The Procurement Software Podcast

Welcome back to The Procuretech Podcast!

We're continuing our mini series where we ask influencers and industry experts for their thoughts on everything that's happening in the digital procurement world.

Our guest today is a real stalwart in this space, and has had her own website and blog since 2009.

She's seen many changes in her career, both as a Procurement Consultant with a procurement tech company back in the day, and now as an independent blogger, podcaster, and CIO.

Kelly Barner, founder of Buyers Meeting Point and partner at Art of Procurement, a very warm welcome to the show!

The View on Tech from Both Sides - Kelly Barner from Buyers Meeting Point

 

2:02

We open up our conversation with a brief rundown of Kelly's professional background.

How did she make the journey from software consultant to content creator, and beyond?

 

6:34

Current economic headwinds might have Category Managers looking over their shoulders and uncertain about the future.

At the same time, growing procurement tech companies are looking to recruit people with procurement expertise. It seems like a natural transition.

How did Kelly find that transition? And would she recommend taking the leap to anyone considering a career change?

 

9:35

Why former practitioners make for great providers, and the value of having a broad base of experience.

 

10:53

What area of procurement does Kelly think will have the biggest potential impact?

What trends has Kelly seen in her years of experience, and where is the impact highest?

 

11:32

Kelly explains the importance of data and analytics. She also touches on how we need to stop seeing compliance as a dirty word. We should be creating a situation that incentivises compliance naturally.

 

13:38

We discuss the value of content creators when it comes to internal communication. Does Kelly think that internal marketing will become a more in-demand skill going forwards?

 

14:55

Kelly feels that companies won't be quick to purposefully pursue content creators.

Although internal marketing, content creation, and communication are hugely valuable, we're much likely to see that value emerge organically.

 

18:52

To what extent does Kelly think procurement tech will be at the forefront of change, when compared to other factors like sustainability and geopolitical disruption to supply chains?

 

22:25

As we spend less time in tech, it's going to force us to want our tech to do more. And that might leave procurement professionals feeling like their role is in jeopardy.

We need to reassess our role with this in mind and become more value oriented.

 

 23:53

With the direction that Kelly's going with Art of Procurement, to what extent do the increasing number of software solutions play a role in her overall strategy and business model?

 

26:14:

If we want to become closer to the business, not only do we need to do a better job leveraging the full capabilities of digital. There needs to be more integration between procurement's digital footprint, and that of the enterprise as a whole.

 

Connect with Kelly on LinkedIn

Check out Buyers Meeting Point

Enjoy Kelly’s content for Art of Procurement

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

Welcome back to The Procuretech Podcast!

We're continuing our mini series where we ask influencers and industry experts for their thoughts on everything that's happening in the digital procurement world.

Today's guest is a former CEO, CPO and published author. She's also an advisory board member to two very rapidly growing startups.

From CPO to Advising Startups - Joanna Martinez from Supply Chain Advisors

Her mission is to help individuals and businesses understand technology, improve processes and align with stakeholders.

That's the Holy Grail, isn't it?

Let's welcome Joanna Martinez to the podcast, and kick off our chat with a quick recap on her background.

Joanna Martinez – A brief background

Joanna is an engineer by profession. She spent the first third of her career in supply chain roles for Johnson and Johnson. It's a very very diversified company that gives a lot of autonomy to its different units.

So this gave her the chance with everything, from a very rigid, rules-based, process-oriented unit to one that was very much like a startup.

This was a great opportunity for learning. And makes great advice for anyone starting their career – pick a company that's going to offer you a broad range of experience.

Joanna did a stint in procurement, and loved it. She decided that she wanted to focus on helping companies that didn't have the kinds of resources that Johnson and Johnson had to create a purchasing organisation: Working for firms where she would either create a procurement organisation, or fix a broken one.

Twice in the subsequent years, she walked into roles that were vacant because the predecessor went out in handcuffs!

That becomes a very interesting stakeholder engagement learning experience.

And it was a fascinating look into how hard it can be to keep track of data when it comes to audits.

The importance of procurement technology

Joanna's last role as a CPO involved a global company with a corporate stand that was very modest, but they had billions of dollars of client spend that they were processing but not really managing.

Technology was really important there. It allowed that company to differentiate itself against the competition. It wasn't the largest supplier in that space. But they could go forward with what they had: Subject matter experts, the right kind of supplier relationships, a platform that clients could use.

Also Joanna had a really good CEO, who was willing to rethink the kinds of agreements he had in place. That was a huge enabler.

In fact, people would say, “What's your most important supplier?” and Joanna would name a technology provider. Having a platform that was easy for clients to understand was hugely helpful. It allowed them to feel comfortable that Joanna was doing a good job on their behalf.

What drives positive disruption?

Joanna wrote a book called A Guide to Positive Disruption. It's about change management and disruption and making sure that change gets adopted within the workplace.

But what's the key driver there? Is it talent, or technology? Obviously it's a mixture of both, but we ask Joanna where she sits on the see-saw there, in terms of which one makes the most impact.

She says that lots of things can cause disruption – in a way, it's existed since the dawn of time.

But technology is certainly a huge driver now. Today, technology is changing how companies do business, even compared to a few years ago.

It might seem like a good thing to have 20 years of experience on your résumé, but these days that might not be the case! The world has changed so much in the last couple of years.

The pandemic became a great enabler for technology. Everyone seems to be doing things differently to what they did in 2018 and that was only four years ago.

Yes, there's still a value to experience and in-depth subject knowledge. But it's much more important at the moment to be asking questions, to be assessing your practices and asking if you're keeping up.

Pandemic Disruption

The pandemic had a big impact on Joanna's own story, too. Just before the lockdowns, she was having a banner year. She had great sets of assignments coming in, and was gearing up for a series of global talks and workshops.

Obviously that did not come to pass.

But she used the time to reinvent herself, to write a book, and to educate herself on new technologies. She already understood things like blockchain, AI, robotic process automation. But there were other subjects like the metaverse, web 3.0, NFTs that she didn't understand as well.

Joanna wasted no time in educating herself, and even set up a Bitcoin mining operation in a spare bedroom, to better understand it first-hand.

In a way, Joanna ended up disrupting herself by doing this. She could add a whole other area of expertise to her talks. And covering tech from the perspective of someone who's just had to learn this stuff was really helpful to people.

Many of the older generations - Gen X, or baby boomers – they're not digital natives. And having the technology explained that way proved very useful.

