Kicking off this week with the first of a number of interviews we'll be doing over the next couple of months with contract management platforms. This is a rapidly expanding area and it's gone from simply being repositories and authorisation / signature software into becoming a very diverse ecosystem over the past few years.My guest today is Elena Mechik of Berlin-based startup Inhubber, which offers a blockchain-based solution for contract management and tracking.Blockchain and its use in Contract Management for Procurement and Supply ChainI have to admit that I was very ignorant about blockchain and its multitude of potential different uses and applications until I started digging into this topic. If you think "it's just something to do with Bitcoin", then think again!End-to-end encryption of contracts: Why is it important?Elena explains that the way you track and store contracts should be treated the same way as you store money. With increasing risk of phishing and cyberattacks, it's important you understand, track and trace your contract management activities.Contracts are encrypted from user-to-user with Inhubber, whereas most other platforms tend to encrypt just on the cloud or on the server. There is no need to send documents via email or any other less secure method of communication.What is blockchain and how is it relevant to contract management?Blockchain technology can be used in various industries and use cases.It works by saving certain information on various "nodes" (or "chains"). You don't save this information on your personal laptop, rather it's saved hundreds or thousands of times on a network of other, independent nodes. This gives the document (or information) immutability: the elimination of somebody being able to fraudulently change or doctor a document.In simple terms, it eliminates fraud and tracks and records any changes or amendments for posterity. There is no need with blockchain to save different versions of contracts in MS Word with the latest version filename as a differentiator.There is a complete audit trail stored in cyberspace. Nobody can falsify or overwrite changes to a document without it being flagged.Which sectors are keenest to adopt this technology?Elena answers that typically, companies that have experience of being hacked are usually keenest to bring this on board. Historically this was only very large companies, but this is now starting to change.As cybersecurity becomes more and more central to companies' risk management strategies, the size of the companies responding favourably to investing in blockchain technology are becoming smaller. It's no longer an issue that only big organisations need to worry about.From real estate, through to construction and most recently banks are all showing an interest in adopting this type of technology.It's not just contracts which can be stored using blockchainWhile they may be the most obvious example, contracts are just one type of document which can benefit from blockchain.Purchase orders and receipts for example can also be stored in Inhubber, and access control to different documents within an organisation or within a network of core suppliers can also be regulated through the platform.By taking advantage of encryption technology, confidential documents can also be transferred for example from a buyer to a supplier when collaborating on joint innovation projects.Leveraging AI to extract key contract dataAs with many competitor CLM solutions, Inhubber also has an intelligent contract monitoring function which can track some standard metrics such as:When is a contract due for renewal?Who are the contract partners?Which conditions have been negotiated?This can also be programmed according to individual requirements of...

On this week's show we're digging into the world of direct materials sourcing. It's a part of the digital procurement landscape that's been a bit neglected, except for e-sourcing tools, and my guest this week decided to do something about this.Anne-Sophie Le Bloas, Founder and CEO of Ravacan, experienced in both her native Europe and also in the US, that there wasn't much innovation out there when it came to leveraging digital tools to manage direct materials spend, and set out to remedy this.Creating visibility, analytics and clarity in the direct materials spacePart of a rare breed, Anne-Sophie is a fellow ex-Procurement Category Manager turned startup founder. She studied Procurement and Supply Chain in Bordeaux and then moved into the corporate world, starting out in the FMCG industry, moving then into aeronautics and then finally the automotive industry.Against this backdrop, there is a lot of focus around specification and quality, while at the same time ensuring cost reduction. Engineering and technical decisions are key, but at the same time there is a lot of pressure on cost, especially in lower margin industries such as automotive.Is it hard to get conversations with innovators and change agents?Traditional manufacturing is an industry where change often happens very slowly and is difficult to drive innovation and different ways of doing things. I was therefore curious to understand whether Anne-Sophie had experienced challenges getting traction if she is selling software into these types of businesses.She admits that there have been challenges, but also says that she tried to target the innovators and change agents within these businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic has definitely helped to accelerate the appetite for change and embracing potential new ideas, partly as a result of supply chain shortages, inflationary pressures and longer lead times.The ability to be able to make decisions faster and to have the bigger picture at your fingertips has been a key factor in driving acceptance of using software. Moving to a remote working environment during COVID meant that previous interactions that would take place within a production plant no longer could, if white collar functions such as Procurement and R&D were working from home.What's wrong with managing directs within an ERP?Understanding knock-on effects and having predictive models to be able to evaluate this impact on the overall supply chain is key. This is something that's very hard to do from within an ERP system.For example if a COVID lockdown closes down a factory in a certain part of the world, how can you model this from within your ERP or using a spreadsheet? Asynchronous ways of working are too slow. Data may have changed by the time you have tried to update and work collaboratively on an Excel and email-based project.Managing multiple tiers of supply and directed buysDirect material supply chains often have added layers of complexity, where you need to understand relationships beyond your 1st tier suppliers. Anne-Sophie cites the example of the consumer electronics industry where contract manufacturing is normal and the Tier 1 supplier is really just a gatekeeper to a number of external manufacturers.It's also quite common in some industries to have "directed buys", where the end customer dictates to a Tier 1 supplier where to buy certain components to buy from further down the supply chain.Having the ability to track your BOM electronically, through one platform, gives a whole new level of transparency and visibility.Leveraging AI to capitalise on savings and limit price impactWith constant price fluctuations in direct materials, there is also an AI element built into the software which allows for intelligent switching of suppliers in the case where components are dual-sourced.Getting the...

Spend analytics is a pretty mature (and competitive) market. So, what does this hold for the future?No better person to ask than the former CEO of Spendency, Arvid Fredin. They were recently acquired by German source-to-pay technology company Onventis. Arvid stayed on post-acquisition and is now Managing Director of Onventis' operations for the UK and Nordic countries, and joins me on this week's episode.A recent acquisition, and how this may shape the future of spend analyticsA good place to start is actually to talk about the recent acquisition of Spendency. Is this part of a wider pattern that is emerging? Are we starting to see more consolidation in the market? And if so, why are we seeing it?Will there be more consolidation and what is driving this?Arvid suggests that the driver is often the desire to get more productivity from their sales force. Being best-of-breed and focusing on one specific solution often means that it's more difficult to get warm leads who are looking for exactly what you're offering.But is the growth coming from customers who are switching away from some of the legacy suites, or is there still enough business to go after from companies who are still at the beginning of their digital transformation journey?Greenfield customers are easier to win over because:No existing solution in place as a benchmark to compare againstNo switching costs to consider to phase out a legacy applicationAs soon as there are fewer opportunities out there in terms of greenfield customers, Arvid suspects there will be much more consolidation.The difference between natively coded tech vs. Power BI or TableauSpendency is actually natively coded, whereas many spend analytics solutions out there, as well as anything natively developed in-house by organisations themselves, usually relies on third party technology.The most common of these are Power BI and Tableau.From a price perspective, this gives Spendency an advantage because they're not paying third party licensing fees. But it also allows them to be able to run queries much faster and more efficiently because their technology is specifically designed for procurement spend analytics reporting. Whereas third party technology on the other hand is built having to be something that can offer all things to all people.This affects overall user experience as well as the cost of the solution.To AI or not to AI: How far can automation get you?Spendency currently doesn't utilise AI for their analytics solution, so the obvious question is do you actually need it?Arvid looks at two ways that AI can be built into spend analytics:For efficiency and to reduce manual, time consuming tasks to enable procurement teams to spend time on more value added activities. This is the type of AI that is typically being used these days in spend analytics softwareThe more exciting, sexy future where AI engine is able to pick up on smart signals and made recommendations.We're not there yet with #2, but this is where the exciting future could be.Using AI for categorisation of spend is definitely on their roadmap. But having AI working together with a Category Manager is likely to be the common model of deploying spend analytics solutions in the near future.Enabling Category Managers to see the categorisation rules is key to this, to remove the "black magic" from the process and ensure that the tool has credibility.Getting to 80-90% categorisation should be possible with technology, but getting to 100% is always going to be a challenge without any human interaction in the process.Is there a difference between what Consultants need vs. Category Managers?Arvid explains that Spendency evolved through Effso, a Swedish management consulting firm, and was eventually...

There are many great stories about how startups are created, but this one is particularly interesting. Take a procurement organisation that is often cited as best-in-class, and then challenge it with becoming even better.My guest on today's show, Michael Pleuger, is a former Senior Executive at Vodafone Procurement who had the mandate to do just that. The result became akirolabs, and the journey of how this happened is our discussion today.Making a Best-In-Class Procurement Team even Better: The story of akirolabs and the strive for excellenceMichael's journey with Vodafone started out with him being part of the team who designed and launched the Vodafone Procurement Company, headquarted in Luxembourg.akirolabs is the first AI-enabled collaboration platform for strategic procurement, and was borne out of him being challenged by Vodafone Procurement Company's Founder and CEO (now akirolabs Co-Founder) Detlef Schultz, to take their already mature procurement digitisation to the next level.Beyond category management: filling a white space in today's procurement technology landscapeTo set the scene, Vodafone already had industry-leading digitisation and was performing as one of the best-in-class organisations when it comes to three KPIs of measuring the effectiveness of procurement:Value contributionComplianceEfficiencyMichael couldn't see at first anything missing from the existing set-up. How do you take that and improve on it.All operational and tactical procurement was already digitised and automated to a high degree, so the question that Michael got to work on was: how can we make the more strategic side of procurement more digital?Thinking outside the box and looking at other industriesMichael's proposal was working around replacing experience with vision, leadership and collaboration.One of the first things the team did was to bring in McLaren Applied Technologies: the data and analytics spin-off of the McLaren F1 racing team. Just doing that in itself shows that bringing best practices from other industries or walks of life can have a huge impact. When you consider just how many data points a motor racing team has to measure to get one step ahead of their rivals, it's not surprising that the insights they could offer were hugely insightful.Classic thinking outside the box. Not "what is our competitor doing?"How did they arrive at Category Management as the focus area?Procurement is in a unique position as the node between the business and the supply chain. No other function in the business works with such a diverse range of stakeholders within the business and at the same time looks outwards with the relationships that we manage with external suppliers.So, what is needed to optimise and leverage this position?Connectivity: being the spider at the centre of the web has limited usefulness if the communication channels between all of the interconnected parties are not smooth and accessible to all.Prevent Silos and Fragmentation: the necessity to have some kind of "digital glue", as Michael describes it, to prevent this fragmentation between all of the different stakeholders we come into contact with, both internal and external.AI to leverage both the Demand and Supply factors: Procurement essentially works with internal business partners to understand the demands of the business, and then communicates this to external suppliers to understand and secure the supply-related aspects of the puzzle.With these three factors, the team then concluded that the Category Management process would be the best way to bring all of this together in some digital form.But does this translate to the average procurement team?It's one thing doing this for EUR 26 billion of spend in an extremely mature...

We look at something a little bit different on this week’s show and examine how one startup Founder decided to start his own community of procurement software startups to help to promote his own. To be able to learn from other procurement tech companies and jointly market each other’s solutions at the same time is a great, innovative way to increase attention to your own business. Andreas Zimmermann, CEO of MySupply and Supplytechs joins me to tell his story.How one Founder created a community of startups to grow his Procuretech companyAndreas began his career as a Consultant and this led him to start his entrepreneur’s journey, at the time also in the consulting space.MySupply evolved from this as he saw the need for an affordable e-Sourcing tool for non-enterprise businesses that can leverage AI to automate parts of the sourcing process, to point the buyer towards the right e-sourcing strategy for a specific project. Recognising the typical challenges that Startups haveSpeeding up the process from minimum viable product (MVP) to having a reliable stream of revenue is the biggest challenge for every startup. Usually in the early stage, a startup will not have a big marketing team or a huge budget to spend on ads. So, finding ways to organically (or relatively affordably) get attention onto the product is going to be key. Even more so if a startup in the early stages is self-funded and not backed by VC money.Enter Supplytechs as a potential solutionSo, without a huge Sales & Marketing team or budget, being able to effectively and affordably start to bring in revenue is key.Andreas explains how the usual route of doing a roadshow at conferences and at industry events was kind of dependent on the other parties being interested (and of course, it’s also not free). Meaning that ultimately, the ability to start generating sales was really outside of their control to a large extent.They noticed that other startups in the space may be targeting the same customers but are not necessarily in direct competition with MySupply, and so the seed was planted that there was perhaps a smarter way to combine resources and to help one another in some way.Why not just sponsor an event instead?Startups just don’t have the budget to compete with the bigger boys when it comes to event sponsorship. Attending events is fantastic from a marketing perspective but the costs to be a sponsor are just too prohibitively expensive. This is also reflected when you see the types of companies that sponsor these conferences and events. Even well funded, later stage startups are rarely seen in the list of sponsors.How to go about getting others on board with the idea?Andreas explained that he used COVID as a catalyst to get some buzz around the idea to do a digital event. With all events and conferences being cancelled, this gave him the impetus to reach out to other startups and potential speakers and there was a lot of interest, for obvious reasons.They recently in September

We're back with another Pub episode, where we dive a little bit deeper into a topic than we do in our normal podcasts and really break down a hot topic in a more informal chat format.My guest for this one is Prof. Dr. Florian Kleemann. He's a university professor, author of four German language procurement textbooks and also a former consultant. We dive into the topic of how people are a vital factor in change management. A digital transformation project, or orchestrating the changes to make a procurement team fit for the future, are both great examples in this regard.Getting Your People Strategy Right for Change Management, Digital Transformation and Orchestrating the Procurement Organisation of the FutureWe kick off the discussion by me asking Florian how he sees the skill set of procurement professionals evolving as we move forward.While on the one hand, Procurement will definitely become more robot-driven for some tasks, he sees the function becoming more of a jack-of-all-trades as we expand our remit into other areas and become more versatile as professionals. By this, he doesn't mean tactical and strategic procurement being mixed, rather the increasing professionalisation and specialisation of procurement as a profession will result in procurement professionals being involved in different areas of the business.Florian's 4 key areas for managing changeDigitalisationInnovationResilienceAgilityDigitalisation should not be seen as the future of procurement in itself: it's more the enabler to help free up procurement resources to concentrate on more strategic topics.When considering resilience, we also need to bring in the increasing importance of the sustainability discussion as part of this too.Touching also on soft skills - selling, influence, persuasion - the type of skills that are often more associated with Sales & Marketing teams, are becoming ever more important to procurement professionals too.Procurement, as Florian argues, should be seen as a service, but not as servants to our internal stakeholders.Taking your team on the change journey from process-driven or compliance-driven to a more agile, strategic function will require a change in the skill set but also a change in the mindset. If you're having to control and beat down your stakeholders to a large extent to keep them in check, then Florian argues that as a procurement team, you have failed to provide a viable strategy and with it, the means of easily and efficiently procuring goods and services.Start with the most eager or most engaged stakeholders to get some quick wins, and then move on from there.Can Greenfield Procurement organisations outperform Mature Procurement functions?I make the example of how many African countries have gone from having no functioning fixed line telecommunications network to jumping a technological generation and rapidly adopting mobile phones. Indeed in Kenya, for example, mobile payments technology is more advanced and more widely adopted than in most European countries.Could the same apply to Procurement in organisations who are starting a centrally managed procurement team from scratch?Florian does see some opportunity here, but also argues that if the pace of change is too quick, then it is usually not aligned to the overall corporate goals."Strategy following structure, or structure following strategy? In the end, culture eats it all for breakfast".What about soft skills and self awareness as part of formal Procurement training?Florian disappointingly shares that the major professional bodies are not really moving with the times yet and adopting these skills into their training syllabuses.He also shares the story of how he wrote an article in Germany's most well-known Procurement and Supply...

