Skip to main content

Spend Analysis - What to choose product or solution ?

More and more I study the vendors and their spend analysis solutions, methodologies in this big big market place of procurement spend, strategic sourcing and related areas, I wonder if there is more gap between "product" and "solutions". Everybody is trying to jump and say "here is more automated solution", "if you can do it in 10 hrs - here I am with 6 hrs", "If you get it for 100 $, here I am with 80$" and likewise on all other comparable factors. Yes, the market is competitive and customers are well educated - so marketing yourself well, providing fastest turnaround and proposing competitive pricing is required and much needed in crowded market. But thats for the short term I guess. In longer term - more and more customer education is required to make them aware of Solution rather than a product. Now, whats the difference?

Is anybody working with customers in identifying their organizational spend analysis goals -  short term, mid term and long term ? Short term could be - 6 to 8 months, mid term is 20 to 24 months and long term is around 40-48 months. In a haste to provide "my" solution, is anybody working with customer to create roadmap? Is there a extensive assessment going on before somebody says - and if for this situation there is this roadmap - which will have you results after 10 months only. Or people just saying - whatever is your situation, my solution accomodates "all" you needs - just give me business.

What would be the ideal "Solution" for customer -
1. No one size fit all solution
2. No "product" proposal - but a roadmap proposal for identifying and recognizing savings
3. A roadmap to understand- if commodity is important, if grography, a business organization or specific system that needs attention

I think customer also needs to know - just throwing few thousand dollars, looking at fancy "automated" solutions and getting spend classified in minutes is not the end goal. Does these provides real savings end of the "term" (not day). Is vendor consultants capable of understanding "your" business, can they convert the numbers into savings - or they bunch of people sitting and saying your "air ticket" to be classified as "travel" and not "you have opportunity to leverage on hotel deal than air travel".

Thanks
Prashant Mendki
pmendki (at) gmail (dot) com

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Bristlecone Webinar on Supplier Risk Management

Purchasing Magazine, Bristlecone and SAP getting together to bring you very good discussion on supplier risk management. Webinar will be held on June 24, 2 to 3 PM eastern Time, USA. Contributors are - Paul Teague from Purchasing magazine , Jason Buch from spendmatters , Naresh Hingorani from Bristlecone - Supply chain leader company and Padmini Ranganathan from SAP. As we always talk about spend visibility, data issues, strategic sourcing - these distinguised speakers will bring out more strategic views to the table on how all this can be achieved to analyze your business risks better, upfront. You can register for event by accessing this link and register See you there.

Master Data Management – Product or Process ?

I have 2 SAP systems and I want to fix my material master, Services Master. I want all that data to be clean, standardized, classified, enriched and load it back to my SAP in next 6 months. What do you suggest ? Chris - one of my key client was explaining during a “solution understanding” call. My sales manager Tom, enthusiastically started talking about new version of the MDM platform by ERP company, tools, technologies, product landscape, licenses etc. After 30 minutes of sales pitch, I could see confusion on Chris’s face clearly. He said - but I don’t want to add any new product in my infrastructure for all this. Can you just implement MDM for me without I adding any new software ?   Both are using MDM implementation as a keyword, but in a completely different context. Chris wants to implement MDM as a process while Tom was trying to sell MDM as a new software. Whats the difference ? Lot I will say. MDM as a product – when you sell a   software license to a...

Data Management - Elephant & Seven Blind Men

I am sure most of you read a story of Elephant and Seven Blind Men. For starters - this is how the story goes - "A number of blind men came to an elephant. Somebody told them that it was an elephant. The blind men asked, ‘What is the elephant like?’ and they began to touch its body. One of them said: 'It is like a pillar.' This blind man had only touched its leg. Another man said, ‘The elephant is like a husking basket.’ This person had only touched its ears. Similarly, he who touched its trunk or its belly talked of it differently." As Wikipedia mentions - This story has been used to illustrate a range of truths and fallacies. At various times it has provided insight into the relativism, opaqueness or inexpressible nature of truth, the behavior of experts in fields where there is a deficit or inaccessibility of information, the need for communication, and respect for different perspectives. The moral of the story is - While one's subjective experience...