Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

This week I came across an interesting report from a leading player in startegic sourcing and spend analysis - Zycus titled "Zycus path-to-procurement-excellence A CPO’s complete reference guide to sustainable performance improvement through strategic sourcing and procurement management ". A long name but a crisp document to guide you on practices and processes around strategic sourcing. An impressive work done by purchasing magazine and Zycus. It not only talks about the step by step process - a multi year one - to reach to startegic savings goal but also puts up process maturity maps to measure different factors at each step. I will recommend every consultant to surely read and learn from this.

And I opologies for it. Yes I took off for few days from blogging. I had lot of topics to discuss about, had a list of things to put opinion about, as data management industry and specifically spend classification industry is buzzing - new products, new methods, new people and customer is looking at spend analysis like never before. But I had to consoldiate my inputs, put a thought process and then thought about posting lot of things. So here I am ... In next few days/weeks I will be posting all those subject posts here .. so watch the space ...

The current economic scenario (even if it’s started looking little bit good now) demands every CEO, CFO to look for a way to save money from whatever way it comes. Supply Chain, Procurement, Strategic Sourcing are, Supplier Relationship Management are always major focus area for optimization. Spend visibility is one such area in Enterprise Performance Optimization – EPO - which gives a promise to identify potential savings. Now everybody knows there are too many products and players in the industry which claims to provide spend visibility. Sales people always claims to give you moon and pitch products in a way like – “you put the data from this side and see the 10% savings on the dashboard on the other side”. But as we know, in every data sensitive engagement it’s a process behind the product that needs to work on your data before you really gets that dashboard – but that’s not the point for today. The point is do you know what to look for when you see those jazzy reports and dashboar...

These days everybody talks about cost cutting, increasing revenue, how the depression, recession affecting company margins and how the job losses are imminent and so on and so forth. All this is true and real and no doubt everybody is looking at new avenues to struggle with the numbers. Though there is no magic recipe to alter the scenario overnight, lot of people, lot of companies are failing to see optimization chances within the organization and chance of increasing revenue – data in their own systems. What data – everything – right from suppliers, customers, materials. What to look for – Data Quality. The surveys done by few companies in the area estimated that the by managing the data quality one can increase revenue by 66%. Now let’s take that as marketing gimmick on the face, but then assume its half of that – still there is a chance of revenue increase of 33% - do you want to believe that? I do. My experience with large global enterprises in the data area points me to bel...

Last week after I posted third part of my Supplier diversity series of - What Why and How, I got an question from my esteemed senior colleague Ashok Pai, Who works in Supply chain industry worldwide for decades and a Client Partner with Bristlecone, asking "When are you writing about WHO aspect of this?" I replied saying I never thought of that angle, as my basic assumption was that supplier onboarding process is part of strategic sourcing and procurement department chain so those are the people who will be implementing it. And then he mentioned to me that "Look at it from supplier onboarding angle, which is a major pain area for US industry". As I started thinking and researching from that angle, I realized that as a part of diversity implementation its easy to say that run the diversity program in industry, capture supplier attendtion, get the diverse suppliers registered and start doing business with them - its hard to implement. Its really hard to get a new su...

In last two articles we discussed two questions about supplier diversity. Basic one like WHAT is Supplier Diversity and its types , Second most important one for business decision WHY? What are key business drivers to implement supplier diversity? Now the third important question is HOW? What are my key parameters to make this decision on implementing diversity program? What are the steps? How should I determine what are my organizational needs? What is an assessment criterion? Key steps or parameters for your decision matrix would be – 1. Define scope and set your goal – link it to organizational goal so you have good business case 2. Build the internal database; connect with suppliers, make the data complete. 3. Run a diversity program 4. Audit, Monitor and upgrade Understanding your requirements and goal setting is first and important steps for implementing supplier diversity. This will not only enable you to asses and quantify the things for assessment and monitoring your progr...

Last week in a related article we discussed about diversity definitions and what each type means. Now the real question that procurement managers in a enterprise needs to answer when there is a talk about implementing supplier diversity is “Why should we implement Supplier Diversity?”. Once (s)he knows answer to this question, then comes the turn of how to implement it. Today let’s look at the key drivers behind the supplier diversity initiative and how one can not only justify but also build a business case around it to take organization along with you. The basic premise here is - A supplier diversity program will partner your company with businesses that are owned and/or operated by women; African, Hispanic, Asian and Native Americans; gay and lesbian individuals; and veterans. It will also connect you with companies that may have been overlooked because of their size as well as those located in economically distressed areas. Now all that is fine, but do these connections make a bus...