and rule) procurement by 2020.” I believe that the general direction of this argument is not in and of itself wrong. But there are a number of flaws in the nuance of how the motion has been proposed. And we are, after all, asking you to judge the merits of the proposal on its own, as it stands. Let me present you with three arguments against it.
Let’s face it. No child ever says, "I want to be a purchasing manager when I grow up.” Honestly, the term procurement itself draws blank stares from kids — and even adults. The best I can do is tell people that I try to help companies “buy better.” They usually nod politely, and even murmur an “uh-huh” if I give some B2C consumer analogies of how people try to shop online for supplies, home services, mortgages, travel and so on. So, perhaps the solution isn’t to try to sell kids vocationally on procurement at all but rather introduce the area of the broader supply chain.
Working at the nexus of enterprise technology and procurement strategy, we see the words “disruption” and “innovation” a lot here at Spend Matters. So often, in fact, that every time I come across either of these words, whether in a press release or marketing copy, the letters begin to blur together and a strange ringing noise fills my ears. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. But I do know that the increased appearance of disruption and innovation in my daily reading has caused me to question whether some writers pick those words for their specific definitions or just to liven up a sentence with an adjective that surely means only good things.
There’s been an awful lot of debate among both liberals and conservatives on what type of president Donald Trump would be. But I think there’s an even more fun question to ask: If Donald Trump were a chief procurement officer (CPO), what would he be like? I actually think we can begin to arrive at the answer from looking closely at his views on policy — and candidly, it looks like he’d actually be a somewhat effective, if unloved, CPO. Here are some reasons why.
Contrary to popular belief – just ask Ikea what they spend on their catalog – print spending is not dead. Granted, while digital has completely upended the market, print and its intersections with broader marketing and agency spend refuses to be completely recycled into something else. If anyone enjoys telling the history of it, I do. Print buying once comprised a very large chunk of spend across all sectors with most large non- and for-profit Purchasing departments, employing many dedicated buyers. And it has refused to die, despite all the prognostications that it might. Even back in 1980, when personal computing began to skyrocket, predictions that we would be a paperless society by the year 2000 abounded. It hasn’t exactly happened that way, even though we’ve become much more efficient at sourcing and managing the lifecycle of print procurement – and spend volumes have dropped. From a practitioner’s point of view, print buying today has become just one of many categories handled by a single buyer. In many cases, we’re still buying truckloads of paper. This shift fascinates me – and raises a lot of questions.
I’ve been working at Spend Matters for well over a year now, and I still don’t understand why this profession has such an identity crisis when it comes to deciding what to call itself. At Spend Matters we use “procurement” as our default; other sites in our space call themselves Procurement Leaders, The Strategic Sourceror and My Purchasing Center, to name just a few. How can all of these publications have so many terms for what seemingly should be the same functional area? Help me out, purchasing/procurement/supply management people. Let’s figure this out once and for all.
A couple of weeks back, I authored a post on Spend Matters, “Die Factoring, Die,” which was also picked up my colleague, David Gustin, on Trade Financing Matters. The essay attempted to address a serious topic in a humorous, somewhat satirical way, starting with a title that was intentionally overboard. In my attempt to have a bit of fun with the topic of factoring, I failed. I offended a number of people in the factoring community with my language and metaphors.
Full disclosure: I am a below-average consumer of beef. But the continuing increases in beef prices and the recent change in country of origin labeling — not to mention the confusion around grass fed, vegetarian feed only and organic labeling — have me miffed, have made me crazy. So, where to begin?
My view of offline factoring models is that they're the equivalent of burning coal with turn of the early 20th century technology for power or heat when we could be splitting atoms or using wind or solar power instead. Like using coal for energy, factoring is wasteful, inefficient and generates unintended side effects. But what’s the solution, you ask? Easy.
The application programming interface (API) has become an ubiquitous topic in the discussion of procurement and supply chain technology. But do we need something more? Something more powerful than a swaggering giant that lords over us, something with a punchout that will get us the control we really need? Finally, the answer has arrived: the Chuck Norris API.
This title is a line from the hit HBO show Silicon Valley, a parody of life in the bubble that stretches south from San Francisco to San Jose. But it’s not really a parody; it’s more of a reality show. I’ve lived here since 1987, but only on the inner and outer edges of the bubble. But if there is one thing that I absolutely abhor and resent about life around that bubble, it is the debasement and trivialization of “the platform.”
A recent purchase of Colman’s mustard via Amazon Business (using our corporate account) was a reminder that there are some unsavory merchant practices lurking in the shadows of the digital commerce world. And TA National Trading, the merchant in question in this case, either made a bad mistake or intentionally attempted an old trading company trick that is more common in the third world (unfortunately) than something we usually see in developed countries.