Inevitably, someone would approach Joanna after a class and say: “Hey, thanks a lot for explaining this. Because I think I'm the only one in my office who doesn't understand it. Everyone throws around these terms. And I don't want to raise my hand and say, ``I don't understand that.”

So she actually wound up with a whole new workstream, educating people on tech in a jargon-free, understandable way.

What will have the biggest impact – changing roles, or changing tech?

Joanna thinks that in a way, it's both. It's not just the technology, it's what the technology lets you do.

Oddly, it's often the most mundane benefits of technology that have the most impact. For example, things that automate tedious elements like the RFP process.

RFP automation removes all the back-and-forth, all the repetitive emails and meetings and things like that. Sourcing people can now achieve in days what might have taken months in the past.

And wasting time doing those labour-intensive email exchanges isn't a good way to spend time, money, or effort. That's not doing anything for the sourcing profession.

If that person automates the repetitive stuff, they can use the time they've created to do something of more value. Maybe they'll actually put their key suppliers together with their marketing folks, and help the suppliers better understand where the company is headed. That way, the suppliers can devote some energy and some manpower and some research power to making the enhancements that are going to be important for the company.

That's a win/win all around.

Procurement can be notoriously bad at internal communication and marketing with stakeholders. That's an area we really have to improve upon. But in fairness, the reason why is often that Procurement is stuck in the weeds doing administrative jobs. So technology can have a huge benefit there.

Technology won't revolutionise things on its own, but if we apply it correctly, it will give us more free time, and it will give us answers faster. But whether or not we use that time and those answers to communicate better and elevate our profession is, ultimately, in the hands of people.

People often moan about procurement not having a seat at the table. But a lot of important corporate functions don't have a seat at the table either. No-one's going to hand that out.

You need to be showing the business that you are focused on their goals and what they're trying to achieve. Sometimes, that's figuring out a way to lower costs, because a competitor just figured out a way to do it.

We've all been clobbered by supply chain issues lately. There's a lot of talk about onshoring, or nearshoring. Everyone seems to understand that. But people aren't necessarily taking action on it.

It's a whole different way of thinking about procurement, where we need to look at the total cost. Because if you - for example - have emergency transport to air freight something from China, that's probably not going on procurement's budget, but it's still a cost to the business overall.

We need to find ways to level out the differences in salaries and the increase in transport costs. There will always be uncertain commodities because manufacturing bases are so dense in certain countries.

But in some cases, that may prove to be a false economy, once you really dig in and look at things like production stoppages and surplus inventory.

It's not as easy as you may think, in terms of working out the total cost.

Wrapping Up

We wrap up today's episode by thanking Joanna for coming on the Podcast and sharing her knowledge.

If you'd like to get in touch with Joanna, you'll find all the links you need below.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time!

Stay in touch

Connect with Joanna on LinkedIn

Check out Joanna’s website

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

Welcome back to The Procuretech Podcast!

We're continuing with our mini series where we ask influencers and industry experts for their thoughts and nuggets of advice on everything that's happening in the digital procurement world.

This episode we're talking about agility, and we're joined by an expert on all things agile procurement: President of the Lean Agile Procurement Association, Mirko Kleiner.

 

Agile Procurement: Fantasy or Attainable? - Mirko Kleiner from LAP Alliance

I first heard of Mirko back in 2016, when I saw him asking on his website why procurement can't be more fun, lean and agile. I'm a huge fan of this kind of thinking. 

Our talk today should prove that agility isn't just something for startups in the tech industry.

But before we get into that, let's have a quick recap on Mirko's journey so far.

 

Mirko Kleiner – A brief background

Mirko's actually not a procurement professional. His roots are in the supplier side, which led to some big tenders from a software supplier back in the early 2000s.

He noticed a problem. Customers didn't know what they really wanted, and expected a fixed price fixed scope contract. So back in summer 2018, Mirko got inspired by the fact that there was no solution for handling this kind of uncertainty.

And so he decided to reinvent the wheel and start on page one. If procurement didn't exist Right? How would we design that from scratch? That was the starting hypothesis.

Because of his software background, he was used to having just one day to close the deal, sign the contract and start collaboration and delivery the next day. That was his starting point.

And out of this crazy idea, a whole new movement and a whole new approach evolved.

 

The evolution of Agile Procurement

The first step was bringing together the right people.

Then they asked, what are the expected outcomes? A lot of customers seemed to struggle internally over expectations at the very high level.

Something magic happened when they realised they needed to bring in suppliers.

Instead of sending around documents as we used to do in the past, the idea was to invite suppliers into the discussion at the ground floor. To have them simultaneously in the same room - physically, or virtually - to co create the solution.

This can close the deal within hours, or days, depending on the complexity of the case.

And this doesn't just apply to software procurement. It extends to buying raw materials or professional services. The approach could apply to any category, direct and indirect.

It's not a silver bullet - if you have a commodity, something that you could buy off the shelf, or a finished product, then you're better using a reverse auction or an RFP.

But if you have a level of uncertainty, innovation, or it's very organisational complexity, sometimes it's even a complexity, an organisational complexity, you should choose a more agile approach.

Agile is is a great way to be able to work with suppliers and understand what they bring to the table in terms of innovation on top of just commercial factors.

 

The role of technology in Agile Procurement

It might seem like agility isn't impacted much by technology. After all, so much of what Mirko does is about bringing people together.

But technology actually facilitates that process. You can't always meet in person. And bringing together 70 people from different suppliers virtually would not have been possible several years back.

From a procurement perspective, Mirko collaborates a lot with the World Commercial Contracting Association. They have tons of great numbers and studies that point to the importance of transparent supplier data. So that's definitely key.

Commodity sourcing is going more in the direction of a self-serving model. This combines with the general benefits of automating tedious processes: The opportunity to speed up how we work and free up time for more tactical concerns.

If we can get clean data and single sources of truth for things like vendor master data and contracts, that definitely supports agility.

It might not be the central piece of the puzzle, but technology is definitely an enabler in that regard.

 

Implementing agility – the next stage

If companies have done their homework with technology, by putting things in place like a single source of truth, that's just the beginning of the journey for Agile.

Roche is a good example. Part of their organisation stepped out of being just a service or a support to the business, into being a more proactive enabler of the organisation.

They started to proactively work together with the business, to educate them, so that they could source themselves or become a real problem solver and a transformational coach to the organisation.

Another example - a lot of companies are still at the stage where they need to optimise and create a single source of truth. Agile recently sourced an ERP system in just four weeks.