On this week’s episode I get to talk to a well-known industry expert and dive into a subject many of you may be confused and excited about in equal measure. Melissa Drew, Associate Partner at IBM is my guest to dive into the topic of use cases for AI in procurement applications. We tackle where we are, where we’re headed and what some of the opportunities and limitations could be for this technology in this space. Use cases, opportunities and limitations of AI in Procurement Melissa starts off by giving a quick whistle-stop tour of her career so far, which includes 27 years in the procurement space in one form or another. I then begin by asking the question of whether AI and robots are about to take over our lives. Are robots about to take over our jobs? Melissa gives a very important definition that AI and cognitive technologies are actually different things, and that what we commonly refer to as AI in digital procurement terms is in fact what she would define as cognitive technologies. The difference being, in the example she gives, that AI in driverless cars is constantly evolving and developing its behaviour as it learns from different scenarios that it is being exposed to. Whereas on the other hand, cognitive technology that’s often used in digital procurement technology is highly reliant on the human that is programming the algorithm telling the machine what it should actually do. AI is only as intelligent as the human programming it In order for outcomes to be representative, a human has to “teach” the models. Teaching the models can only be done by collecting data. But HOW we collect the data and from which sources obviously impacts the programming that is written around how the machine interprets this. Melissa gives the example of Amazon’s CV screening algorithm that was unknowingly biased towards male candidates because of the way that it had been programmed based on the data it had been fed. Inadvertently, it had been shown more male applicants during its programming and as such had developed a bias towards male candidates. What has contributed to improvements to AI over the past 20 years? AI was originally used to augment human behaviour; to take things that we tactically need to do repetitively as a process and just do them faster and more accurately. Synthesizing, cleaning and categorising complex procurement spend data used to take Melissa about 9 long weeks. Back in 2004, when she started applying AI to be leveraged for repetitive tasks in spend analysis and categorisation, it reduced this task from 9 weeks down to several hours. That’s the potential that AI has. As Melissa explains, what has changed over the past few years is the infrastructure that organisations have to house the data, as well as the improved ability to be able to collect and process it all. Why we still need humans to interpret and assess AI’s work How do we ensure that we are collecting all of the right data? Are we using the right breadth of data. Why is AI making the decision or recommendation? <span...

I’m joined today on the Procuretech Podcast by Sammeli Sammalkorpi, CEO of Sievo, one of the stalwarts of the spend analytics space. The well-known Finnish company were actually founded almost 19 years ago!  During this time, what started out as a simple spend analysis tool has grown to be a comprehensive best-of-breed solution for spend analytics. We discuss how this niche has matured over the years and what direction it’s headed in the future. Spend Analytics: Maintaining relevance and continuously improving in a crowded market Sammeli starts off by explaining how being from Lapland, his parents’ wish was always that he would become a reindeer farmer!  Instead, he landed into software development rather than staying in his hometown. This came about through starting out as a junior analyst in a procurement consulting firm and realising quickly that there weren’t any tools out there to efficiently analyse and report on what a client’s business is spending its money on. In a crowded marketplace, Sammeli puts Sievo’s success down to staying on top of the latest technological trends as well as listening to and striving to satisfy their global, enterprise level client base. Machine learning and AI is developing and evolving quickly. New technologies and more and more data is available. They have seen many well-funded competitors enter the market, and some of them fail. Even though Sievo have never received any VC money, they have gradually grown to 220 employees in their two bases in Helsinki and Chicago.  How has Sievo grown despite the onslaught of competitors? There are 3 factors Sammeli gives as the main drivers behind their continued success: Procurement leaders who change companies and then lobby to introduce Sievo’s software in their new company because they have seen the value first hand. The data they have been able to gather and, with their clients’ permission, use it to provide benefits and insights to their whole client base to improve analytics and predictive trends. Big data enables the classification process to be more efficient and accurate, due to the learnings and previous spend which has been analysed and classified through the system. The most obvious example of this is the ability to recognise duplicate vendors e.g. IBM, I.B.M. and International Business Machines as being the same organisation Scale: being able to invest more into software development and marketing &amp; sales as they have become a bigger company than most of their competitors. Leveraging their data assets to add to the CX Drilling down on this piece, Sammeli mentions three areas where they have been ableto improve customer experience through aggregating data: Incorporating client modification or customisation requests into the general product offering to bolster the capabilities of the tool. The aggregate intelligence gained from each spend classification / normalisation of supplier data to be able to have an ever-growing database of parent and child companies in the supply base. <span...

This week on the podcast I’m joined by two guests, because we’re actually going to be talking about a customer success story on the show. Børge Langedal, Co-Founder and CRO of Norwegian spend analytics, vendor and category management tool Ignite Procurement joins me together with Arndt Romer from their German customer SEG Automotive. We dive into how and why SEG Automotive chose Ignite as their digital solution and how they’ve seen benefits since its implementation. Building a digital strategy with the right partner after a divestiture SEG Automotive is best described as a large medium-sized business focusing predominantly on automotive products. With 7,000 employees across 14 locations and annual turnover of €1.5 billion (approx. $1.9 billion). Based in Stuttgart, Germany, they were spun off from Bosch in early 2018 and therefore had to develop their own in-house systems as part of the divestment. Ignite Procurement is based in Oslo, founded in 2016 by an ex-BCG team and has since grown to 50 employees. It’s a spend management solution to make strategic procurement easy, with data management and procurement analytics as the core offering. Bosch had a well developed system landscape which essentially SEG would no longer have had access to after the carve-out and them becoming an independent company. This led to the need to find and develop their own digital procurement and spend management strategy to enable them to have access to good, clean data without being dependent on an ERP system and Excel spreadsheets. Bosch had a central procurement team and a lot of the main team at Bosch remained there, which resulted in the need to hire and onboard a lot of new team members when SEG was carved out from Bosch. The transition from following the processes and internal controls of a global corporation to becoming a leaner and more agile mid-market business necessitated the need to improve their reporting and decision-making landscape. How did SEG arrive at the decision to select Ignite Procurement? Arndt mentions that it was a three-prong strategy. They were aware of some of the more well-known tools and approached them to understand what they could offer. They also considered out-of-the-box solutions such as Power BI, as well as exploring the possibility to develop some in-house solutions. On top of this, they had a digitalisation team internally who was out there going to different trade fairs, researching niche / best-of-breed solutions on the internet to discover tools that were not already known to the business. It was at one of these trade fairs shortly before COVID hit that they were introduced to Ignite. Bringing these three approached together required a scorecard to allow different stakeholders to evaluate the capabilities of each of the different solutions. This enabled them to move forward to pilot phase with shortlisted vendors, at which point, Arndt says it became obvious that Ignite was clearly the best solution for what they were looking for. How did Ignite Procurement go about assessing and evaluating SEG Automotive’s needs vs. their offering? First and foremost is understanding whether they can indeed solve their challenges and meet their requirements. Trying to be everything to everyone ultimately is a road to disaster! Ignite’s team quickly realised that making data more accessible was a key customer requirement and also a key feature of their software, and as such they determined that SEG would be a very good match in terms of system capabilities vs. what they saw as must-haves from a customer perspective. Børge also says that they were quickly impressed with the SEG Automotive procurement and digitalisation team’s rigorous structures and processes, which went alongside the desire to digitise and improve their operations. Why didn’t SEG Automotive choose to go with an established Suite? As a EUR 1.5 billion company, SEG would...

How big does a business need to be before they can afford procurement software? And how many features does the software need to have to still enable it to deliver value? My guest today is Adam Thomas from a small but growing startup oboloo. Based in London, the company is focused on delivering a practical source-to-contract software solution to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). Providing simple, affordable and easy-to-use procurement software to SMEs: Adam Thomas from oboloo The first question we tackle is what is their definition of an SME, because everyone defines the term somewhat differently. Oboloo sees their typical customer base as being companies with an annual turnover between £5 million and £100 million. They identified this space because typically none of the established procuretechs who do what oboloo does are very active in this segment of the market. The software itself is essentially a simple source-to-contract (S2C) platform and has 4 core modules: E-sourcing Contract Management Supplier Management Savings Reporting Adam explains that they are seeking to tackle the more strategic aspects of sourcing and procurement rather than the transactional P2P space. The value proposition being through time saved as a result of digitisation, as well as the value identified through the e-sourcing module and being able to store this data centrally for future reference. Leveraging the data - i.e. performing a spend analysis - from their P2P transactions (which could be integrated with oboloo) can then drive the initiatives that can be conducted through the oboloo platform. What about SMEs and startups without a dedicated procurement team? Adam explains the importance of consistency when managing external vendor spend, whether that is on spreadsheets or shared drives. As a company grows, these processes should grow with it. So, regardless of whether a company has a dedicated buyer, the procurement process itself requires a more robust solution to be able to store data in a single, easy-to-use repository. Sending out simple RFQs and uploading a contract into a database isn’t rocket science at the end of the day, and employees can still use the system even if they’re not procurement professionals. Where is oboloo seeing the most interest in the market? It tends to be less about traditional, established SMEs vs. growing startups and more about the modules themselves. Adam mentions that there is a lot of demand and interest for their contract management module right now, whereas the e-sourcing and supplier management functions are not as sought after. If they just want contract management, why not buy a specialist tool? Simplicity is the easy answer. A lot of businesses at their core just want to have a simple database. While oboloo does have additional functionality, the objective is to ensure that the customer can upload a contract into their system with the least amount of hassle. This increases adoption and reduces the “desk drawer” problem in many organisations, where contracts actually registered in the database are just the tip of the iceberg. How did they find the sweet spot between price and features? Having all of the core functions and features that an SME requires to run their business was the goal. Does it have auction functionality, for example? No, but then practically speaking, an SME customer can go out and find a separate solution for this. The likelihood is that this would be a very infrequent requirement. Ultimately, going back to basics, the objectives Adam states are: Process &amp; outcome Budget People If the employees don’t accept, adopt and use the software, then as an end goal of digitally transforming your business, you have failed to a large extent. It’s more difficult from a

Some of the irritations that procurement professionals face in their daily work are very easily avoidable. With a bit of thought and the right software platform, a lot of busywork and unnecessary admin can be eliminated or simplified. One such example is the vendor intake process. My guest this week is Nick Verkroost, COO of vendor onboarding and master data management solution OCG Software, about keeping things simple and the hidden value in robust vendor master data. Eliminating admin hassle and master data as the new gold: Nick Verkroost from OCG Software Nick explains that OCG was borne out of a previous business that routed office supplies to the lowest cost vendor. I walk through some of my personal frustrations from the corporate world of how inefficient the vendor onboarding process is, through a mix of poor communication, excessive compliance requirements, vendors not following the process right the way through to internal routing of approval workflows being broken. Onboarding a supplier should take a day. In reality, many corporate procurement teams tear their hair out with inefficient, Excel-based processes that take weeks to add new vendors into their system. So, how do we improve this? "Don't worry, we'll find a way around procurement". The age-old tale told by stakeholders to their suppliers because of the painful vendor addition process that takes far too long. Nick describes the desired end state as: "We need to create a mechanism by which you as a customer and me as a supplier can exchange master data in a very seamless and fluid manner; highly secure, fully auditable but also with a process which we've all understood fully aligns with how you want to onboard a supplier into your organisation". Each individual piece of tech has the requirement to onboard or input supplier data. Be it ERP systems, e-sourcing tools, P2P software or risk management solutions. None of them are harmonised. Each of them requires different attributes of vendor data to enable them to function. But none require a uniform, comprehensive set of criteria which fulfil an organisation's compliance and vendor due diligence checks, as well as the data required in order to pay invoices and transact with the supplier day-to-day. Does OCG target SMEs with no vendor management tools, or act as an aggregator enterprises with a complex tech stack? Nick explains that they started their journey as a partnership with two Fortune 500 companies who had big, digital procurement suites which weren't solving this issue effectively. However, where they've seen the most success in terms of evolving customer acquisition trends and where they're focusing most of their marketing efforts nowadays is with SMEs and the mid-market. This market segment generally is more dependent on Excel-based data and sees the bigger payback in relative terms. Being able to give these types of businesses the ability to see a more holistic view in one single source of truth when it comes to due diligence documents on risk and CSR, on top of just pricing and contractual terms, has a huge invisible value vs. this data being stuck in silos. What issues arise if vendor master data or onboarding due diligence is inaccurate or incomplete? Bad data can result in a lot of poor decisions or outcomes further downstream. The simple truth is that the quality of master data is terrible in most organisations. The pandemic, and the ensuing crisis management, laid bare the gaps that exist in a lot of vendor master data. Something as simple as missing email addresses and incorrect phone numbers meant that it was impossible to contact suppliers quickly and en masse to manage an emergency situation. Poor master data can also lead to: Inaccurate spend analysis due to duplicates Payment to the wrong bank account Risk of corporate scandals if the right due diligence

Enterprise suites vs. Best-of-Breed is a long-standing and hotly debated topic. This week's episode is an edit of a LinkedIn Live session that I did with Nico. If you'd like to see this on video, just head across to The Procuretech Podcast Page on LinkedIn and watch the complete live stream! The ongoing debate between Best-of-Breed vs. Enterprise Suites: Which solution is best? We start off with a brief introduction of who we are, and our background. Always good to know how we both got into this space! Then, we dive in to an overview of what, and who, the enterprise suites are. If anyone is listening to the show who isn't an expert in procurement technology, we break it down in easy-to-understand language. So, what DOES an "all-in-one" suite do, and encompass, and where do they typically fall short? And why are best-of-breed solutions such hot property right now, and where could they potentially pose problems due to the fragmentation of needing to make numerous solutions communicate with one another? Nico makes a good case for how a suite can make life easy by covering everything all in one platform. I counter this by arguing that while that may be true, the cost and the complex, tedious implementation requirements make these suites out-of-reach for non-enterprise companies. So, where are the limitations of suites, and what are the pitfalls of best-of-breed solutions? When does a suite make sense vs. when does best-of-breed have the upper hand? Like most complex questions, it kind of depends. Suites are not agile. They take time to plan, scope and implement. Whereas best-of-breed may have the upper hand in terms of flexibility and agility, on the flipside it requires integration between multiple solutions. This has been made simpler thanks to APIs and cloud-based infrastructure, but your IT department will need to be open-minded towards change. Suites tend to be more bulky. Risk of obsolescence by the time a suite is fully implemented and integrated is a real concern. While Nico oversaw the transformation at P&amp;G five years ago and was extremely happy with the result, the world has changed since then. Best-of-breed was a much smaller ecosystem back then than it is now, especially since the proliferation and growth of procuretech since the start of the pandemic. We finish off the live cast by looking at where this space is heading, and a lot of the future trends which may, or may not happen! It's always so much fun to speculate though! Specifically, we examine: Will there be a consolidation of the best-of-breed market, as companies who fail to deliver the expected growth don't make the grade for the next round of funding? Who will buy them up? The suites or other BoB providers? Or will other procurement software companies simply poach their best talent and / or purchase their IP? Realistically, the market probably isn't big enough for 5 suite providers. Will we see a consolidation among the suite providers, as both best-of-breed solutions and the market leading suites both attack the less dominant suites and eat into their market share? Stay in touch! Connect with Nico on LinkedIn Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder...

