In response to the current COVID-19 pandemic, Spend Matters technology analysts have developed a Coronavirus Response series to help our readers understand the array of ways that procurement practitioners are using tools and techniques to respond to the crisis in the short-to-medium term. This is a non-commercial effort to see where procurement organizations can help themselves, their supply chains and beyond.
As such, we'd love to learn from procurement pros and share what you're seeing in the trenches and how we can help. Please contact me personally at pierre@spendmatters.com, or email our team here.
For technology providers and consultants, we’d appreciate hearing back from you on a few questions we have.
Despite economic growth, recent headwinds have procurement and finance professionals considering how to deal with a possible recession in the next year or so, according to a survey by the data-aggregation firm Suplari, which published “Plans & Tactics to Recession-Proof the Enterprise in 2019 and Beyond.” The study notes that many recent surveys spotlight executives’ concerns that job markets, credit risks and tariff policies could push the economy to decelerate. The survey evaluates how to avoid disruptions of performance, growth and profitability, considering what strategies can be employed swiftly to identify cost-savings and risk-optimization.
Deloitte has opened up the 2019 version of its annual CPO survey for participants to share their insights. It’s important to participate because the survey’s depth, rigor and relevance produce influential findings that have set the gold standard for procurement studies.
And this year’s edition is very exciting, especially for me. I’ve been doing procurement research and benchmarking for 20 years, and I was thrilled to not only be given a sneak peek into this year’s study design but to be made me an honorary member of Deloitte’s extended research team to provide input. So, my challenge became how to make a great product even better.
But you can participate too. CPOs and their direct reports are needed — and participants will get an intelligence briefing about the study’s results. At the end of this article, I’ll get more specific about the ROI of participating in this year’s study.
In our last brief, we introduced you to Supply Hive, a provider based out of Chicago that is deploying a new platform for supplier performance management (SPM), specifically around simplifying the process of gathering and analyzing supplier performance reviews. Combining savvy UX/UI design and an apt use of natural language processing (NLP), SupplyHive has built a supplier performance review solution that addresses an acute set of pain points quickly, easily and relatively cheaply.
In effect, it has created what may be termed a “stupid simple” app for supplier management in a market where few vendors effectively address this requirement. Yet the biggest challenges that Supply Hive could face may have more to do with the highly varying levels of maturity that procurement organization demonstrate in support of supplier relationship management (SRM) than in the adoption of the technology itself.
The first part of this brief provided an overview of Supply Hive’s offering and a short selection requirements checklist that outlined the typical company for which Supply Hive might be a good fit. In this part, we provide a breakdown of what is comparatively good (and not so good) about the solution, and some final conclusions and takeaways.
The market for supplier relationship management and risk solutions is broad and fragmented. Procurement organizations have their choice of point solutions for single areas of the supplier management lifecycle, broader suites that provide SRM capability as one module among many, and consulting firms and service providers that offer technology as an add-on to engagements, to name a few options. As a rule, however, there is no single firm that provides a comprehensive solution to all components of supplier management. Instead, they tend to focus either on several related components (e.g., supplier information management, on-boarding and master data management) or specialize in a specific area, positioning their technology as a tailormade solution to a subset of SRM pain points faced by procurement organizations.
The latter strategy is how SupplyHive, a one-year-old vendor out of Chicago and San Francisco, has approached designing and marketing its software for supplier performance reviews. Aware that procurement organizations have handled this essential step in the supplier management process either through minimally supportive survey functionality in P2P and S2P suites or, more commonly, through enormous spreadsheets, SupplyHive set out to create a tool for evaluating employee satisfaction with indirect suppliers that could gather and analyze needed data about supplier performance while offering a streamlined, B2C-like consumer experience.
To oversimplify, it’s Yelp for suppliers.
But even with that seemingly simple concept, SupplyHive has managed, through savvy UX/UI design and an apt use of natural language processing (NLP), to build a supplier performance review solution that addresses an acute set of pain points quickly, easily and relatively cheaply — with clients such as Abbott and Sprint signing on as early adopters.
This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Introduction offers a candid take on SupplyHive and its capabilities. The brief includes an overview of SupplyHive’s offering, a breakdown of what is comparatively good (and not so good) about the solution, a SWOT analysis and a selection requirements checklist for companies that might consider the provider.
In a look at the contingent workforce, MBO Partners' “Client of Choice Report 2019” explores the changing needs and expectations of the independent professionals and what corporations are doing to attract and retain the best talent in this emerging labor market.
Consumers are hungry for more information of all kinds when it comes to corporate social responsibility practices, and many are willing to pay more to companies that can provide it, according to a report in the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Journal. The study, "Supply Chain Visibility and Social Responsibility: Investigating Consumers’ Behaviors and Motives," identified a strong preference among at least 70% of consumers for advertisements with more precise information about corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities compared to ones with vague information if the price did not change.
As B2B e-commerce platforms try to match the level of maturity found in B2C systems, a recent report takes a snapshot of how CEOs, chief digital officers and innovation executives are investing in technology, which innovation they’re pursuing and how they’re making those decisions.
In addition to that benchmarking aspect, a trend emerges in how B2B customers want their online shopping experience to be — and they want many of the same bells and whistles that consumers get when using B2C marketplaces online.
The survey found that technology that can seem cold or off-putting — like artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) — is actually playing a role in connecting people and the products or brands they want.
The category management experts at Future Purchasing have a request and an offer as they prepare their global 2018 benchmarking survey. People in procurement can give feedback to help take the pulse of the industry, and they’ll get a copy of the survey and benchmarking feedback for their company. The survey drills deep into current category management usage and patterns, and it gives CPOs and category managers concrete evidence of what works — and what doesn’t. Now, there are just four weeks left before access to the survey closes, and 10 minutes of your time is needed to give your input.
An October 2018 study released by a watchdog group that focuses on Africa has highlighted concerns that gold mined from conflict areas in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is making its way into international markets and becoming integrated in the supply chains of major U.S. companies. Documents reviewed and interviews carried out by The Sentry, a team of policy experts and financial auditors co-founded by George Clooney, raise concerns that the corporate network controlled by Belgian tycoon Alain Goetz, director at the Belgian gold refinery Tony Goetz N.V., has refined illegally smuggled conflict gold from eastern DRC at the African Gold Refinery (AGR) in Uganda and subsequently exported it through a series of companies to the U.S. and Europe. The study lists companies like Amazon, General Electric and Sony as possibly being ones that conflict gold may have been sold to.
A couple of years ago, organizations raced to catch up and understand cloud computing and formulate strategies for adopting cloud services. Now, according to a new report, the problem isn’t so much cloud adoption, it’s managing the cloud. Organizations that made the switch are finding new problems they didn’t foresee, leading to cost overruns and exposing disconnects between levels of management. According to “The State of Cloud Readiness 2018,” a new report put out by managed services provider Softchoice, while cloud adoption has risen since 2016, organizations aren’t seeing the results they’d envisioned.
With disruption upending every segment of business over the past decade, it may not be surprising that new research ties technological innovation to high supply chain performance. A 2018 web survey by Adelante SCM and BluJay Solutions found that over 80% of companies that identified as “innovators” or “early adopters” of new technologies also ranked their organization’s performance as slightly or significantly above average.