When it comes to enabling businesses through technology, Agile can be a great catalyst for change.

 

Certification from industry associations

Mirko sounds like a classic example of someone from a non-procurement background coming in and spotting inefficiencies. Some industry bodies might seem a little bit stale.

Given his radical approach, have any of the industry's major associations or certification bodies been in touch?

Mirko says they have. Agile is currently working closely with World Commerce and Contracting, for example. They've also come up with their own certification and training.

This is incredibly important. Because when you negotiate these kinds of changes, you're not just looking for a customer supplier relationship, you're looking for strategic partners.

You shouldn't treat a partner with this good cop / bad cop negotiation style. So that also needs to change.

In a big sense, the whole part of management needs to change and become much more agile as well. So the Agile values become crucial here, it's all founded on that.

Agile is also working together with CIPS (the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply).

But Mirko admits that for some of these organisations, the response has been: “What the heck?”

Agile can be seen as a competitor by these old monoliths, but in truth it's complimentary. It could could become an integral integral part of their curriculum for their members.

It's going to take time and working closely together with those associations to get the message across.

 

A new Agile ecosystem

Agility is bigger than procurement – it applies to finance, it applies to marketing, it applies across the board. And these conversations are becoming more and more common.

Mirko has the feeling that all these movements are about to come together. He's currently in progress with some other thought leaders to build up a kind of ecosystem: New topics, new training materials, and sharing data to potentially have a huge, huge impact.

As an example, last year Agile began working with the public sector. Did you know that public sector procurement is responsible for 10-15% of GDP?

That's huge. And Agile could do some really important work in that space. Not just commercially, but in terms of all the other topics that procurement now takes care of like sustainability.

Procurement historically, both in the private and public sectors, has tended to think in categories. Whereas the classic example across the rest of the world and business at large just just doesn't.

It's a perfect fit for Agile to bring some much-needed change.

However, the Agile world needs to understand procurement better too. It takes two to tango, as they say. And that's an ongoing and evolving process.

 

Wrapping Up

Thanks so much to Mirko Kleiner from LAP Alliance for joining us today.

If you'd like to get in touch, or learn more about Mirko's work, check out Agile's website.

You'll find all their case studies, approaches and papers there.

Agile also has a global study on the current state of agility in procurement supply, that you can download for free.

And if you want to learn even more, Agile has public classes on all those topics that you could sign up to.

Links to all of these can be found below.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time!

Check out Lean Agile Procurement's website

Connect with Mirko 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 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

Welcome back to The Procuretech Podcast!

We're continuing with our mini series where we ask influencers and industry experts for their thoughts and nuggets of advice on everything that's happening in the digital procurement world.

Today we're talking about E-Auctions and E-Sourcing. Depending on how the technology's been deployed, some people might be sceptical about this topic.

But our guest today literally wrote the book on E-Sourcing, and he's here to explain the upsides. Let's welcome to the podcast Jacob Gorm Larson, of Moneyball CPH.

 

Success with E-Auctions - Jacob Gorm Larsen from Moneyball CPH

We're going to talk about current trends in E-sourcing from a platform agnostic viewpoint. We might all have our favourite - or least favourite - platforms, but we won't be going into specifics here.

Instead we'll be sharing all the tips, tactics, and observations Jacob has learned during his long career in this space.

We began our chat with a brief rundown of Jacob's history…

 

Jacob Gorm Larson – A career in E-sourcing

Jacob's been in the procurement space for around 20 years.

He spent most of that time with Maersk, the global shipping company. Maersk used to be a conglomerate, so they would operate in oil, gas, offshore logistics and a couple of other industries.

Jacob introduced E-sourcing across all these different industries, and in doing so, learned that it's not an industry or category specific thing. It can be applied in any industry with the right knowledge.

But E-sourcing can be a divisive topic within procurement, because people don't fully understand the technology.

That's why Jacob wrote his book, so he could share the kind of knowledge he wished he had access to at the start of his journey. The book sparked some interest, and a year later Jacob found himself moving to an advisory role.

He now supports companies in their procurement transformation process.

 

How did the rise of technology impact Jacob's career at Maersk, and how did this improve results at auction?

Jacob says he had a fantastic ride with E-sourcing.

He came into his role at Maersk in 2007/8, so there was a huge degree of uncertainty, being right on the brink of the financial crisis. This had a lot of companies in dire straits and facing a lot of challenges.

There was a desperate need for securing cost savings. In many ways there are a lot of similarities to the situation right now, with record level inflation across the world and a potential recession coming in.

It could well be that within the next six months, we see another huge drive for technologies that can help companies take out costs, and bring down the overall cost base.

And that was exactly what Jacob used E-sourcing for back then, too. It was there when companies needed it the most. And so Jacob got support from all the way up the company to introduce it, to push it. promote it and drive it quite hard across all areas of the company.

He realised during that time that E-sourcing is in the DNA of procurement as a function: There's a constant need to own the cost agenda. And one very efficient way of doing that is to apply E-sourcing and E-auctions,

He also added a lot of sourcing optimization capabilities later on, creating a full toolbox to digitally tackle the market and ensure they were always cost competitive within Maerks's various markets.

 

The five pillars of successful E-sourcing

Jacob's book breaks things down into five pillars required for a successful E-sourcing strategy. These are:

Definition

Strategy

Bidder engagement

Adoption and change management

The future of E-auctions

A lot of people think E-auctions are the same as reverse auctions. But they're not the same thing.

Jacob defines an E-auction as any auction in an online, market-driven negotiation, based on total value with commitment. That definition is absolutely key for understanding the potential of auctions if you drive it strategically.

First of all, it has to be market driven. Of course you need multiple suppliers to participate in your negotiation. But the total value piece is another essential part of the definition. Where a lot of companies fail with auctions is that they don't get the total value part included in their approach.

Not all negotiations - actually very few - are purely price based. That's probably one of the top myths about E-auctions, that they're just about price.

If you want a real negotiation, you need to be able to include other parameters. And if you do it right, you can include any parameter in your auctions.

The last, and maybe the most important, part of the definition is commitment.

If you don't commit or award based on the auction result, it's not a real negotiation. It's a market benchmark exercise.

And that's where you get a lot of frustration from suppliers: “Why are we doing this just to give you a benchmark?”. That's not sustainable. You have to treat suppliers with respect and you have to be consistent.