Our final episode in our mini-series of e-Sourcing platforms brings us to a well-estalished provider who has been in the space for over 20 years. So, during the interview with Henrik Balslev, CCO of Danish Source-to-Contract (S2C) software Scanmarket, the most obvious thing to talk about was all of the data they've collected since they've been offering e-auctions and RFx solutions to their customers. Using 20 Years of E-Auction Data to Help Customers Gain Competitive Advantage - Henrik Balslev from Scanmarket Scanmarket have been around a long time and are one of the early e-sourcing providers. They recently acquired Swiss-based contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform Symfact to complement their offerings in the S2C space, and can count customers in 86 different countries who use their software. Their typical client is pretty industry agnostic and somewhere from €1 billion to €20 billion annual turnover, so large enterprises but certainly not Fortune 500 territory. How have e-auctions evolved? Henrik has been involved in e-auction statistics since 2006. E-auctions are now being used as a more everyday tool and The evolution has been predominantly in these areas: Less focus purely on price More thought around which commodities or categories to tender in an auctions More thought and strategy regarding which type of auction or e-sourcing event to utilise When in the process to take the negotiation process offline and move to in person discussions The move towards a total cost of ownership (TCO) strategy in many organisations has been the bedrock behind these seismic shifts. What about using auctions for services? Henrik surprisingly confirms that services have always been in the top 10 of most auctioned areas of spend within Scanmarket's platform, but they have seen a significant uptick since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. What sets services apart is that it is often more tricky to get stakeholders on board for tendering using an e-auction, and that it's also more difficult to measure some of the nuances in proposals for services. "Use the tool when and where it makes sense" is a very good time from Henrik to make sure that it aids and abets the user, rather than hindering the process through having a policy that forces category managers to use a software that isn't suitable for the tender or RFP in mind. Running the auction for certain elements within a specific provision of service can also be a successful strategy, and then inviting the top 3 suppliers from the auction to 1-on-1 negotiations to discuss the devil behind the detail. In other words, auctions are a great way to shortlist vendors if there is a large pool of potential suppliers for a certain service. How specifically does Scanmarket leverage their auction data? The same category for one company can be completely different to the situation within another organisation. There are so many parameters that aren't fixed and are dependent upon an organisation's maturity of procurement, relationship with incumbent vendor, and so on. Rather than focusing on this, they tend to look at more holistic data. Henrik cites an example of the optimal number of vendors to include in an auction. Bringing in an extra supplier into the auction statistically increases the savings by 1.11%, but only up to a total of 7 participating suppliers. Increasing the supplier count beyond 7 doesn't bring additional savings according to Scanmarket's data. We explore how a customer can also best achieve their end goal based on the different auction types and functionalities which can be switched on and off. The "if this, then that" (IFTTT) scenarios which can be looked into based on the data that Scanmarket has, to be able to guide the customer along a path that is likely, statistically, to be more successful. Dealing with...

A tool that's easy to use and affordable, but also very versatile in terms of what it can do and the add-ons that go with it. We continue our mini-series of e-sourcing solutions today with Market Dojo. They've grown a feature rich e-sourcing tool that is offered as a simple, pay monthly software but also comes with many different additional modules to complement the core RFx / e-auction software on offer. I spoke to one of their Co-Founders, Nic Martin, to discuss what brought them this far, and what their plans are for the future. Combining ease-of-use with flexible contracts and plenty of additional modules - Nic Martin from Market Dojo Market Dojo has a wide range of customers - from consultants through to SMEs and larger businesses. They see their flexible pricing model as one of their strengths, essentially enabling anyone to use their software on a pay-as-you-go basis. This opens up the tool to independent consultants, small businesses and growing startups, as well as their more established customer base. Part of the Market Dojo philosophy has been studying a lot of the B2C marketplaces, the most obvious being Amazon, and trying to emulate as much as possible their interface, simplicity and general user experience. How important is UX? The challenge of receiving customer feedback over the years has meant that it requires a balance of deciding what is really needed vs. what are nice-to-haves. Keeping users happy while maintaining a solution that is easy and intuitive to use has been key in balancing how to incorporate new features into the product. What different types of auctions and RFx are available? Core product is e-auctions RFQ Live questionnaires / surveys to factor in considerations other than price, which can provide real time feedback during the event Advanced lots: obtaining cost breakdowns at a much deeper level, without relying on Excel after-the-fact. How do they avoid the trap of trying to be everything to everyone? Figuring out in the early days to understand WHAT features to pitch to WHICH type of customers has helped Market Dojo to learn and grow, and also to decide which features to prioritise. Some aspects of the tool may be more valuable to some users than others. For example, an independent consultant may place a lot of value on a choice of different types of e-auctions, whereas an SME or growing startup would need a lot more hand holding when it comes to running events, and perhaps appreciate simplicity and an intuitive UX a lot more. Niching down is a great marketing theory in principle, but they found that they were winning customers in quite different industries and niches during their early days. Market Dojo has since seen e-auctions run on such diverse categories of spend as global freight, purchased parts and fruit &amp; vegetables, so versatility and offering a solution that can be used in a variety of different industries has been a difficult but possible balance to achieve. Maturing from a pure play e-Sourcing tool to a more rounded solution Taking on board customer feedback was a key factor in instigating Market Dojo to develop additional modules as they have grown from being a pure play e-Sourcing solution into evolving into more of a mini-suite. An example is with the supplier onboarding tool, which was developed based on a request that was made from one of their early customers. One of their biggest challenges was with supplier intake, and they recognised that Market Dojo would be a good solution for this if they could expand beyond just the sourcing module. Whereas on the other hand, some customer requests were seen not to be aligned with their overall vision and direction, and instead led them to seek out partners who could offer such a solution as a best-of-breed solution that could be integrated with Market Dojo's...

We're back with the third in our 5-part series on e-sourcing platforms, and this week we're looking at how e-sourcing can fit into a wider scope covered by a software solution. How can an e-sourcing requirement be married together with upstream and downstream features to create a mini-suite centred around vendor management, with e-sourcing at its core? This is what my guest this week, David Wadler, has created with the Vendorful platform, and he's here to walk us through how this approach can reduce the need for too many SaaS applications in one organisation. Does a Mini Suite of Best-of-Breed Vendor Relationship Management Trump "One Trick Pony" Software? NYC native David starts by giving us some history of his background and how he kind of fell into software engineering and growing a startup after living abroad in France for a number of years. His first experience of procurement was serendipitous, having sold his first software company to Lexmark, who then engaged him on an assignment to look into costs in their IT category. He quickly realised that the sourcing process was broken and was very administrative and manual, and hence Vendorful as a concept was born! E-Sourcing vs. Vendor Management Platform The idea for Vendorful was borne out of an initial concept to build a sourcing tool for IT. As customers demanded more and more features, they followed a strategy they called customer driven development. As David explains, this was based on features that existing customers were asking for rather than internally driven by product strategy. This resulted in Vendorful growing initially to serve e-sourcing beyond the IT category, and then ultimately to become what it is now; a vendor lifecycle management platform which covers some of the activities further upstream and downstream which would have been conducted on email or spreadsheets. Moving from Excel and ERP to one single platform David knew they were onto something when a customer contacted them requesting something that had nothing relating to e-sourcing. He gives an example of supplier onboarding and management where a customer was manually typing in and uploading documents into an ERP system, and managing the records through an Excel spreadsheet which was manually updated. Knowing that there was a better way, this led Vendorful to be developed into more of a full stack vendor management system, covering much more than just e-sourcing. Indeed, eliminating a lot of manual processes around vendor lifecycle management (VLM) is one of the key attributes they now see as their USP. VLM platform plus P2P integration outside of ERP Vendorful doesn't touch any steps of the procure-to-pay (P2P) process and instead sees itself as a platform that would go hand-in-hand with a best-of-breed P2P platform. This tech stack is a very viable alternative to one of the established source-to-pay (S2P) suites, or indeed trying to perform this activity natively in an ERP system with, inevitably, the need to revert to email and Excel for some of the process and analysis. They see their segment and price point as being particularly competitive to mid-sized businesses and even to some enterprises who perhaps want something more user-friendly or versatile. Their cost is in the low 6-figure ($) typically versus price tags of over $1 million for enterprise level S2P suites. David quips that it was once described by a sales executive for one of the suites as "Google Docs for Procurement"! Defending market position from the bigger suites If the suites see them potentially as a danger and move into their market segment, what ways can they differentiate themselves and compete with companies with a much bigger marketing budget? Vendorful is a new product and is not built on a legacy tech stack that is over 10 years old. It is seen as more versatile and is able to cope with more complexity, based on some of the feedback...

On this week's episode, we explore a topic that is becoming ever more important when it comes to selecting a piece of software in the B2B space. Adoption and acceptance of procurement technology within an organisation is highly dependent on a software's user experience and ease of use. And yet very little is spoken about this when we look at review sites and awards for procurement software. This week's guest is Jack MacFarlane, CEO of DeepStream Technologies. They're an e-sourcing platform with UX at the heart of what they do. But can it compete and hold its own against established solutions already on the market? Putting User Experience at the Heart of E-Sourcing Software – Jack MacFarlane from DeepStream Jack is not a procurement pro and actually has a background in investment banking, as he explains in the intro. Going from here to found a procurement software company was a decision he took as a result of a gap he saw in the market for businesses to transact and source with each other more effectively. He saw an email and attachment-based sourcing methodology that was endemic in the businesses he had worked in or experienced, and knew there was a better way. This despite some of the more mature and established competition that is already out there in the marketplace. User experience: how important is it compared to features? Being the "Mac vs. the Microsoft" as Jack explains it was the USP they wanted to achieve when designing the experience behind DeepStream. From a product philosophy perspective, building a digital platform that was as straightforward to use as sending emails and Excel sheets was their main goal. Stripping out features and functionality was seen as a necessary evil to ensure that simplicity was key, all the way from supplier onboarding through to sourcing and awarding of tenders. What impact can having a better UX have when it comes to user adoption? The comparison that Jack makes is with the smartphone. We use a multitude of apps to perform all the activities we use our smartphone for. There isn't one single suite we use on our phones. The same argument can be made for best-of-breed procurement technology because design and functionality, when it's done right, can trump an all-in-one platform when it comes to usability and adoption. The easier it is you make something to use, the lower the barriers are to adoption. People can self-learn without the need for lengthy courses or training. You don't need consultants during the implementation phase. So, logically you're then much more likely to get higher adoption. Not only that, but over time, if the software is easy to use then people are likely to stick with using it vs. reverting to the tried and tested method of using email and spreadsheets. The case for features vs. simplicity If you can essentially digitise within a day, and have users and business units up and running almost immediately, it can organically expand and develop more quickly than a more complex piece of software. "You're never going to see the benefits of digital platforms if you have low engagement rates and it's hard to use" as Jack argues. He sees the more traditional enterprise model to be: Strategy to buy a feature rich, expensive software suite that requires a lot of training to use Get management buy-in Top down "enforcement" of the policy Which ultimately fails if over time, users revert back to form and use what they feel comfortable with i.e. email and Excel. What about UX for supplier onboarding? While suppliers will always be sceptical towards e-sourcing software, DeepStream have endeavoured to make the supplier experience as smooth as possible. The average onboarding time for suppliers is &lt; 5 minutes and it's free to register. There are also a couple of measures that they are using to encourage suppliers to get more from the...

This week we kick off a mini-series of 5 podcasts on e-sourcing software. On the one hand, this is a mature market, with lots of established players. Indeed, many of the larger suites started out as auction platforms back in the day. But this is now being challenged by fresh thinking and new technology, especially as businesses realise that there are way more possibilities to drive value here than just through a traditional e-auction platform. First up, we welcome Tim Grunow and Lukas Wawrla from Zurich-based startup Archlet to the podcast. Leveraging E-Sourcing to Consider Non-Price Factors - Lukas Wawrla &amp; Tim Grunow from Archlet Archlet began as a university project, and has since developed into a startup with over 30 employees, which recently secured $10 million in Series A funding to continue its path of impressive growth since inception in 2019. Tim explains how they grew quickly to learn about supporting a client on a packaging sourcing project during a university consulting assignment, and how this ultimately became the spin-off that then became Archlet. Why are companies still using Email and Excel, with so many e-sourcing tools already out there? Lukas argues that perhaps it's flexibility. The tools are not versatile, flexible or user-friendly enough to facilitate an end-to-end sourcing event completely within platform. At some point, sourcing managers get stuck or frustrated with the tool and revert back to form, which means going offline and using Excel to analyse the data from their tenders. We talk about re-thinking procurement tools starting with the user first and explore a great graphic that I came across when I was on Archlet's website, all about Procurement's digitalisation journey: If we consider e-sourcing, there are 5 stages: Stage 1 - 100% Email and Excel based Stage 2 - Supported by technology i.e. using an e-sourcing tool as a repository to collect bids or run e-auctions, but then the analysis and post-event requirements are typically done off platform; often then offline in Excel. Stage 3 - Optimisation: The ability to perform the end-to-end event, including supplier onboarding, event management, post-event analysis and negotiation completely within the e-sourcing platform Stage 4 - Guided Sourcing: How you could use the tool to create your scenarios to get to your desired outcomes faster? Leveraging external data as part of this to augment and complement the data in a sourcing event. Stage 5 - Autonomous Sourcing: Completely autonomous. Will we ever get there? This is the blue sky scenario! So, how can we avoid post-event deferment to Excel? Focusing on the USER as a key USP, instead of being driven by features and process. Many existing e-sourcing tools are seen as being process-centric. Archlet have focused on "consumerising" the approach. They see the key as being feature-rich enough to offer the value that other tools can't offer, but at the same time have user-friendliness and ease-of-use at the heart of the product. Their trick that they have up their sleeve is using external data sources from other third parties to add value to and enhance the e-sourcing data, enabling users to incorporate this into their supplier selection process during a sourcing event. Leveraging non-price and external data factors into the sourcing decision Tim and Lukas walk us through their strategy of having tools integrated into their platform that cover other non-price related aspects of an e-sourcing event. Archlet recently partnered with existing tech offered by Tealbook and Ecovadis for example, which can be integrated into their e-sourcing process and their data leveraged to add this into the native data that is returned as part of the e-sourcing event. The opportunity to have additional know-how that you don't necessarily have directly from your suppliers with the responses that they give....

The Lowdown on Spend Matters 50 To Know / 50 To Watch and the ProcureTech100 This week is a solo episode. I rarely do them, and I thought long and hard before publishing this. At the end of the day, I'm just one person who has a keen interest in digital procurement technology. I'm not an academic or a researcher, but I do take a passionate interest in what is out there and I have some strong views on what I feel should be the priorities when it comes to digital procurement transformations. I'm also acutely aware that most of the listeners to the podcast are not CPOs in enterprise level organisations. My aim is to bring content out there to Procurement Leaders outside of Fortune 500 companies and to shine light on solutions that are a fit for regular, mid-market businesses. Challenging or questioning the conventional wisdom of how these lists are made up is something I debated for a while. Ultimately I decided that listeners need to know and understand what goes into selecting these lists, so as they can look at them with a critical mindset and draw their own conclusions. I sincerely hope this episode provides value to everyone who listens to it and I would love to hear your feedback! Spend Matters Spend Matters are a household name to anyone in the Procurement space and are part of a larger parent company, Azul Partners. Spend Matters was founded by Jason Busch in 2004 and was one of the first Procurement and Supply Chain Blogs. The focus on digital procurement technology with their 50 To Watch and 50 To Know began in earnest in 2014, and has since grown to be the go-to resource for research, analysis and content in the digital procurement space. So, what are the 50 To Watch and 50 To Know? Let's have a look: Almanac They're part of a wider directory of digital procurement solutions housed on the Spend Matters called the Spend Matters Almanac. The Almanac has over 530 listings from 59 categories and over 140 analyst insights. Feeding into the Almanac is the Spend Matters Solution Map, an interactive software solution finder, where the user can select a comparison of different types of procurement software based on a bunch of different criteria and buying personas. Spend Matters have a pretty big analyst team to crunch the data, and the listings have been going since 2014, so they have a huge back catalogue of content and analysis to draw from! There are 23 different categories in the Almanac in total, and not all of them are focused on software itself. There are some consulting, training and membership organisations included in here too. But this is what sets the base for the 50 To Know and 50 To Watch So, how do we get from here to the 50 To Know and 50 To Watch lists? "The Spend Matters® annual 50 Providers to Know and 50 Providers to Watch lists are determined by the entire Spend Matters analyst team to represent the best of the commercial providers that serve enterprise-level procurement organizations." "We do not include brand new startups with only a few employees and customers who are piloting some “minimum viable products”. We track over a dozen of them right now and are working on highlighting them in the near future."...

