Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

A good Article by industry analyst - Jason Buch on SAP Spend management solution - SAP Spend Performance Management: Supply Risk Meets Spend Analysis Posted At : March 30, 2010 11:10 AM Posted By : Editor Related Categories: Jason Busch, Spend Management For years, SAP and Oracle largely punted on the spend analysis area, providing a large opportunity for other vendors to gain a foothold inside companies in a critical Spend Management area. In the past two quarters, however, both SAP and Oracle have gotten serious about releasing entirely new spend analysis tools that acknowledge the need for looking beyond just ERP systems data and dumping raw information into a data warehouse. SAP in particular has moved past solving basic multi-system and source spend data challenges, which they now accomplish through a combination of SAP extractors for ECC and SRM as well as a data integration ETL capability for non-SAP systems, not to mention support for integrating third-party data feed...

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 ...

In his first ever article in 2010 on his blog spendmatters, titled Wish you Happy New Year 2009 , Jason Buch started it with a question - "Wouldn't you like to forget 2009? " As an industry observer and analyst I will say NO. Not lot many of you agree with me I know, as it was an upside down for many of us. But lets think - in which decade there was no such situation in one or the other front somewhere ? So this is a phenomenon continues. Whether that affects individual life or not - that person will see it as a good or bad. Now being in the big economy was bound to affect sometime - which it did. Just like a tsunami devastated many, a year prior to that. Now lets look at what happened good in 2009 - the first and foremost - overall manufacturing, support, logistics, supply chain and IT and hundreds of ancillary sector went through a matuarity curve. The things that were irrelevant or not so critical in the chain started vanishing. Everything now is being attached wit...

Hello, Wish you all and your Family Very Very Happy New Year 2010. May all your dreams come true and life filled with Happiness this year. I am sure this year is going to be a wonderfully hectic on work front. Now sometimes yes hectic is not so wonderful, but most of the times I enjoy it. We all know that the analytics industry is all buzzing and getting matured after long learning curve. Till 2 years back, supply chain analytics or spend analysis was game of more nische players whereas big guns looking at it as "something that we dont have to do", "its not our thing" attitude. Big ERP players was more into application integrated with their systems and data management activities was always service delivery thing with speciality companies doing good like - Ariba, Zycus, Emptoris, Bravo to name few. Now 2008 and 2009 saw sudden changes in that landscape. As economy was fragile and people started looking at optimization as the solution, everybody including big ERP pl...

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...