Commitment is an absolutely essential part of running a sustainable auction program. If you do that, you'll also get the respect and the acceptance from your supply base required to participate in these events.

 

AI, machine learning and suggested pricing

Pricing has always been a tricky thing to evaluate in-platform. Some platforms are now implementing AI and machine learning to enable suggested pricing.

This is an absolute game-changer when it comes to facilitating bidder engagement: They'll be more engaged, knowing that they're not going to get beaten up on price. And in return, that helps internal shareholders become more engaged too.

Interestingly, suggested pricing isn't a new thing. Glen Meakem, who founded FreeMarkets (the first E-auction platform) 25 years ago actually submitted a patent for this very thing. The problem was that very few users were actually using it.

It comes down to a problem of understanding, UI, and training.

You don't become a Formula One driver, by putting yourself in a Formula One car. You need training to get the most out of these tools. And in turn, the tools need to be designed with users in mind.

Another huge barrier to adoption here is change management, mindset, and the lack of buy-in from the procurement community. There is still a lot of convincing to do.

 

E-auctions and the future

Procurement professionals now, especially with a recession around the corner, are going to have to do more with less resources. Giving them an electronic sourcing platform that's perceived as something that creates more work for them is not going to bring them on board.

We need tools that are more easily usable. And, looking towards the future, maybe companies should consider solutions for autonomous negotiations, or using machine learning or scraping for supplier scouting.

That's the fantastic thing about what has been going on here over the last couple of years. If you look 10 years back, the only digital option you truly had for addressing your sourcing needs was out of the boxE-sourcing platforms. But today we have a range of different solutions.

You can have a customer who is doing the predictive part of procurement. So why even negotiate if we can predict the price and tuse that as an anchor towards suppliers? Now you have a Paxum who's introducing chatbot negotiators.

Keelvar do sourcing optimization, but they also do the sourcing bots - for example, for ocean freight.

So for the first time in history, the procurement organisations have a full digital toolbox available for how to address this spend in times of economic uncertainty.

Jacob thinks technology will be a differentiator here: The organisations who manage to truly embrace all of these opportunities, versus the laggards that are still just getting started on digital sourcing.

But it's not just technology. Jacob believes that change is actually 90% people driven. It's not about the tech, so much as in the heads of the people who need to apply it.

When it comes to the future of talent, he believes that we'll focus more on how data and tech-savvy people are.

He thinks the days will soon be gone, where you have the old school negotiator who has done this for 30 years, who'll swing suppliers around and get a good deal.

In terms of leadership as well, the technocrats and the policemen will soon become a thing of the past. We need to be more focused on an entrepreneurial mindset and agility in terms of getting things done, rather than following a process.

 

Wrapping Up

Thanks to Jacob Gorm Larsen for a fascinating dive into E-sourcing and E-auctions, there.

If you'd like to get in touch, or would like a copy of Jacob's book, A Practical Guide to E-auctions for Procurement, you'll find all the links you need below.

And in the meantime, if you want to explore what's out there in the E-sourcing space, we've got 26 solutions listed on Procurementsoftware.site. So head on over there and use the filters to find what you're looking for.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time!

 

Check out Moneyball CPH

Connect with Jacob on LinkedIn

Read Jacob’s book: A Practical Guide to E-auctions for Procurement

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

Welcome back to The Procuretech Podcast!

We're continuing our series of interviews with industry experts and thought leaders to get their take on digital procurement. In this episode, we're going to extend that a little bit and talk about supply chain.

Democratising Supply Chain Training - Dr. Muddassir Ahmed from SCMDOJO 

Today's guest is a big personality in the supply chain space: Dr. Muddassir Ahmed, CEO of SCMDOJO. 

He's got a YouTube channel with almost 10,000 subscribers and a complete resource platform for online courses. 

But before we talk about that, let's get some background on how he got there.

 

Dr. Muddassir Ahmed's background – From corporate to SCM thought leadership

Muddassir studied abroad in Sweden, where he earned a masters in production and supply chain. He then moved to the UK for a PhD scholarship. Settling in Birmingham, he began work for the manufacturing company Eaton. 

Muddassir started work as a demand planner, but got to experience a wide range of roles at Eaton. He gained experience in supply chain across different departments; electrical, automotive, aerospace, hydraulics. So he's hardcore supply chain guy, through and through.

When he finished his PhD in 2015, he realised that most content in the supply chain space was pretty archaic in nature. FinTech content at the time was a lot more attractive: Punchy articles, simple “How To...” guides, easy to read lists. 

He thought he'd try to bring this bite-sized content to the world of supply chain, and it worked!

What started out as a personal blog quickly grew into a brand in its own right, taking on the name SCMDOJO in July 2018.

SCMDOJO now gets 50,000 visitors every month, and the YouTube channel is growing too.

Dojo is a Japanese word which means place to stay and meditate. And that's exactly what SCMDOJO does. It gives the supply chain community  knowledge, tools and best practices, to help them survive and thrive.

Last year, Muddassir took his biggest risk yet, when he left his job to focus on SCM Dojo.

What impacts has Muddassir seen from disruptive procurement technology?

Muddassir thinks we have a lot of catching up to do, in procurement. We're easily a decade behind FinTech when it comes to digitisation.

He often gets criticised by the big ERP providers for saying this, but he thinks they're really slowing us down. If the same four ERP providers didn't have a stranglehold on 80% of the market, things would change more quickly. 

There has been a move to adopting digital tools lately, but the downside from Muddassir's perspective is that they're rarely made by supply chain people. 

Every supply chain is very vertical driven, and needs to be customised to the user's business model. This takes consultation and a lot of time. As a result, transformation in supply chain has been slow. 

It might be 10 years late, but better late than never. 

The flurry of startups in recent years presents some problems. Everyone wants to go the SaaS route, but there's no clear guide on which software to use, how to use it, or how best to customise it. 

Or, you go the enterprise route and it ends up costing millions of dollars and 20 consultants. Which, of course, not everyone has the budget for.

Even if companies do want to embark on supply chain transformation, they often don't know where to start.

Lessons in digital transformation

Muddassir offers courses to help businesses take that first step, and he thinks there are two big things companies need to learn.

First, there's a difference between digitization and digital transformation. 

You can digitise a paper process easily enough – for example, sending emails through DocuSign. But that's not the same as using technology to transform the way you do business at a structural level.

People often jump on a new technology without thinking about the bigger picture of change management. Sure, you can rush to buy into AI, or deploy cloud, or blockchain. But it's not going to create value without a plan on how that fits your business. 

