Blockchain Content

Yesterday at Zycus Horizon, I gave a talk to a small breakout group titled “Cooking in a New Source-To-Pay Kitchen.” The topic gave me carte blanche to essentially bring up trends and ideas shaping the future of procurement and combine these with some bad references from my favorite Seinfeld episodes (for example, imagine the equivalent of procurement saying “no soup for you” to stakeholders that it would rather avoid engaging). Here are the five core cooking ingredients for new procurement dishes, according to yours truly.

As I hinted at yesterday, the notion of a truly open supplier network doesn’t exist today. My first contribution – and request of you – has to deal with the best ways of overcoming the notion of closed supplier search, ratings, rankings and connectivity. Instead of pointing fingers at the effect of closed systems (e.g., supplier network fees for transactions, business credit rating agencies “double-dipping” on fees, etc.), let’s together come up with solutions. Together. This is the first installment of a crowdsourcing series where Spend Matters analysts will offer up an “open call” to the market for a B2B problem that exists in the value chain. It’s easy to complain generically about broad problems, but we thought we’d provide a more granular specification for a crowdsourced solution that we feel is needed in the market. There’s no cash prizes here other than bragging rights…and world domination (maybe).

Imagine a new world, where the concept of a ‘supplier network’ becomes a set of discoverable and available web services and associated data that has persisted in trusted/distributed registries that buyers can access directly or through authorized channel providers. The data is written once by the supplier and accessed flexibly by the buyers and other value chain participants as needed. Let me say I’m certain Ariba, Basware and D&B will continue to provide value to customers. The ROI of e-procurement and P2P is undeniable. They won’t die — but Blockchain does have the potential to be a revolutionary disruptor in supplier networks, procurement technology, and supply risk ratings.