Tag Archives: L1
Hackett’s P2P Performance Study: The Best Freemium P2P Benchmark in the World
My alma mater, The Hackett Group, has launched their bi-annual Purchase-to-Pay benchmark study. Unlike other free “benchmark studies” in the market which are 20-30 minute survey polls with sketchy data quality, the Hackett P2P benchmark study is in fact a “freemium” version of its full P2P process benchmark that uses the same general methodology as the flagship Hackett procurement functional benchmark that generates the venerable Hackett “world class” benchmarks, except that in this case it’s a “top performer” peer group that is essentially world class for just P2P performance. What this means is that you get: A true apples-to-apples comparison [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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SAP Sapphire: Moving to Frictionless AND Sticky Commerce
This year’s Sapphire conference has been extremely interesting, not to mention big, with 80,000 users attending on-premise or virtually! It’s been a while since I was at Sapphire, and this year, they co-located the ASUG (user group organization) conference. This is good news for practitioners, and personally, I feel that last week’s Ariba LIVE should be similarly co-located next year (i.e., a ‘conference within a conference’ type thing) both to preserve its value and to be kind to the limited travel time and budget of procurement practitioners. If there was one theme to the event, it’s “all about the network.” [...]
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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): [...]
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New Webinar! Will Supplier Networks Thrive, Implode, or Evolve?
Supplier networks are a topic of hot debate these days. If you’re an AP, treasury, procurement or supply chain manager, you should be thinking about the future of eProcurement, e-invoicing and business connectivity. So join Spend Matters and Tradeshift on Tuesday, May 21 from 9 to 10 AM CDT for a free webinar featuring a live panel discussion that, as always, will incorporate audience questions and commentary in real time. What we’re doing a bit differently this time is that there will be four industry experts sharing their individual views on the future of supplier enablement & connectivity. Four perspectives, [...]
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When Will Banks & Financial Institutions Get P2P Right? Has Ariba Discover[ed] the Trick?
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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CEB Procurement Transformation Leadership Metrics (Part 2)
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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CEB Procurement Transformation Leadership Metrics (Part 1)
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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Google Glass: What it Means for Our Brains and for Procurement
Spend Matters welcomes another guest post from Alex Burns. In 2011, an interesting study found that our brains have been very specifically altered by the Internet. In this day and age, we readily have access to the Internet via smartphones, tablets, laptops and free Wi-Fi in coffee shops, and thus we have access to the vast database of information stored there. Even when we’re visiting suppliers or talking to our colleagues about supply chain activity, we can pull up information over a network on one of many electronic screens in a manner that makes information access a standard course of [...]
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Conflict Minerals EDGE Live!
Spend Matters and MetalMiner are hosting our first event of 2013 today in downtown Chicago: Conflict Minerals EDGE. In considering the conference production textbook, we did pretty much everything wrong: We decided to hold Conflict Minerals EDGE because we were intellectually interested in the topic and saw a pragmatic business need to cover the subject matter live (not because of a pro-forma P&L that showed we’d make a few bucks on this) We came up with the idea less than three months before the event We announced it and went about getting speakers, sponsors and attendees (not necessarily in that [...]
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ISM: Righting the Ship (and the Upcoming Membership Organization Tidal Wave)
Thomas Kase, Pierre Mitchell and I collectively descended on Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM) annual event this week, formally known as the 98th Annual International Supply Management Conference & Educational Exhibit. In evolving its platform and mission under the new leadership of Tom Derry, ISM feels like it’s making early progress based on Pierre’s observations. The opportunity that Tom Derry faces in evolving the vision and services for ISM may seem common to any national mission-driven organization. It goes without saying that an organization like ISM must strive to not only set educational, learning and credentialing standards for an industry, [...]
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Procurement Inertia: When Did You Last Run Through the Seven Steps?
Don’t wait for the consultants to come in and kick you past your inertia. If you stay vigilant by revisiting your spend on a regular basis and looking at what you can source more competitively, you might even be able to find line items you no longer need. No point in buying spare parts for a production line that is being phased out, right? You also need to understand the revenue model and customer base of your key suppliers. Looking forward is a challenge in all organizations, and it is tempting to come up with ways to address challenges from [...]
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Commodity Price Management at BorgWarner Part 1: The Tip of the Iceberg in Supply Analytics
BorgWarner gave a terrific presentation at this year’s ISM annual conference regarding Commodity Price Risk Management that I thought I’d share. Borg Warner is a global Tier 1 automotive firm (60 locations in 19 countries) that buys 80,000 metric tons of commodities globally, including Steel, Copper, Resin, Aluminum, Powdered Metals, etc. The presentation could have just as easily been called “profit risk mitigation”. The homegrown system (called ‘commodity engine’) they developed out of their Morse TEC division allowed them to help mitigate commodity price risk by linking commodity purchase price forecasts and resultant contracts to the final assemblies sold to [...]
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Modern English – A Regression of Evolution?
Today we welcome a guest post authored by Alex Burns. It is a clever diversion from our usual content, but we’ll tie it back to procurement in a postscript at the end. Human language has evolved over many thousands of years. The evidence lies in the pidgin languages of Hawaii, neurological data on speech impediments following cerebral injury and the written evidence on cave walls around the world. It is a marvel that we communicate so freely with a set of behavioural rules that make us uniquely human. While language is a ubiquitous human trait, the particular form of the [...]
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- Supercharging Procurement’s Buying Leverage : Navdeep Sidhu said: Silos will be the death of us all! One hand has to know what the other is doing, especiall... more
- 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
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