You can implement the best technology but with poor change management it will fail.

Each technology has a specific application, there is no one size fits all. And that awareness needs to be created.  That's the first part. 

The second thing is that you have to standardise to digitalize. You can spend millions on an online product, but if you're not standardised you won't see ROI.

There's also a benefit to choosing software that team members actually want to use – UI and UX count for a lot. 

And talking about choice, it's worth focusing that selection process, on how we select a platform. 

Historically, in a big company you have two problems when choosing software:

First, there's security. For a big company it can take four or five months just to make sure something is secure. And that's just too long, we need to get that time down – possibly on the software development side of things.

The second problem is, again, who is making the decision? It should be supply chain and procurement people with relevant knowledge who get to select the software used, but because there are such costs involved, it often becomes more of a finance decision.

But price should come later as a consideration. You first need to be happy with the UX and UI, and the integration with your current ERP so the transfer of the data is seamless.

On Demand, modular best-of-breeds, and why we need them

People also don't want to use multiple platforms. If I'm a supply chain manager, I want to do everything on one platform. 

If I have to use a separate platform to do RFQ procurement and standard spend analytics, then use my ERP to create my purchase orders and track my shipments, then somebody else has got to give me visibility... I'm using four different platforms for one job, and that's just too much. 

We are seeing some changes here. Coupa is moving towards implementing supply chain and procurement software in one platform. And a lot of the smaller best-of-breeds are now moving towards a more modular structure. 

These new players are starting to replace the older legacy players, because they're expensive, slow, and built on legacy stacks that are no longer fit for purpose. 

Tech is now more accessible to medium sized or smaller businesses that don't have the budget for any of these big enterprise suites. 

Muddassir thinks that pricing will be a huge factor in the success of these modular best-of-breeds.

These modular platforms might come with a handful of features, but if you only want to use two of them, why pay for the whole shebang?

Maybe a user wants to, say, use the RFQ module all the time, but only needs the CRM software one every six months. 

An On Demand price model would be the best solution here. Then the user can pay only for the modules they're using, when they're using them. 

And that's obviously very attractive as a thing to adopt.

Whichever software company first offers this sort of On Demand modularity should be on to a real winner. 

How does SCMDOJO help to educate people?

There are three levels. It's like a Venn diagram of overlapping spheres. 

The first sphere is the obvious one: knowledge. SCMDOJO has different teaching pathways here: A supply chain manager pathway, a logistics manager, a demand planning pathway, etc. 

People see SCMDOJO as a knowledge platform, not a solutions platform. But the tagline is knowledge and solution. And that's where the other two spheres come in.

If the first is knowledge (core technical knowledge, sourcing, contract management, demand planning, supply, planning, logistics), then the second sphere is the human level: Communication, presentation, how you interact with people. 

SCMDOJO can teach all of this from a uniquely supply chain-focused perspective. 

The third sphere is the digitalisation part: which technology you buy into and how you implement it.

What gives SCMDOJO an advantage is the quality of mentoring available. It's about how you bring those three spheres together, and that takes coaching. 

Tools in development

To that end, some new projects from Muddassir are aiming to address the technology side of things too.

“Phase two” of his plans with SCMDOJO are already in development. He's talking to developers and experts in the SCM space and beyond, and hoping to launch this phase of SCMDOJO soon. 

The aim is to have a hundred experts on board by the end of year, available to SCMDOJO users as subject experts they can hire for one to one coaching.

The end goal is to create one true platform for SCM knowledge and solution expertise, offering standard practices and tools to drive a revolution in supply chain.

Muddassir would love to hear from you if you're a supply chain expert who'd like to get involved with this project. 

There is also an upcoming phase three to Muddassir's master plan with SCMDOJO, but that remains under wraps for now. 

Wrapping Up

We close this episode of the Procuretech Podcast by thanking Muddassir for his time and insights. 

We also tease an exciting up-and-coming collaboration between Muddassir and myself – so watch this space!

If you'd like to get in touch with Muddassir, or to join his SCM revolution, you'll find all the links you need below.

Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time!

Check out SCMDOJO

Connect with Muddassir 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 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

Welcome back to The Procuretech Podcast!

 

We're continuing with our mini series where we ask influencers and industry experts for their thoughts and nuggets of advice on everything that's happening in the digital procurement world.

 

Content and Community for Procurement - Daniel Barnes from Gatekeeper

Today we've got a returning guest who was on the first series of the podcast way back in 2020.

He's a man who needs no introduction. But we're going to give him one anyway.It’s procurement influencer Daniel Barnes, of World of Procurement and lately Gatekeeper.

 

A quick catch up on the last few years

It was the very start of the COVID pandemic when we last spoke. So we kick off the podcast by asking Dan what he's been up to since then.

A lot changed very quickly for Dan when the pandemic hit. He was working as a consultant in the defence space at the time, and COVID really impacted the pipeline of work in that space.

From there, he pivoted to a FinTech firm where he worked for around 18 months. During that time he started looking into procurement tech and contract tech.

In that role, he sourced and implemented a contract management product called Gatekeeper, then decided he wanted to join that company.

Dan's got a legal background, including an undergraduate degree in commercial law. So the contract side of procurement comes naturally to him. He finds it fascinating, being able to hold his own against properly trained legal people like solicitors.

He also felt like he could make a bigger impact at Gatekeeper - by showing off this kind of tech and educating people on the benefits of digital transformation.

He's been in the role of Community Manager over at Gatekeeper since June. His job now involves shooting content on topics like contract and risk management, and also working with Gatekeeper to help better position the business.

So that's lots of change in the last 6 months, let alone the last two years!

 

Dan's experience working in FinTech

When he joined the FinTech, Dan was the very last person to join the team. Everyone else was more focused on the supplier management side of things

They had a CLM but it was basically just a repository that allows you to store metadata, and it didn't really do anything else. It was really painful to work with. It was probably just an Excel worksheet by the CMS, and then a user interface was slapped on top of it.

Going into a FinTech space in a scale up environment was terrifying. Everything happens so fast. Dan realised that with all the admin workload, there was barely any time to any work that adds value.

And the work was boring, too. It was just the most mundane stuff - stuff that you could have a virtual assistant do for pennies, anywhere else in the world.

He felt like a very well paid admin assistant a lot of the time. And that's bizarre, especially for a tech business.

 

Implementing Gatekeeper

Thankfully, the company Dan was working for did get it. He managed to secure some investment to go out and find a solution that could change things.

