Category Archives: Procurement Research

Is Indirect Category Sourcing Savings Fact or Fiction?

Sydney Lazarus - May 15, 2013 6:02 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

Last week we told you about a new research paper authored by Spend Matters UK/Europe’s Peter Smith, titled Indirect Category Sourcing Savings : Fact or Fiction? Delivering Credible Benefits from Sourcing and Category Management Programmes. You can download it for free by clicking the link above. Getting down to the question of fact or fiction, Peter says: “The final section of the Paper looks at how Xchanging themselves are addressing the issue of benefits tracking and measurement. Of course, this is particularly important for them as an outsourced service provider, as their success – and in some cases, their direct income – depends [...]

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Improving Program and Delivery Management

Sydney Lazarus - May 13, 2013 10:07 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

Last week we told you about a new research paper from Spend Matters UK/Europe’s Peter Smith: Indirect Category Sourcing Savings : Fact or Fiction? Delivering Credible Benefits from Sourcing and Category Management Programmes. You can download it for free by clicking the link above. The paper analyzes how procurement and sourcing programs benefit from focusing on program and delivery management, which itself has several key components. On the issue of improving program and delivery management, Peter divides the topic into three main areas: Program Management— “To deliver effective sourcing and category management, what we might term the ‘basics’ of project and program management [...]

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Indirect Category Sourcing Savings?

Sheena Moore - May 8, 2013 9:53 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

Today we’d like to feature a new research paper authored by Spend Matters UK/Europe’s Peter Smith: Indirect Category Sourcing Savings : Fact or Fiction? Delivering Credible Benefits from Sourcing and Category Management Programmes. You can download it for free by clicking the link above. Peter says: “I’ve co-authored it with Ed Cross, (pictured here),  Executive Director of Xchanging Procurement Services, also a serious triathlete and heavy metal music fan. (I’d love to say we developed the material during our regular 20-mile training runs… but I’d be lying). We start by looking at what makes sourcing and category management programmes successful. As well as [...]

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Getting More from P2P with Better Analytics and KPIs (Part 2)

Jason Busch - May 2, 2013 6:02 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

In the first installment of this series, based on the Spend Matters research paper Avoiding “Dumb Ways to Die”: eProcurement and P2P Style Adoption Scenarios to Breathe Life into Implementations, we began to explore the limitations of analytics and insight often found in today’s P2P implementations. When thinking about the type of insight that’s essential for building through better dashboards, reporting and analytics, we must consider a number of areas. This visibility could include the ability to drill down on vendor information, such as spend with specific suppliers on a PO, non-PO and invoice basis linked back to historic baselines [...]

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Compliance Elements and Supplier Management

Jason Busch - May 1, 2013 10:05 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

When Spend Matters surveyed 36 companies during Q4 2011 on their interest in substance and materials centric compliance as part of supplier management and supply chain risk programs, a number of compliance elements emerged that were of keen interest to corporate procurement and supply chain leaders. Materials conformance was noted by nearly 70% of survey respondents as being a compliance element “when selecting and managing vendors and materials.” Somewhat similarly, the importance of adherence to a proprietary set of internal or adherence to a set of industry criteria was noted by 62% and 56%, respectively. Interest in environmental health and [...]

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Getting More from P2P with Better Analytics and KPIs (Part 1)

Jason Busch - May 1, 2013 8:07 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

Historically, man reaped what he sowed. Without sunlight, however, nothing grows. One of the many challenges lurking in the shadows of eProcurement and e-invoicing implementations is that processes and systems must trudge ahead without sunlight. Reporting is periodic, insight is low, and the effort is too much. What’s needed is a new class of analytics. They shouldn’t be layered on top of the process but be built instead into the processes themselves. This can drive dramatically better end-to-end performance for existing implementations while helping new ones get started. In the case of P2P, including external content and intelligence to provide [...]

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eProcurement Troubles: “Globalizing” P2P (Part 2)

Jason Busch - April 29, 2013 10:08 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

In the first installment of this series, based on the Spend Matters research paper Avoiding “Dumb Ways to Die”: eProcurement and P2P Style Adoption Scenarios to Breathe Life into Implementations, we began to explore the challenges that come with global P2P implementations. There are many, and it’s critical not to underestimate them! Some global and regional-specific P2P tailoring can be accomplished through better use of pre-existing capabilities, including rules-based workflow in various fields including monetary amounts, supplier type, spend category, region, etc. In most organizations, unfortunately, such efforts tend to be very crude and follow a one-size-fits-all model. Companies thinking [...]

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Upstream Risk Mitigation and Logistics/Transit Routes

Jason Busch - April 29, 2013 8:01 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

The following post is based on material contained in the MetalMiner report (available for free download): Conflict Minerals: Building Responsible Manufacturing Supply Chains. Join MetalMiner and Spend Matters for the Conflict Minerals Edge event taking place on May 6th in Chicago. Upstream Risk Mitigation Following the clarification on information needs from upstream actors, OECD also acknowledged “that upstream suppliers are those who can most effectively and most directly mitigate the risks of adverse impacts. Downstream companies are not expected to directly mitigate risks upstream in the supply chain” and that “industry initiatives provide one-way information on upstream activities and add [...]