We’re back with the final part of our 3-part series of live episodes recorded at Procurement Summit in Berlin on 29 and 30 September 2021. Each podcast features a different theme, focusing on some of the newer, less well-known startups who pitched and exhibited during the summit. This final episode looks at 3 solutions out there who have doubled down on tackling the lucrative and under-served niche of digitsing services procurement. Prospeum Philip Rathjen joins me from Prospeum, a pretty new solution out there that has recently been launched. Philip explains that the idea came to him and his co-founders when they were working together in IT and they realised how much work goes into tenders, and what a manual, admin-heavy process it is to manage. This led them to ultimately go their own way and build Prospeum. Prospeum's features start with supplier scouting and vendor onboarding, and then moves through the complete sourcing process up to the point where a vendor is selected. Their focus is on the big ticket, complex services sourcing requirements in IT and marketing categories. It doesn't offer contract lifecycle management or SRM functionality: it is solely an e-sourcing platform. So, why not just use one of the established suites for this? Phil explains that the suites are often not just focused on e-sourcing and even those which do have strong e-sourcing modules tend to be a) difficult to use unless you've received a lot of training and b) usually designed with raw materials or commoditised goods in mind, meaning that none of the templates favour services. Sourcing nuanced, complex services is a whole different board game. Prospeum has a feature that enables pre-qualification of vendors before inviting them to an event, and then enables internal stakeholders and suppliers to collaborate on the platform. A welcome change to what usually happens, when stakeholders and suppliers just email you outside of the e-sourcing platform because they hate using it! Typical avatar customer for Prospeum? Any business with a large IT spend, typically the higher end of the mid-market towards enterprise level. Banking, financial services, insurance and high growth tech companies would be some examples that fall neatly into that category. Prospeum website Philip's LinkedIn profile Apadua This one is a bit of an outlier because it's vendor funded. In other words, the suppliers pay to have a profile and a presence on Apadua rather than the buying organisation purchasing a SaaS subscription or a license to run the software. Here to tell us more about this unique approach is Gregory N. Vider, Apadua's Founder. Greg sees their strength as being "by procurement professionals, for procurement professionals", as both he and his co-founder Markus have a procurement background. Direct procurement is usually pretty strong in most companies, whereas indirect procurement and specifically services procurement usually lags behind in the maturity curve. This is especially applicable in smaller businesses, and as Greg explains, the platform can be used by SMEs with just a couple of million € spend, right the way up to enterprise level clients. The purpose of Apadua is to make services procurement free at the point of entry to buyers, while at the same time providing both sides with smart technology to create value together and build sustainable business relationships on an equal footing. But if your own incumbent vendors aren't on the platform, then what? You can also onboard your existing vendors onto the platform in plenty of time to run an RFP. Does Apadua have issues with getting vendors to pay to use the platform? Gregory argues that in industries such as...

We’re back with part 2 of a 3 part series of live episodes recorded at Procurement Summit in Berlin on 29 and 30 September 2021. Each podcast features a different theme, focusing on some of the newer, less well-known startups who pitched and exhibited during the summit to bring awareness to some of the exciting new players out there who have a bright future. Hot Digital Procurement Startups which Utilise AI and Game Theory to Deliver their Solution This episode is all about startups who heavily feature AI or game theory as part of their experience and solution. Pactum My first guest is Fabio Herle from Pactum. Pactum leverages AI and game theory to automate negotiations. Quite a bold claim to automate something that many procurement professionals have spent their whole careers trying to refine, improve and perfect! Fabio explains how the German-speaking area of Europe offers both challenges and advantages in equal measure. On the one hand, Procurement is a fairly mature function and there are some world class companies, procurement functions and well-managed processes. On the other hand, it’s a more conservative business culture where resistance to change can be quite common. While Pactum was founded in Estonia, they are actually headquartered in the US. Not because of investment but due to ease of customer acquisition in relation to Europe’s largest markets. So, what can it do, and what are its limitations? Fabio goes on to explain that Pactum is not able to replace a human in a complex negotiation which requires preparation, emotional intelligence and the need to maintain a strategic relationship with a critical vendor. Instead, Pactum focuses on automating negotiations for tactical purchases where it may not be the best use of a procurement professional’s time, or where the spend would not have been previously managed by anyone in the procurement team because of the value of the transaction. NDAs and simple payment terms “horsetrading” are two examples which Fabio cites as being prime opportunities where Pactum can add value. The goal is that over time, it will be able to handle more complex negotiations as the AI matures. The example of being able to give counter offers and counter proposals, in a proper trading style negotiation, is an area where Fabio explains is part of Pactum’s plans as the tool matures. Another advantage of using a machine is that it never forgets any of the details! This is definitely one to watch and a rapidly scaling company. Fabio’s’ LinkedIn profile Pactum website MySupply Next up is Andreas Zimmermann, CEO of MySupply. This is an e-sourcing tool, looking at some of the more tactical areas of sourcing. Whereas most e-sourcing tools tend to focus on strategic sourcing for highly complex tenders, MySupply focuses on the more straightforward sourcing requirements. The specific USP of MySupply is the engine behind the tender which guides it towards the right strategy e.g. should it be an auction, 3-bids-and-a-buy, simple RFP etc. Whereas it is primarily aimed at smaller and medium-sized businesses to provide a way to affordably bring more spend under control and negotiate with suppliers that otherwise would have been unmanaged, it also functions for larger businesses too for any sourcing requirements that are not complex. As with Pactum, this focuses on a problem that is coming more and more to the forefront. Namely, that Procurement often does not have the resources to get involved in non-strategic spend, but would like to get the savings or cost avoidance from being able to deal with this in a more automated and hands-off way. We talk about existing tools for e-sourcing and auctions, especially the more established players, not being...

This week, we bring you the first in a 3 part series of live episodes recorded at Procurement Summit in Berlin on 29 and 30 September 2021. We’ll be covering a different theme on each episode, and featuring 3 procuretech startups each week. Our focus is on some of the newer, less well-known startups who pitched and exhibited during the summit to bring awareness to some of the exciting new players out there who are destined to grow quickly. Hot Digital Procurement and Supply Chain Startups in the ESG and Risk Management Space On this episode, we’re looking at startups whose mission is solving problems in the rapidly growing and increasingly important ESG and Risk Management area. Shipzero Tobias Bohnhoff, Founder of Shipzero is my first guest. Shipzero tracks and manages transport emissions, helping freight buyers and logistics managers to have more transparency around their shipping data. The tool essentially enables companies to make strategic decisions around two key areas of transportation procurement and logistics management: Helping companies to reduce their overall transport footprint through optimisation of their freight operations. Evaluating different case scenarios when it comes to deciding which mode of transport to use. One part of this conundrum is actually looking at where to source goods from. The increasing cost, especially of ocean freight, is making companies reconsider lengthy supply chains where historically the logistics cost was not a major factor. Technology is now in place to enable data sharing between companies. The transportation market is very fragmented and contains a lot of smaller businesses who are not as technologically advanced as global logistics firms. Shipzero enables this data to be aggregated for the end customer. When it comes to decarbonisation, there are also the factors of considering transportation methods powered partly or wholly by renewable energy. Shipzero enables companies to simulate the CO2 emissions based on different transportation scenarios. The range and payload for electric trucks is different to diesel trucks. Using a granular data stream from the telematics of the truck allows you to make the decision of which methods or lanes for transport can be switched to transportation from renewable energy sources. Tobias mentions that any company with over €/$100 million annual turnover with significant transportation spend can benefit and see a positive payback of using the tool to optimise their transportation. I ask Tobias how he would convince a company who doesn’t see this as a priority, to take action now rather than in a few years time. Then we round off the interview by looking at Shipzero’s plans for future growth. Tobias’ LinkedIn profile Shipzero website Prewave Next up is Harald Nitschinger, CEO of risk management solution Prewave. Harald comes off the back of winning DPW’s Startup Pitch competition during their virtual conference just a few weeks ago in September. So, what’s so special about Prewave?! Well, it’s certainly a hot topic with COVID-19, broken supply chains, the new “Lieferkettengesetz” (Supply Chain Law) coming into effect in Germany making it a topic and a solution very much in focus right now. Supply chains have never been less transparent and have never been more complex, with large organisations having tens of thousands of suppliers all over the world. Keeping on top of all of these transactions, past, present and future, is almost impossible without the help of technology. Potential scandals, force majeure events, natural disasters We take the hypothetical example of a child labour scandal for a textiles retailer using a supplier in Bangladesh: how...

Tactical, non-strategic spend is a time suck to pretty much every organisation, regardless of their size. Managing this through traditional channels - i.e. ERP systems - is a cumbersome process for both the procurement professional who has to manage it, and the stakeholder who just wants a simple, user-friendly interface to be able to buy something. Henning Hatje, Co-Founder and CEO of Berlin-based startup Lhotse is my guest on this week's show. He explains how their solution helps to simplify tactical, non-strategic and tail spend (we look into each of these definitions during the show, too!) Simplifying and Automating Tactical Spend Lhotse was founded in 2020 and is growing rapidly, having recently announced a €5 million seed round funding just before the show was recorded. The fact that such a young company has managed to secure this kind of funding is tantamount to the need for a solution on how to manage tactical and tail spend. Deloitte's 2021 CPO Survey points towards more effective management of tactical spend With companies under new pressure to operate leaner, smarter and faster, it's little surprise that tactical and tail spend is coming under the microscope. Operational efficiency topped the list of most urgent priorities among those surveyed for the 2021 Deloitte CPO Survey. Finding a more productive use of buyers' time when it comes to the huge operational workload of dealing with non-strategic spend will no doubt be high on the wish list. Tactical vs. tail spend? There are many different definitions, and much if it is nuanced and dependent upon how different organisations see their spend. Lhotse views "tactical spend" as: Being non-managed spend by procurement Predominantly indirect in nature Whereas they see tail spend as: Also having some crossover with tactical spend But also encompassing "managed" areas of high volume, low value spend such as certain areas of MRO spend and office supplies which are often procured using punch-out catalogues Much depends on the thresholds that companies use to define how tactical spend or tail spend is seen. What typical policies exist for non-strategic spend? These are some common scenarios for how non-strategic spend can fall through the cracks: Spend that falls below the threshold where competitive bidding is required - i.e. three bids, then a buy - clearly has a lot of untapped opportunity. Here, essentially, stakeholders can purchase from whomever they wish. Diligence with which a policy is enforced. Often this is dependent upon the perception or reputation of the procurement function internally, but also is heavily influenced by staffing levels within procurement teams and their (in)ability to manage all areas of spend. There are massive differences between how these thresholds are applied - from very strict, low spend thresholds right the way through to enterprise level organisations in high profit industries which can sometimes have 6-figure sums considered as tactical spend. When it comes to other ways of handling tail or tactical spend, Integrators and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) are still common, but as Henning explains, they can often have flaws. It can send the wrong message to stakeholders when low value spend is farmed out to an external organisation. But more importantly, there is now technology that can automate or semi-automate large parts of these processes. This moves the organisation away from functionally managing a BPO or an integrator and instead towards a more strategic process of researching and integrating technology into the procurement function. Other advantages of applying technology to this problem Henning talks about the opportunities that a solution such as Lhotse can leverage existing data in your system to automate or...

AI is a term that often scares anyone who is not familiar with the technology and the application. In this episode, we're going to cover some of the different use cases for AI in the procurement space, and then dive into master data as a specific case study. Adriano Garibotto, Co-Founder and Chief Sales &amp; Marketing Officer of Italian procurement data management company Creactives is my guest on this week's show to break down this not-as-scary-as-it-sounds technology! Using AI to Clean Procurement Data Creactives originally set out as a cost reduction consultancy for indirect procurement back in the early 2000s, focusing specifically around optimisation of MRO spend in manufacturing businesses. The constant challenge of poor data, inaccurate or missing taxonomies and battling with free text PO descriptions is what ultimately led them down the path of creating a software business to solve this problem at scale. Origins of what Creactives is today comes from some of the early stage AI utilised by their consultancy around 15 years ago. Together with a collaboration with the University of Verona, they then doubled down on developing a software solution which can help to classify, clean and structure complex master data from multiple ERP systems and sources. Some examples of what AI can do in the Procurement space AI must be applied to specific fields to provide tangible solutions. The fundamentals of procurement can be broadly classified into the following 4 questions: What am I buying? From whom do I buy? What price am I paying? Who is doing the buying? Answering these questions is not easy, especially in large, enterprise level organisations with legacy systems i.e. different ERP systems, multiple languages and complex supply chains. AI can play a strategic role in the harmonisation of the data and helping to create a unique visibility. This is the fundamental building block which leads to other opportunities to use AI in the procurement space. How can AI be leveraged as a catalyst for positive change? Addressing resistance to technology is a change management issue, as Adriano explains. At its core, getting the right organisational structure in place is the key to success. Data preparation historically required a large amount of work from procurement professionals. There is the classic Pareto of 80% of the time being taken doing the preparation, and only 20% conducting the actual added value activity for which the clean data is necessary. If AI is able to do the lion's share of the 80%, this then allows strategic resources to be freed up to focus on more value-added activities which can actually implement the changes and the projects to drive the costs down, or reduce the supply chain vulnerability, or whatever the higher goal of the activity may be. Data itself on its own doesn't intrinsically have value - it is the enabling factor that facilitates the journey to be able to deliver the value. Is category management dead as an organisational structure? Adriano makes a controversial - but very valid - point that the category management architecture of procurement organisations which has been dominant for the past 20 or so years will be rendered irrelevant by AI. The way procurement teams operate in future will be beyond the category model, as a result of data being the driver of how organisations drive value in their business. Product launches and lean activities cut across numerous different categories, and the design of procurement departments must consequently adapt to this. To what extent can AI perform data classification? Adriano uses a nice example of comparing master data and AI solutions to motor vehicles. The more sophisticated the engine is, the more sophisticated that the fluid going into the engine needs to be. The same applies to procurement data and the AI...