They looked at maybe 10 different suppliers, in CLM, and the wider procurement space. Then eventually chose gatekeeper as the best solution.

It automated everything that might usually fall to a junior admin assistant – literally every single part of what that job spec would have looked like.

Dan can remember the early days when he could spend all day working in an Excel spreadsheet. These days, Excel gives Dan anxiety.

Spending all day in a spreadsheet isn't doing procurement. It's busy work.

People might shut down at any mention of AI, but it really moves things along when it comes to processes and workflows. Whether it's extracting data, creating records or reaching out to people, it reduces the time spent on jobs that don't add value.

This is what Dan finds so empowering about technology.

There are also really exciting social and ethical implications, too.

Dan gives the example of the sustainability platform Circular. They're trying to make sure that the the raw materials that end up in our phones and our cars are devoid of slave labour, exploitative practices and corruption.

The platform uses Blockchain technology to make sure there's a trackable audit history, reducing ethically dubious practices.

He thinks things like that are really a game changer.

It's not just good for procurement, it's going to benefit all of us as a society as well.

 

Gen Z and the sustainable future

Many of today's global challenges – from the aftermath of COVID, to supply chain challenges and geopolitical risks – make it feel like now is the time for procurement to shine.

How can technology help us face down all the current uncertainty in the world?

Dan thinks that technology has a huge role to play, not least in attracting essential new talent. He looks to Gen Z and their need for more efficient, usable systems.

As we get rid of the boring workload foisted onto procurement professionals, we're going to attract more creative thinkers. We're going to attract more diversity, more varying perspectives.

A lot of that generation has different priorities, for example a strong ethical belief in sustainability, and a consciousness of where products come from. 

Working in procurement potentially enables you to impact what millions of people across the world buy. And that’s really exciting.

But companies need to actually take this opportunity on. They have to rework all of their job specs and welcome this change.

 

Community Management

Community Manager is a role that's very much in its infancy. How essential does Dan think it is, in terms of building a brand and marketing a SaaS product?

Gatekeeper is maybe a bit different to a lot of other SaaS solutions because it offers unlimited users. So everyone in a business has access to the platform, and that creates a community base from day one.

Those people can give feedback, helping to shape and direct the platform's development. The customers want to grow the product too, for obviously selfish reasons.

Content is also incredibly important. Content has to be genuinely useful. If it has no value, no-one wants to read it. It's just a superficial thing.

Dan thinks that they're lucky at Gatekeeper to have such insightful talent. The level of expertise at the company means that they have genuinely useful insights to share in their content.

LinkedIn isn't always the biggest help – they don't really share much content.

So having someone like Dan come in is really valuable. If his videos get good viewership ,and are on topics that people are passionate about, that starts creating conversations.

Then there's thought leadership content, webinars, all sorts of directions in which a community can grow.

It's about putting value out first and foremost. And then good stuff will happen in one way or another.

Wrapping Up

That's all for this episode of The Procuretech Podcast.

We wrap things up by talking briefly about Dan's World of Procurement podcast, and an exciting upcoming podcast project he's working on with Gatekeeper.

You can check that out, connect with Dan, or explore what Gatekeeper has to offer, using the links below.

Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time!

 

Check out Gatekeeper

Connect with Dan 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 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

Welcome to another episode of The Procuretech Podcast!

We're continuing our third series of conversations with industry leaders, which now releases twice a week.

Tech and Remote Workforce Management – Lilia Stoyanov from Transformify

Today's guest is Lilia Stoyanov, someone who truly wears many hats. 

She's a professor at Ziggurat Business School. She's an independent contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine. And most importantly, she's the CEO of Transformify - a vendor management and payroll management system.

Our conversation opens with a brief catch-up on Lilia's background.

Lilia Stoyanov's early career

Lilia started off in the shared service space, working for Coca Cola where she helped to build a shared service centre. Her role, as either CFO, or – as at Coca Cola – director of procure to pay, involved structuring shared service centres.

The big challenge was that Coca Cola, like so many large enterprises, had a variety of subsidiaries and a confusing tangle of legacy tech. Lilia's job was to decide how to bring all that together, and which PTP system or STP system to implement. 

This meant factoring in time, and of course cost. Which at the enterprise level could be huge.

It's not only the cost of the system. With those types of traditional procure to pay suites, you often need an army of consultants to implement it as well.

Then there's training people how to navigate new systems that are very complex. And they shouldn't be.

In the past, it seemed like suites needed to look complex in order to impress buyers with all their functionality.

Now it's the opposite.

Users are demanding simplicity and accessibility. Whether this is the influence of Gen Z entering the workforce, or just users losing patience with outmoded tech, the message is the same: Software needs to be user friendly.

Leaving enterprise to become an entrepreneur

This eye for simplicity and user-friendliness was an inspiration for Lilia.

The same could be said for her unique vantage point: Working inside growing companies that are breaching into the enterprise level gave Lilia insights into the process of building a business. 

It was only a matter of time before she wanted to do it for herself.

Having seen how enterprises function, she could see what the common problems are before she even began. And it's important to know the pitfalls, and also what the market is demanding. Otherwise, you can't bring a product to the market that everyone else needs and is ready to buy.

Lilia would absolutely recommend this to budding entrepreneurs.

 If you're considering such a journey, first of all, how do others do it? How are successful businesses structured? What's the hierarchy? How do you manage teams? How do you respond to change? How do we respond to fast paced growth?

And after that, you'll be ready to do it yourself.

How did Lilia's experiences in corporate influence Transformify?

There are two big problems that pretty much every procurement team faces.

One is finding talent in the right places at the right costs. 

The other is managing one time vendors, or occasional vendors, and dealing with the bureaucracy and human error that goes into maintaining vendor master data.

What Lilia's doing now at Transformify tackles both.

But what lessons from the world of corporate inspired the creation of Transformify?

Vendor management is a big one. 

Be it regular or one-off vendors, using a traditional approach is very time consuming. It takes a long time to get a vendor into your vendor master data, then a long time again if you need to change their invoice details, etc.

Transformify shifts that responsibility on to vendors themselves. 

They have a portal where they can do things like update bank account information. And once it's done, it's done for everyone on all sides.

After that, Transformify also consolidates payments. It aggregates all payments to thousands of vendors into one. Instead of collecting invoices from thousands of vendors, you get one invoice.

Someone else is automating the entire process. So there’s no need to reconcile payments to invoices, no need to check if those invoices are tax compliant. Nothing. It's a simple, smooth process.