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eProcurement Troubles: “Globalizing” P2P (Part 1)

Jason Busch - April 25, 2013 8:03 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

This post is based on content contained in the Spend Matters Compass series paper: Avoiding “Dumb Ways to Die”: eProcurement and P2P Style Adoption Scenarios to Breathe Life into Implementations. The paper, authored by Spend Matters Chief Research Officer Pierre Mitchell and Jason Busch, is available for free download in our Spend Matters research library. For some economic and policy wonks (and New York Times columnists), the world seems to be flat. But for most procurement organizations, the notion of “think globally, but act locally” is a challenging proposition and far from reality. We still must find ways of delivering a personalized [...]

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Enabling Suppliers Without Massive Cost or Effort

Jason Busch - April 24, 2013 10:02 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

What organization does not have thousands of suppliers that ideally they would onboard into a closed-loop, visible procurement environment? Just about every middle market and larger entity wants this level of supplier enablement. Yet one size never fits all when it comes to onboarding and enablement for a given supply base, which is why the great majority of vendors are not linked into a closed-loop system. For supplier enablement, companies must make trade-offs when it comes to how quick and cheap they want a process to be. Furthermore, they must consider what level of automation touch points they require: self-service [...]

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Conflict Minerals: Flexibility in Supplier/Upstream Engagement

Jason Busch - April 17, 2013 7:54 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

The following post is based on material contained in the MetalMiner report (available for free download): Conflict Minerals: Building Responsible Manufacturing Supply Chains. Join MetalMiner and Spend Matters for the Conflict Minerals EDGE event taking place on May 6th in Chicago. A key concern that downstream participants expressed in the OECD Cycle 3 Final Report was interpreting the level of information the Guidance required from them “about upstream and smelter due diligence and the level of information downstream companies should review under Step 2” (Page 14). Throughout the document, OECD made great efforts to clarify that flexibility in the design [...]

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Conflict Minerals: Supplier Prioritization and Data Validation

Jason Busch - April 11, 2013 10:01 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

The following post is based on material contained in the MetalMiner report (available for free download): Conflict Minerals: Building Responsible Manufacturing Supply Chains. Join MetalMiner and Spend Matters for the Conflict Minerals EDGE event taking place on May 6th in Chicago.   Supplier Prioritization The OECD Cycle 3 Final Report states that “the majority of companies developed supplier priority levels based on 3T content in products… communicating with a sub-set of Tier 1 suppliers that provide parts with highest content of 3TG in the first phase of due diligence. Many of these companies plan to reach all suppliers of 3TG materials [...]

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eProcurement Troubles: Finding Approved Suppliers That Don’t Seem to Exist (Part 3)

Jason Busch - April 10, 2013 8:06 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

This post is based on content contained in the Spend Matters Compass series paper: The Definitive Guide to Conflict Minerals Compliance for Manufacturers: An A–Z Guide to Conflict Minerals and Semi-Finished Metals. The paper, authored by Spend Matters Chief Research Officer Pierre Mitchell and Jason Busch, is available for free download in our Spend Matters research library. There are many ways to go about overcoming the vanishing supplier problem in P2P systems for either core or non-core spending areas, though of course it would great if there were a “quick source” marketplace. In certain cases, there is. “Tail-spend” provider Fedbid [...]

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Beyond Procurement Outsourcing: Supply Chain and Direct Materials BPO (Part 2)

Jason Busch - April 4, 2013 8:01 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

The total number of FTEs dedicated to supply chain BPO relative to procurement BPO in the providers surveyed by Everest Group might surprise readers (hint: it’s lower for the former than for the latter, but not by much). As Everest Group gets into the relative scale of SCM BPO segments, the largest area of FTE focus is order management and fulfillment, followed by logistics and inventory management. Returns, MDM and RAC (reporting, supply chain analytics, and compliance support) have fewer FTEs dedicated to them in the provider community. One area of procurement BPO that overlaps with direct materials procurement is [...]

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Conflict Minerals Compliance: Bill of Material (BOM) Approaches

Jason Busch - March 19, 2013 10:29 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

This post is based on excerpts from the MetalMiner (part of the Spend Matters Network) paper: The Definitive Guide to Conflict Minerals Compliance for Manufacturers: An A–Z Guide to Conflict Minerals and Semi-Finished Metals. Spend Matters PRO Subscribers can also click to read two more detailed technology analyses on conflict minerals compliance strategy here and here. If one could leverage opportunities to use the International Material Data System database for 3T’s/G purposes in an industry like automotive, or if a company builds their own approach tied to a BOM, PLM or similar resource– at some point it makes sense to [...]

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eProcurement Troubles: Finding Approved Suppliers That Don’t Seem to Exist (Part 2)

Jason Busch - March 13, 2013 10:12 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

In the first installment of this series, based on the Spend Matters research paper Avoiding “Dumb Ways to Die”: eProcurement and P2P Style Adoption Scenarios to Breathe Life into Implementations, we began to explore the Twilight Zone buying scenario of frontline users who can’t seem to find approved suppliers. In other words, on-boarded vendors vanishing into thin P2P air. To overcome this challenge, many leading organizations are starting to use supplier information management (SIM) tools in order to find potential suppliers from a smaller universe of registered/approved suppliers rather than from an über-marketplace or world-at-large. The linkages with eProcurement can [...]

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