Business relationships at their heart are all about people, when you put the commercials, the products or services, and the mechanism or process used to manage those relationships to one side. Managing people-to-people relationships, whether with stakeholders or suppliers, through email chains and Excel sheets isn't particularly effective. Especially when it comes to continuity and longer term collaboration based on mutual trust. Sheldon Mydat, CEO of Suppeco is my guest this week to walk us through how stakeholder relationships and supplier development can flourish when these relationships can be managed in one single place. Stakeholder and Supplier Collaboration Without Emails and Excel Emulating relationships that are based on human behaviour is tricky to do with spreadsheets and presentations. It's highly subjective but it also is key to driving successful, incremental value. But this value often gets lost because it's unstructured. Sheldon explains how he built a tech platform based off the back of what he's tried to build Excel formulas and macros to measure: the performance-related benefits to some of the more subjective areas of supplier relationship management (SRM). Value Creation through a structured approach to SRM The challenge of course is ensuring that everybody uses a given tool or process to work with SRM, instead of defaulting to type. So, what's in it for the stakeholder or the supplier to use a digital tool? If we look at contract and spend management, we're looking at the bottom of the pyramid. But if we look at the top of the pyramid, we look at other ways to create value such as innovation, shared R&amp;D, different areas of performance management. The result is that these activities all drive the bottom line value at the bottom of the pyramid. Creating a structure and a visibility across all of this activity is key, so as those affected can actually see it bearing fruit. Sheldon uses "just-in-time" (JIT) as a great example of how supply chains have been primarily driven by cost savings activities rather than collaboration. Bringing stakeholders across the whole supply chain into the relationship and to actively drive value and collaborate together is the opportunity to break this cycle. The triangle between stakeholder, supplier and procurement Sheldon cites an article from McKinsey about how digital procurement platforms can drive incremental value of between 3% and 10% annually because of the ability to drive instant collaboration between the three points of this triangle. Having a structured process to work on whichever activity it may be is key, and part of that process is clearly being able to work in a platform that enables this. Monthly or quarterly business reviews are often talking shops, and can be the very thing that holds you back because they are too rigid. The savings achievable through immediate and ongoing collaboration outside of formal meetings are real. However, the discipline and the structure to log in and actually use the platform is key to success. Sheldon explains that there is a deliberate intention not to spam users with notifications, and to have smart links in any email communication to avoid the need for users having to log in and enter a password each time to check a project. Is there a niche or sector that real-time SRM works for best? Community-wide engagement is key, and ensuring that everyone is aligned that any digital collaboration platform is the single source of truth is absolutely essential. While certain sectors or departments may be better resourced and tech savvy, the fundamentals for success are always to ensure that the process of how SRM is run and administered within an organisation is the secret sauce. Sheldon cites the construction industry as one sector which has struggled in the past with SRM, but is now starting to make considerable strides to develop this. How to...

Historically, there wasn't much technology out there to deal with indirect services spend, both from a sourcing and supplier contract lifecycle management perspective. This has started to change recently. But is it possible to manage both strategic, corporate level service agreements as well as more tactical, tail spend and one-time buys all in the same platform? My guest on this week's podcast is Fabian Heinrich from Berlin-based startup Mercanis. They claim to have a solution for both. We dive into this and find out to what extent their platform can support these requirements. SRM for Services: Managing both Strategic and Tail Spend Procurement volumes have massively shifted from goods to services over the past 10 years, as young tech companies have grown into major corporate entities. Furthermore, IT and marketing have become increasingly important categories and now account for significantly more spend than they used to. How are the sourcing requirements for services different from goods? A services e-sourcing platform needs to be more flexible, due to the very diverse range of products being purchased under the different types of services. Workflows are different in many cases, depending on the type of services and the type of contracts being sourced. Subcategories can often be varied and diverse, and taxonomies are much more difficult to apply to services spend. What's more, the stakeholder collaboration and the level of the relationship between procurement and their internal business partners by necessity requires much more focus during the end-to-end sourcing process. Managing the lifecycle of services spend and its complexity I asked Fabian about how to ensure that the lifecycle of services procurement is reflected, and some of the important characteristics that need to be monitored and taken into consideration. There's the classic trap of having a corporate procurement team negotiate a central or global contract that then ends up on Sharepoint or on a C-Drive that nobody in satellite locations knows about. Stakeholders and local buyers then just continue doing whatever they've always done! Fabian explained that a sourcing tool for services wasn't enough, and that some features from an SRM or contract lifecycle system were necessary to ensure that it was a rounded platform to satisfy the needs further downstream. The "self-service" model for tactical purchasing and one-time buys Just like catalogues have been common for buying tail spend on indirect goods e.g. MRO and office supplies, a guided buying process to enable stakeholders to "self-serve" themselves on smaller, less strategic purchases or one-time buys is a feature Mercanis realised was absolutely essential. If one of the goals is to free strategic procurement teams from the day-to-day operational work of sourcing non-repeatable requirements and low spend, high volume items, then something similar to how this works for goods would need to be part of the user experience. How to avoid maverick spend for local, site level purchases Strategic spend is (usually) well managed within larger organisations. The problem generally comes once you get down to the decentralised areas of spend. These are often categories or suppliers managed at country or local level. Mercanis has enabled the end users through guided buying to have a better user experience when seeking to buy services locally. This enables the end user to buy from compliant sources, and to find a supplier faster, than having to go through this process in an analogue (Google search and email) RFQ. The other advantage from a procurement perspective is that this frees up resources in strategic procurement teams to focus on the activities which have the most business impact. What preparation is necessary to ensure success with a digital services procurement platform? Like most things in life, you get out from it...

We're BACK! We kick off series 2 of The Procuretech Podcast with with a mini-series examining three different Supplier Relationship Management platforms. The first one we're taking a closer look at is Danish startup LeanLinking, and my guest on this week's show is their CEO, Lars Kuch Pedersen. Why supplier performance data can't just be measured in hard KPIs Lars begins by explaining how he came to set up LeanLinking following a successful career in procurement as a Regional Category Manager for a pan-European hardware retailer. One of the problems he was commonly faced with during his career in procurement was being on the other side of the table to Account Managers from his suppliers who almost always had better data on him as a customer than he did on them as a supplier. Was the company generally happy with the supplier's performance? Was quality performance acceptable? Were they easy to deal with when it came to scheduling deliveries or accuracy of invoices? How responsive were they when there were quality or delivery problems? The truth was, other than asking every single stakeholder individually, by email, he had no way of knowing. Lars quickly realised that he was far from alone with this problem. Most large companies don't have good supplier performance data outside of the standard on-time-in-full (OTIF) measurements. Hard vs. soft performance data Spend data and delivery performance data is (relatively) easy to get hold of. In most companies, quality data can also be extracted from ERP systems. The challenges come when it comes to more subjective, "soft" data around performance. How do you measure that in an ERP system or in supplier performance KPIs? Without surveying stakeholders individually, it's extremely difficult. How do you measure hard data for ease of cooperation, responsiveness of suppliers? Some categories of spend make it harder to track Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or KPIs. How do you track the performance of a marketing agency? Much trickier than measuring the performance of a raw materials vendor. Managing performance of direct vs. indirect suppliers You can't measure OTIF and corrective action incidents on indirect spend like you can on raw materials. Here, you're much more reliant on nurturing and collecting stakeholder feedback as part of the supplier review and SRM process. What are the concrete problems that need to be overcome to improve the overall cooperation with a supplier? These are often not visible when looking at hard KPIs. Not doing proper SRM = value leakage If you're not constructively measuring supplier performance, you're missing out on driving value. What is the cost of poor supplier relationships? Yes, it's difficult to put a cost on, but not doing it is leaving opportunities on the table. Non-conformance reports or a ticketing system can be managed within LeanLinking. For example, a storesperson can raise non-conformance tickets for packaging issues, or incomplete deliveries of spare parts. What about SRM through ERP systems or enterprise level all-in-one Procurement suites? Lars explains how ERPs are not really built with Procurement in mind and don't offer the opportunity to measure supplier performance. SAP for example have acknowledged this and are opening up their interface to integrate best-of-breed procurement solutions as a compatible add-on to their ERP suite. Likewise, the major enterprise level suites for managing procurement are more focused on Source-to-Pay and don't really touch 360° supplier relationship management. Scorecarding and sharing agendas with stakeholders and suppliers to increase collaboration is not a feature built into these systems. How do "growth" sectors benefit from SRM if cost is not a major focus? In sectors such as tech and pharma, Lars explains that there is...

Innovation never stops. Alongside the tools that are making manual processes digital, there are also a new breed of tools which are fundamentally changing the way we go about our job. How we structure and carry out tenders hasn’t really changed much over the last 20 years. E-sourcing tools have been around since the late 1990s, and have been pretty mainstream for the past 15 or so years (I used them myself way back in 2003)! There are a lot of cool apps out there that are disrupting the old-school world of procurement. One of these concentrates on simplifying, shortening and using game theory to influence the outcome of sourcing activities. Bid Ops was recognised for its disruptive contribution to the procuretech space when it won Best Startup award at the 2019 Digital Procurement World conference in Amsterdam. This week, I interview Founder and CEO Edmund Zagorin on how they’ve grown, how Covid-19 has changed the landscape and how they’re growing despite cuts to procurement and IT budgets through an innovative business model that delivers value from day 1 to their client base. Making e-Sourcing Faster and More Effective using AI and Game Theory: Edmund Zagorin from Bid Ops 2:09 Bid Ops recently won the best startup award at DPW 2019. So, has that propelled growth for BidOps, or is it more down to Covid-19 and everyone needing to deliver more, faster, and with fewer resources? 5:42 I ask Edmund how does BidOps differentiates itself from a standard eSourcing tool e.g. SAP Ariba for large organisations, or MarketDojo and RFP360 as a more accessible, cloud based solution for all businesses. We talk about “Best-in-Breed” cloud based solutions and how the “unbundling" of procurement tech is niching down into more specific applications focusing on one specific area. 12:47 BidOps straddles the two niches of being an eSourcing tool and also a platform to utilise AI for simulation of negotiations. I ask Edmund what he sees as being the biggest challenge here, and whether he sees a move-away from more traditional ERP systems for managing RFQs and tenders. Edmund’s answer about using technology for Sourcing versus using it for P2P optimisation is an interesting insight. Sourcing offers so many opportunities beyond traditional automation and digitisation of operational and transactional practices. 18:15 Budgets are tight right now, so I ask Edmund to tell us a little about how Bid Ops has tried to combat this with a more innovative pricing model. 23:00 It’s a bit of a hornet’s nets from a legal perspective when you work on a gain share model. How does one prove a saving? Because not everything has a last paid price… 25:58 Edmund talks about having to do more with less, and how using gain share to enable immediate implementation of a solution without a lengthy budget approval process is allowing teams to drive results faster. Especially in times where headcount and budgetary constraints are a very real issue for many procurement teams. 27:07 How to deal with sceptics: how is Bid Ops able to distinguish and differente itself from some of the more traditional e-sourcing tools which some of us in the procurement space have had a love/hate relationship with over the years? There’s a great discussion here about how mutually de-risking the first quote and using game theory in negotiations can lead to a more successful (and shorter, more convenient) outcome from sourcing tenders. 32:17 Finally, I ask Edmund the best way to get in touch to learn more about Bid Ops. If you’re interested in giving this tool a try, as a certified partner I can also help you learn more about what it can do and connect you to the Bid Ops team for a demo. How to connect with Edmund: Bid Ops website <a...

There are lots of options out there for software to facilitate and digitise our P2P processes, perform e-sourcing or manage our contracts more effectively. However, the surprising omission up until recently was having something that gets us out of our inboxes. Procurement still relies heavily on email, and the volume we receive means that important stuff can easily be missed. Storing Excel and Word documents, as well as project updates and meeting minutes on Sharepoint was able to do that to a certain extent. But let's be honest, Sharepoint's interface is pretty clunky. It's also difficult to find stuff on there unless you've got an experienced administrator. The solution? One answer is to have a cloud-based SaaS app which shares project updates, stakeholder and supplier communication and delivery objectives all in one space. That's what Richard Sains, my guest today, has developed. He's one of the growing contingent of former procurement professionals turned procuretech entrepreneurs! ! Note - my audio is a bit sketchy on this one due to me recording this outside of my usual podcasting space. Improving our Productivity for Day-to-Day Communuication and Project Management: Richard Sains from Acada 1:43 Rich explains what ultimately drove him to make the switch from being a category manager to a SaaS entrepreneur. 4:54 We discuss the biggest changes over the last 5 or so years in terms of developments in the procuretech space, and how the continuing trend seems to be the faster, leaner, more agile tools that are “best-in-breed” modular, niche solutions. With this comes some unique challenges in terms of integrating all of these together to get them to communicate, but technology is evolving to deal with this. Swapping things out and replacing them one-by-one makes it easier to upgrade on a modular basis rather than a major IT project each time there is an upgrade. 7:52 I ask Rich what he sees as the most common forms of waste or inefficiency in procurement teams and to what extent he sees automation or technology as the solution to combat some of these challenges? 12:01 Some inefficiencies of existing working practices will have been laid bare as a result of Covid-19 and the immediate shift in many cases to remote work. What therefore are the biggest challenges to larger organisations if we assume remote work in some form is here to stay? 14:24 Should technology be seen as a facilitator or productivity enabler? Or will it completely replace some manual tasks in their entirety and eliminate some operational or tactical procurement roles? 18:32 Rich in his own words describes Acada as an innovative system for procurement people to manage their workload and give visibility to their leaders and stakeholders. He expands on what he means by this here. 22:29 There are overlaps and similarities to some of the other tools out there, a couple of them have even been on the show. I’m thinking specifically Tarmo from ProcurementFlow (Episode 2) and Pierre from Per Angusta (Episode 13). Rich explains any specific inefficiencies or value adds that he feels Acada solves, that other SaaS tools in the procurement tech space can’t do.  25:56 Acada is a pretty new tool compared to some of the other solutions out there, so what are their next steps in terms of growth or development? 28:12 Rich walks through the business case of if I was a CFO, how would he convince me to buy Acada as a tool? How to connect with Richard: Richard's LinkedIn Profile Send Richard an email Acada website Stay in touch! Download our <a...