Rather than something like a tail spend automation system, what Transformify offers is essentially an integrated platform that enables companies to replace X number of vendors with just one.

And that's a big relief to the finance teams, payment teams, procurement teams and everyone involved.

It's usually Finance people who approach Transformify. 

Their payments teams struggle with transferring payments, making sure there are no duplicate payments or late payments, handling the resulting tax liabilities…

It's the CFO that oversees all those functions, or the finance director. So it's absolutely not surprising that they're the people screaming “we need something!”.

 

People Management and Transformify

Moving on to the people management side of Lilia's business, and how this relates to the evolution of user-friendly tech, talk turns to the geographically diversified workforce.

We're looking at technology that is mobile-first, user-friendly, and enables procurement as a function to allow stakeholders to self serve.

This means that procurement, at least in theory, can work remotely: You're not having to be on site to serve your stakeholders with day to day operational problems.

This then enables you to have a much more geographically diversified workforce.

As an employer, this means you can take advantage of lower salaries, lower taxes, lower social contributions, and of course, to tap into a wider talent pool.

The biggest challenge in procurement is getting practitioners to think outside the box to be a bit more visionary rather than technocratic.

But how does this work, practically?

Firstly, cloud-based solutions are definitely the future here.

The reason is simple. It's not only remote working - it's simplicity. Let's say you're on a business trip, and you want to quickly check something before you start negotiations. You need access, and you need access from a completely different location.

We're also seeing fewer companies that want to support an app, and also to support desktop. Focusing on both can lead to a confusing user experience, or one version having missing functionalities. So that's another reason for a shift towards cloud-based solutions, and responsive design.

When it comes to hiring people across borders, COVID taught us a lot of lessons.

Even companies that weren't open to hybrid work, or remote work, are now having to open up to it.

As a result, more companies are hiring the right people, regardless of their location. 

You might have people in various continents in various time zones, and that's absolutely normal now. That's the future, and there isn't any way back.

 

Managing payments to a globally diverse workforce

Transformify offers services for both independent contractors and payrolled employees who live overseas.

For one-off overseas contractors, there's what’s called payroll on demand.

Here, Transformify acts as an authorised reseller. It buys the services provided by all those independent contractors, checks their components, documents, whatever else is needed, and then it resells those services to the end customer. 

Again, the end customer receives just one invoice.

When you want to add someone to your payroll, but they live in Asia, or Africa, for example, they need to have all the same benefits as any other tax resident of that particular country.

That's why Transformify has a vast network of local partners across the globe, making sure this employee gets everything they're entitled to, wherever in the world they are.

Both contingent workforce (in terms of category spend) and talent acquisition and retention are very relevant in terms of procurement. We're starting to see companies taking that bold leap into hiring outside of their jurisdiction. 

But a lot of HR teams don't really understand the options available to them and just say: “No, we're not taking that risk”.

And that's a shame when you see so many positions on LinkedIn going unfilled.

There's plenty of talent out there, it just means why you might need to pay a bit more.

Just because your office, or your headquarters or your team is in one jurisdiction doesn't mean all of your employees need to be.

 

Making procurement sexy

Acquisition teams almost need to become marketers.

They need to be able to sell the role. It's not just copy pasting the description from somewhere, you need to make it really relevant.

You need to make it appealing if you want the best talent to apply. And the same is applicable to procurement.

You're selling a product. You're selling a role within your company, and people need to buy into that.

If you want the best procurement talent, make it sexy!

We should really get some T-shirts printed with that…

Wrapping Up

Lilia's been a great guest, but that's all we've got time for on this episode of The Procuretech Podcast. 

If you'd like to connect with Lilia, or get in touch with us here, you can find all the links you need below.

Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you in a few days for the next episode!

 

Check out Transformify

Connect with Lilia on LinkedIn

Follow Lilia on Instagram

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

Welcome to another episode of The Procuretech Podcast!

We're continuing our third series of conversations with industry leaders, which now releases twice a week.

Procurement Media through the Years - Jon Hansen from Procurement Insights

 

This episode, we've got a guest who's been talking about procurement for decades. With a long-standing blog and a podcast that goes all the way back to 2009, it's Jon Hansen of Procurement Insights – the original procurement podcaster.

We're going to talk about everything that's changed in the world of procurement over the course of Jon's long-standing career.

 

Jon's career as a long-standing procurement commentator

Jon's been in the tech industry for more than 40 years, and procurement for almost as long. This has given him experience both as a practitioner and provider.

One of his first business ventures was to start a company with funding from the government. It leveraged algorithms that allowed the Department of National Defence to procure indirect materials for their entire nationwide military installation base. He later moved to doing the same thing for the New York City Transit Authority.

Jon sold that company in 2000, and that's when he began to shift towards blogging.

He'd already had a lot of media experience from interviews in his role as a company founder. When someone in the media world said “why don't you start a blog?”, his first thought was “what's a blog?”.

This was around 2007. By 2009, Block Talk Radio was launched in New York City. With guests from the world of business and procurement, it broadcast a deeper understanding of procurement to an entirely new audience, through an entirely new medium.

Jon jokes that he's always had a face for radio, but he clearly had the talent to match: Some 900 episodes later, the monthly listener base was up to 15,000 a month.

And that eventually dovetailed into where Jon is today with Procurement Insights.

 

Was digital transformation a hot topic back then compared to what it is today?

While it wasn't called transformation back then, it's interesting that a lot of the same issues were still being talked about 20 or 30 years ago.

One of the biggest challenges in the procurement world was that the earlier platforms were ERP based. Procurement personnel and professionals weren't involved in the selection process of that technology. That was a Finance decision.

So there was a great deal of frustration with the majority of ERP implementations. Not that ERP doesn't have a vital role to play. But back then the majority of e-procurement initiatives would fail miserably, costing 10s of millions of dollars.

The emergence of the on demand or SaaS software was exciting. Because that started a shift away from a centralised, monolithic approach to automation, to one that was strategically effective and geared towards the procurement people.

The interesting point, as we track this story over the last 10 or 20 years, is the value of human experience. In 2019, a Deloitte CPOE global survey indicated that the majority of CEOs were dissatisfied with the results of their initiative.

Of course, their ERP technology was cumbersome. But ultimately it was the mindset and approach that was at fault. It was how to leverage that technology and implement it.

That inspired the move from Procurement being a function of Finance, to being a key strategic player within the enterprise.