The topic of data is like a boomerang. It always seems to come back into every discussion when we get into the nuts and bolts of implementing a digital transformation in procurement or even just implementing a software solution to get more visibility into spend analytics. Problem is, investing in it often doesn't yield a visible payback that can be directly tracked to a future P&amp;L statement. So, how can data management ever become top of the agenda? My guest today argues that a significant part of the solution is being able to tell the right story to the right people, to help them better understand the implications of NOT doing this. The message is clear. At the point of putting together a business case and a budget appropriation request for implementing procurement tech, getting your data ducks in a row needs to be an integral part of the calculation. Scott Taylor joins me on this week's podcast to help explain why. Why Implementing a Digital Procurement Solution Must Include A Data Strategy: Scott Taylor is The Data Whisperer 1:47 What problems does Scott see when it comes to the causes and the effects of poor or inconsistent data? 5:53 Master data - what are the different types of data in the procurement space and where do the common pitfalls tend to come from? And how can feeding garbage into a procurement tech solution impact your implementation of a digital transformation? 8:46 Why is data management an important component in the various different procurement initiatives that are buzzwords at the moment? 12:02 Scott explains his "4C" concept and how it helps businesses to understand their potential flaws in master data management. 18:12 If we assume that cleaning your data is something that's a non-negotiable, I ask Scott how to approach the discussion with key decision makers. Specifically, how to pitch to CFOs to get buy-in to make the investment in something that doesn't have an immediate, demonstrable payback. 21:10 Scott explains why if digital transformation is part the journey of where a company wants to go, it requires highly structured data to successfully reach this destination. 22:11 Why selling data cleaning as a stand-alone project is likely to fail, and how to make the case for including data management and structure in the budget of any large-scale procuretech investment. 23:59 When it comes to data management, do smaller businesses have the advantage over larger corporations because they have fewer legacy systems and less data to manage, or do the larger businesses have the upper hand because they have the resources and expertise to stay one step ahead? 27:41 As a final question, I ask Scott about whether he thinks data scientists will be an integral part of procurement organisations going forward. How to connect with Scott: Meta Meta Consulting website Scott's YouTube Channel Scott's LinkedIn profile Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder app Sign up for the

Understanding what you spend is the most important part of strategic procurement. Without this, you can't do much else. You're shooting in the wind, not really knowing whether what you're tackling are the ripest opportunities. While spend analysis tools have been around for a while, they're now becoming old hat. The new generation provides spend analytics and guides you to where the best opportunities may be hiding in your spend data. Taking it to a completely new level, the ability to combine spend analytics with process mining is game changing. If you're not sure what process mining is, it will save what would previously have taken days, if not weeks of work to find holes and inefficiencies in your processes. The P2P process is a classic case of where this can be implemented effectively, and combined with spend analytics to drive both performance improvement and cost reduction. That's what my guest today, Samir Kharkan, CEO of German startup SCALUE is here to talk about. The Killer Punch for Extracting the Most Value: Combining Process Mining with Spend Analytics 2:40 I start off by asking Samir the same question as I asked Kevin last week, and that is: what makes a vendor “cool”? 3:14 Spend ANALYSIS vs. spend ANALYTICS. What’s the difference, and how does analytics drive businesses forward more than just a standard analysis dashboard? How SCALUE and similar tools (see episode 3 with Eddie from Seaforth Analytics) differentiate themselves from the first wave of spend cube software 6:54 What is Process Mining, and how does this add further benefits beyond the spend analytics function in terms of analysing business processes to view potential inefficiencies and non-compliances? 8:30 Does a powerful tool such as spend analytics combined with process mining enable CPOs or CFOs to employ less experienced procurement managers now that software can do most of the heavy lifting? Spoiler: the answer is NO! 11:45 I ask Samir to walk through what the must-haves or prerequisites are on the customer’s side to ensure that implementation of a tool like SCALUE is successful. Samir’s "Captain of the ship" analogy is absolute gold! 15:47 We drill down into why this type of solution specifically solves a common problem for mid-sized companies, when considering this with the captain, ship and compass analogy that Samir so eloquently explains. 17:53 Is spend analytics and process mining also a relevant tool to use in professional service industries where there is no product being manufactured? 20:43 We drill down into an example of where an automotive supplier discovered 30% maverick spend in indirect services through the data made available by using SCALUE’s solution. Samir walks us through how they discovered it and then put measures in place to reduce this. 26:00 Let’s talk payback calculations…how long does it take for customers to typically see return on investment? 27:18 Samir gives a great example of how looking at invoice discrepancies based on drill down of incoterms can often give return on investment in just one swoop. How to connect with Samir: Samir's LinkedIn profile SCALUE website Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our <a...

Tail spend is a huge, untapped opportunity that you're probably not exploiting to its full potential. If you're following the 80/20 rule, then managing the tail isn't going to be a key priority when it comes to resource allocation. Meaning a lot of opportunity goes to waste. Especially if headcount is being cut and procurement teams are having to deal with bigger workloads. My guest this week is Kevin Frechette, CEO and Co-Founder of Fairmarkit, who were recently recognised by Gartner as one of their "4 Cool Vendors" in the procurement tech space. I also recently wrote a piece for Fairmarkit's blog all about leveraging tail spend in a recession, if anyone is interested to read my thoughts there! Strategies for Dealing with your Tail: How AI-powered Automation fits into the Mix 2:20 In light of their recognition by Gartner as one of 4 “cool vendors”, I asked Kevin what in his view makes a vendor cool. 4:44 Kevin explains how Fairmarkit came into the space of offering tail spend solutions. It’s an interesting story that shows a great example of pivoting what their initial idea was, to actually offering what the market is asking for to solve a specific challenge that kept cropping up in their discussions. 7:10 Kevin walks through the business case of why tail spend is a great untapped opportunity, and how a lot of the existing procuretech solutions were not addressing this as an opportunity. 8:20 We walk through some of the reasons why there is so much cash left on the table when it comes to tail spend and why organisations often overlook this as a valuable source of cost savings. 9:28 Is there a justification to allocate procurement resource to tail spend? If you can’t add headcount, especially under these economic circumstances, then how do you decide what to tackle and what not to? And for what you’re not tackling, what opportunity does this then offer to technology as a solution? 11:20 What actually constitutes tail spend? Is there a single definition? And what about services as well as goods? 14:13 What are the advantages of using a tech solution such as Fairmarkit vs. just leveraging other non-technical solutions such as BPO, catalogues, MRO and FM integrators and Group Purchasing Organisations? 18:16 We explore finding where the "sweet spot” is between value of purchase order and available resources in procurement teams to be able to leverage a tech solution like Fairmarkit to drive value and reduce sourcing cycle time of tail spend items. Kevin then walks through an example of how the process would then work when running a sourcing request through Fairmarkit. 20:50 Dealing with data quality and how Fairmarkit can manage non-perfect descriptions of what requisitioners are trying to source. Kevin explains how machine learning will improve the ability to work with imperfect data as the amount of requisitions Fairmarkit processes continues to increase. 26:26 We discuss Fairmarkit’s strategy of moving beyond just tail spend to offer a more end-to-end solution, and what the driving factors behind it were. 28:02 Kevin explains the concept of “intelligent sourcing”, and how data and automation can be leveraged to streamline and optimise the sourcing process. 30:32 Are clients using the productivity gains achieved through using the tool to redeploy FTEs onto more strategic procurement activity? Or are they just using the benefits to reduce procurement headcount? 34:01 A final example given by Kevin focuses on the concept of sourcing smarter. How to connect with Kevin: Kevin's LinkedIn profile <a href="https://www.fairmarkit.com" target="_blank"...

Buying smart, and measuring total value rather than just price, is a popular concept right now. And for good reason, given the supply chain fragilities that the Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare. Nonetheless, the automotive industry is one that's renowned for being particularly cutthroat in its often combative relationships with suppliers. My guest on today's show, Dr. Gisela Linge, is a strategy consultant who has over 10 years of experience in the automotive industry. So, it's all the more relevant to talk to someone with her experience about how sourcing smart and collaborating with innovative startups can move the needle. We discuss how some of the process and regulatory roadblocks can be removed to ensure procurement and R&amp;D are able to work with the most innovative companies in the space without having their hands tied by impossible T&amp;Cs, bureaucracy and book-length contracts. Sourcing Smart and Successfully Collaborating with Startups - an Interview with Dr. Gisela Linge from Strategy Meets Reality 2:09 I ask Gisela for a short intro of how she got into the space of strategy, specifically in procurement 5:18 Buying smart rather than buying cheap - how does it work in an industry that is as cutthroat as the automotive sector? 8:21 Do large organisations such as OEMs and Tier 1s actually have the self-awareness to see the opportunities of how they can benefit from working with startups, or do they require external help from consultancies to understand the lay of the land? 13:07 Will we as time goes on see a more open interface between ERP systems and individual apps offering specific solutions that can integrate with them? 15:27 We look at examples of where companies do have a strategy of working with smaller and more innovative startups, but can often become unstuck with the usual big company compliance and legal bureaucracy. This can prevent startups from getting a foothold into these organisations as vendors, so we look at how this could play out and what needs to change, including an example of how Gisela overcame this in a previous position she held. 19:20 We touch on one of my favourite topics - I promise I didn’t lead the conversation this way(!) - of pragmatism over rigid process and how there must be more flexibility within legal and internal audit departments to make these collaborations a success. 21:58 I ask Gisela her experiences of being able to convince legal colleagues to be more pragmatic, in the quest of being able to work with startups who don’t have the bandwidth to sign up to standard large corporation T&amp;Cs and contractual requirements. 23:46 Exploring the opportunity of using risk management software to assess risk level of working with a specific vendor, and how this can be used to procurement’s advantage in preparing the business case to gain buy-in from Legal or any other sceptical internal business partners. 24:47 I ask Gisela for a tip for buyers who are struggling to get their stakeholders to agree to working with smaller startups to drive innovation. How to connect with Gisela: Gisela's LinkedIn profile Strategy Meets Reality website Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our <a href="https://app.procurementsoftware.site/" target="_blank"...

Expenses for items such as individual company mobile phone usage, printing and copaying is typically billed centrally against a centrally negotiated contract. The costs incurred, however, are often both a mystery and black hole of unaudited, unchecked invoices. They needn't be. All organisations can access individual employee expense data if they so wish. The reality is that few of them do. Which is really a lost opportunity, when you consider all of the anomalies, discrepancies and consumption-driven cost reduction which can be attained here through just having the right data. My guest this week, Anthony Devine, explains how organisations can, through the power of well presented data and a culture of transparency, use this data to drive awareness of cost and usage, and make a serious dent into the overall spend on these services. Driving 30% Savings with Deep Data on Employee Expenses: Anthony Devine from Finfo tells us how 2:50 Anthony tells a fascinating story of how he discovered this was a problem from a very different original career path he had been on. 4:45 What does Finfo define as indirect employee expenses for the purpose of what the tool can track? 6:31 How can these expenses be broken down to show what each employee or username is consuming? What are the means and mechanisms used to be able to get hold of the data and present it in an easily understandable format? 8:59 What is preventing the client from accessing this data themselves? Anthony’s answer is surprising in that the barriers to entry are relatively low but the penetration rate of clients actually requesting this data natively is very low. 11:08 I ask Anthony how they are able to fulfil the data privacy requirements of GDPR, and what data they are actually able to legally display within their own organisation. 14:47 Anthony walks us through how Finfo onboards a new client, and how they go about giving them visibility of the data which could generate an easy return on investment with regard to going after the low hanging fruit. 18:14 The savings figure in Year 1 that Anthony alludes to is an eye-popping number you won’t want to miss if you’re an IT or telecoms procurement professional! 21:41 Beyond year 1, how does Finfo manage to deliver value beyond implementing the initial quick wins? 23:01 How procurement category managers can benefit from a third party provider (such as Finfo) as a means to having better knowledge of their competitive position with regard to their contract terms with telecomms and printer/copier suppliers. 26:05 I ask Anthony to give me the elevator pitch of how Procurement Managers should be positioning this to persuade budget holders to invest in tools to assist with cost transparency How to connect with Anthony: Anthony's LinkedIn profile finfo website Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder app Sign up for the Procurement Software Newsletter <a...

Larger organisations tend to use enterprise level ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle, neither of which are particularly user-friendly. In fact, the average person who only uses them to request, approve or receive goods and services will usually find them cumbersome to the point that they find ways around them. Organisations typically react to this by offering solutions such as punch-out catalogues and P-cards, or even third-party integrators and BPO to deal with tail spend. Smaller and medium-sized organisations either don't have an ERP system (particularly for rapidly scaling startups), or they have a sales / accounts-oriented solution like Xero, Sage or Netsuite. In all of these situations, there isn't really much opportunity to have visibility of requisition and order tracking, as well as what is being spent against which budget in a format easily visible to users and budget holders. My guest this week is the CEO of Canadian scale-up Procurify, who are making waves through their super user-friendly P2P software which facilitates a more visible "spend culture" in organisations through its smartphone app first technology and easy to user interface. How Well Designed P2P Software Can Lead to Improved Spend Awareness: Aman Mann from Procurify 2:14 Aman begins the interview by walking us through what he views as being a good corporate spend culture, and examples of where it can easily go wrong. 5:47 We explore the differences between a healthy corporate culture of spend transparency vs. a more controlling, top-down approach of strict spend control, and how the former can result in a much more autonomy and less bureaucracy. 9:35 Uncontrolled spend vs. transparent spend - what is the difference and what can cause the former vs. the latter? 16:00 We look into two examples: A rapidly growing company that has no ERP system vs. a well-established organisation that has a legacy ERP system in place that does not really cater well to procurement's needs. I ask Aman how Procurify's system can drive benefits and what time savings this typically provides. 22:18 What to do if you already have an existing, legacy ERP system in place? If this has a finance module, what options are there to use a P2P system such as Procurify that has been designed with procurement in mind when there is still a need to use legacy systems for accounts and invoice processing? 25:56 Simple P2P functions such as approvals of requisitions and POs and performing goods receipts have only fairly recently become commonplace via mobile app, whereas travel &amp; expense software has had functionality to submit reports in an app for years. I ask for Aman's thoughts around why this has taken so long to catch up. 29:27 How Aman sees Procurify's product as just a tool which can help as an enabler of how organisations can succeed through company culture and mindset. How to connect with Aman: Procurify website Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder app Sign up for the Procurement Software Newsletter <a...

While many solutions providers in the procuretech space have focused their efforts on automating or simplifying operational procurement, my guest this week is from a company who have used this technology to bring AI-driven benefits to the spend analysis process. Instead of just providing a spend dashboard, Simfoni is seeking to distinguish itself from an increasingly crowded marketplace by offering spend classification, a suggested savings roadmap and risk analysis all in one. We discuss how this can lead to faster decision making, as well as exploring some of the limitations where the procurement skills of the person managing the category will still come into play. Just like a pilot's relationship with an aeroplane's auto-pilot capabilities, AI can do the heavy lifting, but the nuanced expertise of the procurement professional is vital. Leveraging AI to Power Smarter Spend Intelligence: Sreeram Venkitakrishnan from Simfoni 3:10 What is AI-powered spend intellgence? 5:41 I ask Sreeram whether AI capabilities are really that advanced when it comes to classification of PO data and the ability to categorise vendors and individual POs into taxonomies or buckets of similar spend. 10:15 Can a machine or artificial intelligence perform risk analysis? Or is it more around accelerating decision making through making certain pieces of data more accessible? 13:31 We explore how using AI and machine learning can locate the most lucrative cost savings opportunities, which could vastly speed up the amount of time to come up with an expense reduction roadmap from an initial spend analysis. 15:20 Sreeram explains the concept of "should cost analysis", and how market intelligence can be utilised to project what direct materials should cost based on market price intelligence and various sources of commodity price data. 17:32 We discuss how tools like this can facilitate the ability to "hit the ground running" in a new category management position, especially in cases where Buyers and CMs don't have experience of purchasing that particular category before. Will Simfoni and similar tools enable access to more roles for experienced Category Managers with a more generalist background? 20:17 Of the 3 key pillars that Simfoni offers, I ask Sreeram his thoughts on which of them will have the most profound impact over the years to come. 24:10 I muse about some of the same topics coming up in several different interviews that I've done for the podcast and how this is very unlikely to be a coincidence! If you want to stay relevant, ensure you're aware of what these are! How to connect with Sreeram: Simfoni website Sreeram's LinkedIn profile Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder app Sign up for the Procurement Software Newsletter Book an Intro Call and let’s talk all things Digital Procurement! <a...

Preparation for negotiations has long been something that we as procurement professionals know is vitally important, but all too often we're stuck in the weeds with firefighting and process-related administrative work to do what we should be doing. Add to this the difficulties we also face in obtaining the necessary market data. Maybe your organisation has stopped subscribing to commodity price data channels because the subscriptions are too expensive Or you're new to a category and you don't know how to pull this data. Perhaps your predecessor stored the Excel spreadsheets on his/her C drive or on some far flung corner of Sharepoint that you're not aware of. We've all been there. Time is scarce and access to the necessary knowledge isn't always straightforward. In today's episode, I interview Kent Ledgerwood, VP of Customer Success at LevaData. They're a company who are facilitating easier access to supplier data to help buyers in their negotiation preparation, as well as more general risk management assessment activities related to sourcing and supplier management. Using Cognitive Market and Supplier Intelligence to Cut Negotiation Prep Work: Kent Ledgerwood from LevaData 2:53 I start off by asking Kent whether he believes it's true that Sales typically know their customers better than Procurement knows their suppliers, and what we can do to catch up and level the playing field. 4:48 We go on to discuss how size of company may still impact overall perceived buying power. However, it no longer necessarily means better access to market intelligence and certainly doesn't mean ability to act faster. 6:43 Kent explains how there is a sweeping change of collaboration in diverse industries between buyer and customer, in order to become more innovative, maintain margins and be faster to market. Democratisation of data and the ability to open up is changing the way business is done. 8:51 Will this trend happen faster in certain industries than others? 9:59 We discuss to what extent having perfect knowledge of the market and of the supplier can assist a negotiation preparation, and why AI will still rely on the human at the other end and their ability to be able to interpret the data to facilitate them in making informed decisions. 11:26 How "big data" can give you the insights to how your organisation is performing in relation to not only the market, but also compared to other peer companies in the same industry? 13:49 What are the limitations of what a machine can provide vs. where does the human knowledge of the Commodity / Category Manager come in to complement this augmented intelligence? 16:03 How cognititve data can assist with New Product Introduction (NPI) through its analysis a Bill of Materials (BoM) to ensure that pricing can be optimised in real time in collaboration with both Engineering and Procurement. 18:23 We look into how intelligence of actual costs in the marketplace can ensure speed and effectiveness in sourcing, and how this can also avoid unsubstantiated budgets driven from financial controllers without the benefits of market insight. 21:22 Risk management is the buzzword of late, but no platform will completely eliminate all of your potential supply chain disruption. We explore the benefits as well as the limitations of this, as well as looking deeper into 2nd and 3rd tier vendors and how they can be analysed to spot potential risk. 24:54 Certain geopolitical risks are easier to predict vs. less predictable risk such as the emergence and rapid spread of Covid-19. I ask Kent to what extent good data is necessary in order to provide the necessary intelligence in the context of risk to your supply chain. His answer is surprising and unexpected... How to connect with Kent: <a href="https://www.levadata.com"...

Accounts payable issues are something that we as procurement professionals shouldn't really need to get involved in but inevitably we do. In these instances, our role is usually the equivalent of a fire extinguisher. It performs no added value and very rarely do we receive any recognition for it. So why does it land in our inbox? Because, well, where does the buck stop when the supplier hasn't been paid or invoices have been lost? Yup, that's right. If we own the vendor relationship, then you can bet your bottom dollar that we'll hear about it when AP are underperforming. There are lots of reasons why this happens. Broken processes, poor onboarding of new staff, reliance on sending invoices by post or email, as well as high attrition rates within AP teams can all lead to a less than optimal process. My guest on today's show walks us through how automation can lead to productivity gains of up to 70% and redeployment of staff from administrative processes to more analytical work. This is a great example of how developing countries have leapfrogged us in the West to come up with a truly remarkable solution, and that innovation is everywhere. Automating Accounts Payable: Veekshith C. Rai on how to eliminate human error and non-value added admin 3:10 Veekshith walks through the 5 main areas that a CFO typically needs to cover off, and how Finly has contributed to automating these. 4:21 Why did Finly decide to include a procurement module? Learn how non-PO spend is much more common within Indian companies and how they were able to adapt a solution to accommodate this. 8:09 Veekshith talks about how automation can increase departmental productivity by ca. 70% and that smart companies can redelpoy the headcount saved through this to more added value tasks. 12:09 We talk about specifically the procurement modules and whether these can be used as stand-alone options without the need for ERP integration, and the pros and cons of doing this. 15:26 Because procurement teams typically don't have an IT or capex budget, persuading the business to invest in procuretech is usually a laborious and difficult task. Especially if there are no guaranteed P&amp;L savings. I ask Veekshith his thoughts on whether selling directly to CFOs (because this is predominantly a finance tool) is easier than going through procurement. His answer is super interesting and also gives an insight into how corporate structure and governance in India is different 19:24 I ask Veekshith about his plans to conquer the US and European market and he explains some of the challenges of making this a reality. His answer was startling and was a huge eye-opener of how far behind our banking systems are in more mature markets vs. more innovative players in emerging economies. 21:58 This is a competitive space, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. I therefore ask Veekshith as a final question what he sees as Finly's USP, especially in light of their plans to enter more competitive markets. How to connect with Veekshith: Finly website Veekshith's LinkedIn Profile Veekshith's Twitter Account Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your...

Although it may not seem that way as we emerge from Covid-19, the war for talent is just about to get real. The thing is, it's the war for the right talent. If you're in a fairly generic, operational procurement role then I HIGHLY recommend you listen to this episode and take ACTION before you find yourself in a role that's becoming obsolete, thanks to the unstoppable march of technology and automation. In this episode I'm joined by experienced recruiter Martin Smith of Talent Drive, a UK based recruitment agency specialising in Procurement and Supply Chain roles. We discuss the impact of Covid-19, immediate and longer term trends as the importance of "bums on seats" in the office from 9 to 5 every day diminishes and as technology plays an ever more important role in how procurement teams achieve their results. Recruiting Procurement Talent for The Digital Age - Martin Smith from Talent Drive 4:23 Martin goes into what the market is likely to look like post-lockdown and how employers will be forced to move with the times if the marketplace for top talent stays competitive. 7:26 We explore the impact this could have on salaries and benefits, and how employees could value softer benefits going forward as access to technology and telecommuting becomes the norm. 9:11 Will salary become less important as time goes on, as employees tend to value flexibility over remuneration? 11:51 I ask Martin his thoughts about fixed-term contracts and the increase of interim managers, as companies become more savvy about having flexible resourcing to cover peaks and troughs in demand and workload on a project-specific basis. 17:26 Martin and I go (educated) crystal ball gazing into how procurement organisations of the future may look. If you’re worried about whether your skills are relevant, or if your role could become redundant or obsolete in future, this is something you REALLY need to listen to and define an action plan. A robot may be able to do your job in 10 years time. This is your wake-up call. 22:08 We discuss how operational and tactical procurement roles will likely not exist in a few years time in more progressive companies who are focused on added value and driving the business forward, rather than technocratic, process obsessed procurement teams. 23:13 I have a bit of a rant about how procurement professionals are still predominantly tied up in non-value added tasks and administrative work! Then I ask Martin about his thoughts on the biggest change in skills that employers will seek from procurement professionals as we go full speed ahead into a digital age, where soft skills and the ability to influence stakeholders will play an ever-increasing role. 27:08 We round off the interview looking at how certain roles currently not in procurement may at some point be part of the organisation, and also discuss where procurement’s reporting line is likely to be as we move more into Industry 4.0. 29:00 Finally, I ask Martin for his 3 tips of how procurement professionals can improve their relevance (and their employability) in a changing market. How to connect with Martin: Talent Drive website Talent Talks podcast Martin's LinkedIn profile Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our <a...

Procurement has an image problem. We're often seen as the department our stakeholders and business partners run to when they have a problem that requires an immediate reaction. We're often brought in to extinguish the fire extinguisher, but rarely to prevent them from happening. So, how do we move from being a reactionary department seemingly in servitude to our stakeholders, to a better respected business partner that is seen as a value generator. Part of the solution is making our contribution to the organisation better known and more visible. We're not just a department that fulfils our annual cost savings targets. We also provide a whole lot of other value that often goes unmeasured, but where individual business partners are more directly impacted. It's here where we discuss how better awareness and communication of these initiatives, and a common mechanism to measure and track these, can make a huge difference to how procurement is perceived internally as a credible business partner. My guest this week on the show is Pierre Laprée, CEO of Per Angusta. They're a French company who have developed and successfully implemented a tool that tracks total procurement performance in major businesses. Measuring Procurement's True Value to the Business – Pierre Laprée from Per Angusta 3:12 Pierre explains his background and how he went from Procurement Director to SaaS startup entrepreneur, by way of seeing a clear problem that needed solving and having the foresight and confidence to jump in with both feet to develop a solution! 6:17 I ask Pierre's thoughts on why procurement is often misunderstood. Whether he sees it as a lack of corporate understanding of what procurement actually does, or whether culturally it's just that we're still seen as being an administrative function. 7:43 Technology is not the solution to all problems. If the organisational structure is immature and a CFO is too blinkered to acknowledge procurement performance beyond just hard savings, there's no magic bullet. 8:42 We discuss the dangers of only measuring cost savings, and what can be done about this in terms of wider value recognition. 10:22 Pierre explains how performance tracking can be expanded to other financial and value-driven contributions that are not as obviously visible in the P&amp;L. 12:56 There is a value bomb dropped here, around how small steps with value generation and achieving "more with less" can build trust on a longer term basis with key stakeholders. 15:10 We discuss mechanisms of how cost avoidance can be measured and recognised, and how designating and agreeing a model for this requires interdepartmental alignment right from the outset. 22:32 Is data quality imperative to get results and buy-in from using the tool? We talk about the issue of potential lack of consistency and reporting standards across different countries and business units. 26:22 Rounding off the interview, the benefits of open platforms and interconnectivity. There is much more flexibility when it comes to using best-of-breed solutions vs. a one-size-fits-all enterprise level procuretech software. How to connect with Pierre: Pierre's LinkedIn profile Per Angusta website Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech...

We've often spoken about different software solutions and certain, specific areas of the Procurement flight deck which can be automated or digitised. Here, we're taking a step back and looking more holistically at dissecting a project from the conception, right the way through to after installation and commissioning has been completed and managing the performance of the vendor throughout the duration of the contract. Sourcing a vendor, contracting with them, and then actually orchestrating an enterprise level digital transformation in procurement is no easy task. My guest on this episode, Karthik Rama, who goes by the pseudonym "Procurement Doctor", has done this several times and shares his knowledge with us around what to consider when, and what the most common pitfalls are for the uninitiated. Dissecting a Digital Transformation – Karthik Rama is the Procurement Doctor 2:15 Karthik explains his unique skill set and how this has served him well when being able to communicate with both procurement and technical / IT stakeholders. 3:00 Assuming procurement has the ownership of this initiative, then at what point should the project manager involve IT and start building relationships with the function? 4:45 How to go about understanding the marketplace. With all of the market intelligence out there, is there a still a need to do an RFI? 8:04 We discuss organisational maturity and how this is such a key factor to the success or failure of a procurement digital transformation 9:23 How to tackle the obvious problem that no buyer is likely to be an expert on this type of software, unless they're coming from an organisation which has already implemented procuretech. 11:15 The most common mistakes made during the RFP / vendor selection phase, and how to avoid making them! 14:32 Karthik shares his experiences of how open SaaS vendors are to negotiation during the contract process? 15:58 The vital importance of having an A player heading up the implementation of a digital transformation, as opposed to somebody who just has the bandwidth from a workload perspective. Karthik also shares a nugget of advice around which role specifically could be the best person to lead the implementation. 18:55 What works best in terms of mix when it comes to outsourcing certain aspects of a complex implementation to consultants, versus which functions or aspects of the project are better retained in-house? 20:57 Potential issues or watch-outs which could be lurking out there post-implementation and why hypercare period is key to ensure a successful handover. 24:33 When the project has been handed over, how does the day-to-day governance work from that point onwards? What happens when there are issues? Which ones has Karthik seen most frequently? 27:28 Typical contact periods, and pros and cons of going for shorter or longer agreements. 29:23 How to connect with Karthik: Karthik's LinkedIn profile Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder app Sign up for the Procurement Software...

Technological capabilities are changing fast. While it can sometimes sound like a cliché, there are tasks which can be aided by robots now that can massively expand our knowledge and remove what previously would have been many hours of administrative work. In this show, we dig into what artificial intelligence (AI) can do to aid sourcing and buying teams, and how machine learning and cognitive buying can expand our knowledge of the supply base, as well as removing many hours of work from the source-to-PO process. Game Changing AI – Benoit Larrieu from Silex 3:18 What actually is AI and what is the difference between AI and machine learning? 6:20 Benoit walks through a couple of practical examples of how a tool such as Silex can help procurement departments work more effectively by analysing the market's capabilities as well as all internal data on the incumbent supply base. 10:17 How "clustering" can enable sourcing teams to find potential suppliers on the market for specific items or components, in cases where a buyer may not have the necessary knowledge of the marketplace. 14:22 Benoit explains how Silex gathers market intelligence on so many different suppliers out there, enabling them to do the heavy lifting on behalf of the buyer. 15:53 We discuss how a tool such as this is not only used to derive greater savings. The real advantage is often seen as the ability to have greater market intelligence and a better synposis of the supply base in all countries. 18:34 How an AI-driven tool together with the human ability to think and evaluate effectively can be a killer combination when fuelling sourcing decisions.The consideration of total landed costs, coupled with the robot-powered intelligence of who can supply what in which country / region. 21:01 Using AI to serve both larger corporate clients as well as smaller businesses, and how it could potentially benefit both depending on the project and objectives. 22:48 How Silex can be used as a stand-alone tool with individual modules in the cloud, or can be integrated into customers' ERP systems. 25:51 What's next for Silex and how they plan to scale and grow their offering. How to connect with Benoit: Benoit's LinkedIn profile Silex website Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder app Sign up for the Procurement Software Newsletter Book an Intro Call and let’s talk all things Digital Procurement! Connect with James on LinkedIn

Marketing spend is one of those areas which often goes untouched. While many larger companies don't have a policy of having procurement manage this spend, smaller companies and especially startups don't have in-house procurement teams but nonetheless, they still have a considerable marketing budget as they grow and scale as a business. Enter Sarah Scudder, my guest on this podcast. Sarah is a marketing services procurement expert and also the co-founder of a software company which helps companies procure print media. We dive into how most requests and POs for marketing spend are for print and promotional items. While this creates most of the work, it's often often not where the real value is delivered, this being high frequency but low PO value in nature. By optimising and automating this, marketing procurement can add more value on where the big bucks are spent, on digital and visual media. Marketing &amp; Promotional Spend – Sarah Scudder from Real Sourcing Network 2:47 Sarah explains how buying marketing services is different to many other categories, and how bringing procurement in to manage their vendors can often be contentious. 5:14 Why difficulty at the beginning to engage and persuade stakeholders shouldn't put you off, and why marketing spend is a huge untapped opportunity that has a great potential to bring home some fast savings. 6:49 Sarah sheds some light on why senior marketing leaders are often prickly when procurement want to come onto their patch and manage their spend. 8:41 Why digital media and print media, as the main big buckets of marketing spend in most companies, are 2 very different beasts. 10:35 We dig into some specifics of print media and how it fits into the classic 80/20 pareto of it being 20% of the spend but 80% of the workload and total vendor count. 13:18 Sarah introduces how sourceit as a tool can assist with reducing workload and making processes transparent when it comes to sourcing print media requirements, both as an internally hosted catalogue for frequently purchased items as well as a guided RFQ process for one-time buys. 17:30 Why print media has many different nuances that are tricky to take into consideration if you don't have a strong background in procuring the category, and how sourceit already take this into account as part of the guided RFQ process. 19:20 Sarah walks through how, unlike most e-sourcing solutions, sourceit offers a mixture of both an outsourced procurement service for organisations who don't have their won marketing procurement, as well as the SaaS product as a stand alone solution for bigger organisations who just want to increase their productivity. 21:40 We get down to talking turkey about how to convince the business to use this type of solution in terms of hard and soft benefits. 28:08 Now is a better time than ever to penetrate marketing organisations and reach out to gain influence over their spend, as budgets are cut and they are having to deliver more with less. How to connect with Sarah: Sarah's LinkedIn profile sourceit website Real Sourcing Network website Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our <a href="https://store.procurementsoftware.site/tech-map-for-smes" target="_blank"...

Managing contracts can be a massive time suck but also an often under-utilised way of mining for gold when it comes to discovering savings opportunities. In this podcast, I speak to Daniel Barnes of Ikaros Consultancy. Daniel is a law graduate and also recently launched his own podcast, World of Procurement. We talk about how the human touch, combined with automation of repetitive tasks, is the best solution when considering how to best manage your supplier contracts. Contract Management – Daniel Barnes from Ikaros Consultancy 2:42 Daniel explains how he landed into the contract management space in the procurement world. 6:30 How Daniel took his experience working on government defence contracts and was able to take these key learnings into the private sector and civilian industries. 7:38 Are there significant differences in approach when considering smaller businesses versus larger corporates? 9:45 How the technology and resources could be different depending on the size of the business and the amount of contracts processed in any given organisation. 11:28 I ask Daniel whether it's better to approach contract management by size of spend basis first and foremost, or by category. The answer he gave was not what I was expecting. 13:20 A funny story of the building with no windows which nonetheless had £100k of invoices for replacement of windows. 16:00 We talk technology, and the advantages and limitations of using tech to be able to make contract management easier. 20:52 Why a digital contract management solution will only work if your organisation is ready to embrace it and your existing systems and processes can support it. 22:40 How to build a business case for a contract management solution. Is it primarily cost avoidance? And if so, how to convince a CFO to part with their budget to implement a solution to successfully manage it? 25:52 Does operational and tactical procurement have a future? Daniel has some pretty strong views on how these roles will likely be eliminated over the coming years. How to connect with Daniel: Daniel's LinkedIn profile Ikaros Consultancy website Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder app Sign up for the Procurement Software Newsletter Book an Intro Call and let’s talk all things Digital Procurement! Connect with James on LinkedIn

Before you can go out there and run a tender and select a provider for all of your digital transformation and procuretech requirements, you need to have an overview of what's out there, and what differentiates the different providers and types of software, right? So, that's why I invited Joël Collin-Demers on the show to give us a Source-to-Contract 101 lesson so as you can get a broad knowledge of what type of solutions are on offer. Joël is a Source-to-Pay (S2P) expert and consultant from Montréal, Canada and has extensive knowledge gained in this field from his time in large organisations. Source-to-Contract Tech 101 – Joël Collin-Demers from Pure Procurement 2:39 "An expert is someone who has seen all of the mistakes you can do in a narrow field" - Joël explains how his experience in consulting makes him a prime candidate to advise clients on their digital procurement requirements. 3:31 Why enterprise level ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle are not necessarily the best systems for procurement teams to pull the data they need. 7:26 Joël explains the difference between P2P and S2C (because I hate acronyms!) in terms of what different pieces of software can do. 10:23 Why traditional ERP systems are great for doing operational purchasing requirements but are less smart at performing strategic procurement tasks. 11:20 How procuretech solutions can be applied both as a complementary function to a legacy ERP system, as well as a stand-alone solution in smaller businesses, and what potential pitfalls need to be considered. 13:53 How different solutions may be required depending on the size of the business, and how this can impact the technical requirements necessary for implementation. 16:23 Is it better for immature procurement organisations to approach this differently and take baby steps first, before going down a complete enterprise level solution? 19:29 We talk about the people factor, and how this is essential in ensuring a successful transformation. 20:33 Optimising resources to be able to take staff from operational or tactical roles into performing more strategic functions, the challenges around doing this, and the importance of having IT alignment when undertaking a digital transformation. 22:39 Joël explains what the next steps should be once there is IT alignment and budget has been signed off, through to the point where you actually select a vendor and move into contracting. 26:16 Why it's vital to do one specific piece of due diligence that many companies simply miss out of their sourcing process, and why it's not as hard as many buyers perceive it to be. How to connect with Joël: Joel's LinkedIn profile Pure Procurement website Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder app Sign up for the Procurement Software Newsletter Book an Intro Call and let’s talk all things Digital...

Anthony is the CEO of Una, a US-based group purchasing organisation from Kansas City. He joins me on this episode of the podcast to explain how digital procurement initiatives don't necessarily need to be complex. It's all about leveraging technology + expertise to hit the sweet spot of saving client organisations both time and money when it comes to managing tail spend with vendors where the buyer would otherwise not have a great deal of buying power. If you're a "C" customer to some of your low spend, non-strategic suppliers and you wished you could get better prices or service from them, this episode should answer some of your questions and curiosities about how group buying could be one solution. He also loves the term "Sourcing Hero", as you'll find out when you listen to the podcast! The Power of Group Buying: Pooling your Non-Strategic Spend to save Costs and Time 1:47 How Anthony became involved with the Una setup and who they serve as their client base. 4:06 We dig into how group purchasing is not a new concept per se, and how Una's model has put a unique spin on how to best serve the downtrodden "Sourcing Hero". 8:34 Who Una focuses on with their client acquisition strategy, and what they see as the key strategy areas where a GPO model can add the most value to a small, under-resourced procurement team. 10:00 Some of the challenges encountered when selling the advantages of a GPO to potential clients, and how educating the prospective client is often a major factor in convincing them that there really can be a win-win outcome to combining spend to leverage better pricing from otherwise non-core categories. 12:49 Why a consultative and educational approach can allow clients to concentrate on more strategic categories of spend, while relinquishing control of the long tail of non-core spend can deliver ongoing savings and a well-managed process virtually on auto pilot. 15:07 The 3 ways how a buyer &amp; supplier matching service such as a GPO can potentially make money, and how Una approaches this with their business model. 18:35 The approach Una takes to offering up-sell services in cases where clients may be seeking a more hands-on approach to strategic sourcing support and consulting services. 20:15 How Una plans to expand and grow, utilising technological developments which can be leveraged to better manage client and supplier data. 22:06 That old chestnut...DATA QUALITY...that just keeps coming up!! How to connect with Anthony: Anthony's LinkedIn profile Anthony's personal brand website Una's website Stay in touch! Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder app Sign up for the Procurement Software Newsletter Book an Intro Call and let’s talk all things Digital Procurement! <a href="https://linkedin.com/in/james-meads/"...

Sarah from Let's Talk Supply Chain and Shipz joined me for a great chat about how digital trends are shaping the wider supply chain industry, and how procurement fits neatly into that. We both agree that increased collaboration and the developing trend of both functions reporting into the same line can only be a good thing when it comes to better alignment of business objectives and delivering value to organisations. Supply Chain Digitisation - Sarah Barnes-Humphrey from Let's Talk Supply Chain 2:01 Sarah's story of how she went from the family business to Let's Talk Supply Chain as a stand alone full-time business and how this has spawned various spin-offs and sub-niches. 6:00 Is Supply Chain ahead of the curve with digitalisation versus Procurement? 10:10 We talk about the concept of a Chief Value Officer as Head of both SC and Procurement, and how continuity of supply and cost savings could be meshed into one overarching objective for both functions to deliver. This joined up thinking could drive benefits across the business through better alignment of objectives. 12:01 Procurement's lack of involvement in managing the spend of the Supply Chain function and how this total cost of operation is still quite siloed in many organisations, with often minimal procurement involvement in the supplier relationship management of logistics vendors. 13:56 How can technology help to propel Supply Chain out of the Covid-19 crisis? What types of innovations could be key? 16:05 Sarah touches on issues with legacy 3PL IT systems, and we talk about how a lot of 3PL and 4PL vendors don't have fully integrated systems across all functions and how this can lead to a data deficit when evaluating optimisation opportunities. 18:00 We talk about 2 possible scenarios to deal with increased supply chain volatility in future, and the different potential consequences depending on which of these approaches an organisation decides to take. 19:50 Will more statistical modelling become popular when it comes to considering total LIFETIME cost, considering aspects such as TCO, risk management, capex investment and impact on inventory held? What other technology is out there already which will be adopted much faster by organisations when we emerge from the crisis? 23:23 We discuss how innovation is driving the trend for larger companies to partner with and get to know innovative startups. The future will likely see more collaboration in this space between medium-sized companies and startups, rather than just large corporates, in order to ensure they don't get left behind. 25:20 How being forced into remote work is actually proving to be popular and is likely to become mainstream post Covid-19. 26:08 We touch on the remote work and geo-arbitrage opportunities that this could drive and how this could be of benefit to both employer and employee from a cost perspective. 27:37 Sarah talks about her new startup which helps to match SME shippers with ocean and airfreight forwarders, her goal and vision for the business and how it plugs a gap in the current market. How to connect with Sarah: Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn Let's Talk Supply Chain website (includes links to podcast and YouTube channel) Shipz website How to connect with James: Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our <a...

Susan Walsh is The Classification Guru, bringing you affordable solutions to clean up your data before undertaking any digital transformation project. Dirty data is the scourge of most organisations, both large and small. We discuss the approach, the root causes of poor data, what to do about it, and how maintaining key data is the key. Doing it once and then washing your hands of the problem is a recipe for disaster! Fixing your Dirty Data - Get your data classified, so you can deliver savings opportunities or commence your digital transformation 2:05 Susan's story of how she became a data specialist, from quite an unconventional work experience history! 6:45 Why starting with the basics and making data FUN is core to Susan's approach to data. 7:25 Where to get started if you're a complete beginner to the topic of cleaning your data. A "Data 101" of how to get the basics in place and what the best first steps to take should be. 9:20 Consistency is key - the first rule of data classification. Using a master taxonomy that sits above any local level data classification. 10:12 The first step: Supplier normalisation (vendor master harmonisation) to remove duplicate records of the same vendor. 11:31 Once vendor records have been harmonised, Susan then explains how the next steps are really dependent upon the client's setup and to what level of detail they wish to categorise their data. 13:32 What is the recommended programme for ongoing follow-up and data cleansing reviews? We dig in to how much ongoing maintenance is necessary, depending on the specifics of each case. 15:49 Proactive roles which can be playes to ensure data governance is given the necessary importance in roles and responsibilities throughout teams. 18:58 Susan gives her best answer to anyone facing the conundrum of how to put together a business case for senior leaders to sign off on the costs of a data cleansing initiative. 20:58 The opportunity cost question: Is it more cost effective to do this in-house? Why would you task your category managers or procurement analysts with this, when it's not their core job? 22:30 Ownership of data (or lack of!) Why this conundrum scuppers most organisations, and what can be done to change this. Where should data ownership sit, especially in a larger organisation? 24:29 The role that a Chief Data Officer could play in future, and how this could disarm some of the politics of "who's data is this anyway"? Useful Links: Art of Procurement Episode 301 How to connect with Susan: The Classification Guru website Susan's LinkedIn profile How to connect with James: Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder app Sign up for the Procurement Software Newsletter <a href="https://calendly.com/jamesmeads/30-minute-intro-call" target="_blank"...

Stephany Lapierre from rapidly-growing supplier data startup Tealbook joins me on this week's episode of The Procuretech Podcast. We talk about all things machine learning when it comes to getting clean, meaningful vendor data without the need for "push" based solutions from vendors or master data analysts. With poor data and lack of in-house resources or capabilities often cited as a major objection to why firms decide not to purchase enterprise level procuretech for their digital transformation initiatives, this one is a real game changer. Vendor Data: Single Source Of Truth - Stephany Lapierre From Tealbook 1:31 The spark behind what drove Stephany to found Tealbook 4:18 Educating executives of hyper-growth companies of the importance of procurement early on in their growth journey 5:32 What the biggest inhibitor was for these companies when it came to making trusted decisions. 7:31 Why getting 100% visibility of who you do business with, and who you SHOULD do business with, is vital. 9:10 How Tealbook uses big data and machine learning to clean and enrich supplier data, and how this removes reliance on "push" systems of vendor master data management. 11:05 The "eureka" moment for Tealbook and the pivot which changed their direction. 14:14 When you have good data, then the opportunities of what you can utilise it for are endless. 15:06 Case study of improvement in supplier diversity data. Using Tealbook's machine learning dug up 1,600 additional suppliers that were missed through internal audit / validation system in a Fortune 500 company's native reporting mechanism. 17:22 Why digital transformation doesn't succeed on its own, and why poor data will ultimately scupper any enterprise level procuretech software implementation. 18:21 Tealbook as the data foundation that powers the software market, rather than a stand-alone solution. 20:20 If your supplier date is independently in the cloud and is self-enriching, then just plug it in to a 2-way integration. No IT resources or ERP integration necessary. 23:32 Partnering with the larger S2P and P2P software providers, and how this strategy will ultimately help the software providers to remove a common objection (poor vendor data) to signing up to a contract with them. 26:29 Grab your free supplier report for Covid-19 mitigation efforts. 29:20 Webinar series --&gt; check out Tealbook's website for more info. How to connect with Stephany and Tealbook: Stephany's LinkedIn profile Tealbook's LinkedIn Page Tealbook website Free Report to help with Covid-19 mitigation How to connect with James: Download our Tech Map for Enterprise Download our Tech Map for Mid-Market Download our Tech Map for SMEs Find your perfect procurement tech solution in our Software Finder app Sign up for the Procurement Software Newsletter Book an Intro Call and let’s talk

Eddie McGeachie from Seaforth Analytics and Accelerated Insight joins me on The Procuretech Podcast today to discuss how data and supply chain analytics have shaped his career over the years. We dive into how his company now helps boutique procurement consultancies and direct clients to understand the data from disparate systems and formats, and how understanding data . I've long been a proponent of getting your data ducks in a row, so this was one long, golden nugget of an interview for me. So much so that I just let Eddie keep dropping bombs of value, and even after a fair bit of editing I was still about 10 minutes over our usual episode length! Warning: If you're not a native English speaker, you might have to listen slowly to understand Eddie's Glaswegian accent - it's a tough dialect! - but you will get TONS to ponder after listening to this. Agile Analytics: How Seaforth Analytics' solutions deliver cost modelling and savings across diverse sectors 1:45 Eddie explains how his long and successful career eventually led him to the Supply Chain Analytics space. 5:32 Good fortune allowed Eddie to be in a job where he was given the freedom to work 25% of his time on passion projects. Learn what he decided to work on. 7:08 Getting the basics in place first. I offer up 3 fundamentals of what every procurement department should get in order and then ask Eddie for his take. His answer was not what I expected: surprising but very insightful. 9:10 Eddie explains the importance of procurement and supply chain having a presence at the top table, both to increase influence and to be seen as a value driver rather than an overhead. 11:29 Why being able to understand the same language that all stakeholders speak and being able to "get" where each department or affected party is coming from is vital 14:00 Eddie explains the value of finding the pivotal person in any organisation at the beginning. The person who understands at source what data and queries can be pulled from the existing systems in place. Usually, he mentions, they don't sit in procurement. 17:03 I ask who are Seaforth's client base typically and what different type of products and services are on offer. 17:58 Is the analysis performed a one-off exercise, or can they integrate with existing ERP systems? 19:10 How the Accelerated Insight tool brought together 150 disparate files on one procurement transformation project, and why having the data on its own is not enough. You need to understand what the data is actually telling you. 20:58 We discuss the bane of free text POs and how to make the best of a bad situation with imperfect data. Eddie provides an example of how this led to spotting a valuable irregularity, or can also be used to spot patterns of potential fraudulent transactions. 26:30 I ask whether there are specific categories which are better suited to their tools and analytics. 28:20 How price anomalies can be easily exposed from the analytics they can run, without the need to manually check invoices at first. 29:35 We discuss whether these findings can apply to direct or indirect materials alike. 31:34 Why Eddie believes that data science techniques and fundamentals should possibly be part of the CIPS qualification or at least general procurement onboarding training in large corporates. How can you get in touch with Eddie? Accelerated Insights website Seaforth Analytics website Eddie's LinkedIn profile Contact Eddie by...