And now we've learned that from the pandemic more so than ever before. It's caused organisations and people to look at the technology through a much different lens.

In other words, you don't throw technology at something and expect it to fix everything. You have to have the right people in place. You have to decide on the right technology and understand how to utilise it effectively. You have to adapt the technology to your processes.

Technology doesn't improve process. Process has to be improved using technology as a tool.

As an example, there was a major service organisation, which gave their tax incentives by the number of service calls they could do in a day. The more service calls you did, the better your score, and the better your compensation.

On the other side, though, they wanted to implement a system whereby on-site technicians could go online to order necessary parts on location. One of the biggest problems, however, is that the technology was cumbersome. It didn't save time, because they couldn't make as many calls if they had to stop at each location to wrestle with cumbersome technology.

So what ended up happening was what's known as sandbagging - where we're there to hold the technology, or hold all the orders until the end of the day.

The problem there is that with indirect materials, especially computer technology, the price in the morning of a particular part may be $100. But by late afternoon, as the geographic time zone of sourcing began to shrink, that price could easily become $800, $900 or $1,000.

The technicians were really doing their job based upon the incentives that were created for them, but in the long run, it drove up the cost of the parts that they needed.

So they had to look at the technology and say wait a second, how are we going to be able to make it easier for technicians to leverage the technology?

And that's why we now see these intuitive, Amazon-like user experiences. That was always the goal – it was just very difficult to get there in the early days.

How do you complement the performance or the requirements of the service technician with the objectives of hitting an SLA but doing it on a cost efficient basis where you were not paying a lot to get these products? 

It's a combination of processes, AND you've got to bring those together and collaborate more effectively.

In many organisations this was tough, because procurement was rarely involved with anything strategic, rarely seen as doing more than simply buying at the lowest cost when needed. And so the biggest change is that the procurement and professionals in supply chain are now seen as the leader, rather than a spectator in digital transformation.

 

Freeing up procurement professionals, and the future of procurement

There's a lot of talk about fully automated P2P 'freeing up procurement professionals' to focus on more value added stuff. But what does this mean for the future of procurement?

The trouble is, when you create all of this freedom to let people become more strategic in their tasks, what exactly does that mean?

For example, with the Department of Defence, they had 21 buyers, 21 people managing contract infrastructure, and it was a large contract. Through the automation process,within 18 months, they went from 21 buyers down to three.

So here's the question - what do you do with the other 18?

It depends on how willing and how capable they are to upskill and adapt. If a procurement professional is willing to move with the times and see the writing on the wall, that headcount and within procurement teams won't necessarily be fewer than today. The roles are just going to look very, very different.

There's a major overhaul happening within the procurement realm.

When we become less functionally driven and more strategically driven, we have to expand to new areas of endeavour.

We have to look at data management, and what we do with that data. Digital transformation is impossible without clean data.

And the fact remains that the majority of organisations (according to IDC) only analyse 5% of the data they have. They're flying blind, even with the automation. So who's going to take the lead on that?

We have to look at factors such as cybersecurity, too. A study in Supply Chain Digest found that 53% of all enterprise breaches occurred through a third party partner or vendor.

Who should own those third party vendor relationships? Should it be finance? Should it be procurement? There's a new role there.

And there's not really anyone better positioned than procurement professionals to understand how to structure those relationships, how to engage suppliers, how to coordinate that and manage those risks.

That extends even into non cyber threat areas: Managing ESG objectives and goals, for example.

You've got to choose the right suppliers, you've got to build the right infrastructure. So we have become strategic and view our role beyond the traditional limitations of getting something at the best price as fast as we can.

 

The value of internal marketing

As aspects of traditional procurement are automated and phased out, we'll have to spend more time communicating. With suppliers,  but also within our own organisations.

Procurement as a function, historically, has been dreadful at internal marketing and communication. Compared to sales or environmental health and safety, when it comes to communicating their message, procurement has a long way to go.

If you do a survey on LinkedIn, and say: “Procurement pros, do you think it's harder to negotiate with external suppliers or to convince stakeholders to implement your initiatives?” 9 times out of 10, they'll always say negotiating internally is harder.

We have to do a better job of selling our own identity. And thus that positions us to take the lead in these new strategic arenas - like cybersecurity, like data management, like all of these other aspects of it. We can no longer be spectators. We've got to be able to make sure that people are coming into the profession for the right reason with the right understanding. It begins with us.

Jon shares the story of a procurement professional who once approached him at a conference. He said he was ready to go to his company the next morning all motivated, full of new ideas, and they're going to say: “No. That's not your role”.

That professional asked Jon what he should do, and Jon said - you find another company. That may seem like a smart remark, but there's truth to it. Companies have to embrace change.

Technology doesn't repair the challenges that we're running into now, because the challenges reside in how organisations define and recognize the importance of procurement.

And that not only starts at where we are as professionals, but also starts at the top of the organisation in the highest levels. Companies need to provide the right incentives, guidance and motivation to expand the scope of procurement.

Organisations that do that will ultimately be more successful than those that continue to operate within the confines of what we were in the past.

 

Wrapping Up

Jon is such a fountain of knowledge that we really could have spoken all day, but sadly that's all we have time for.

If you want to reach out to Jon, or to us here at The Procuretech Podcast, you'll find all the links you need below.

Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you in a few days for the next episode.

Stay in touch!

Check out Jon's Procurement Insights Podcast 

Connect with Jon 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 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

Welcome back to the Procuretech podcast!

We're continuing our  third series of interviews with industry experts and thought leaders. 

Today we're talking to someone with a unique niche perspective, to hear their thoughts on all things digital procurement.

 

Why Data is the Bedrock of Digital - Susan Walsh is The Classification Guru

My guest needs absolutely no introduction to most of you: Susan Walls, the classification, Guru herself.

Susan was one of our first guests in series one, all the way back in April 2020. A lot has changed in the world since then, but before we dive into that, let's get a quick reminder of Susan's background.

 

Susan Walsh – A brief background on the Classification Guru

Susan has been running The Classification Guru for just over five years now. She started working for a spend analytics company, before deciding to go it alone.

Susan thought there must be companies out there who just want their data classified and normalised, without the analytics part. And she was right.

Spend analytics is being increasingly brought in-house – most departments have some kind of analyst now. But people still struggle with classification.

That's where Susan comes in, bringing a human touch and years of experience to classification.

The Classification Guru can help with things like supplier cleansing for PT implementations and CRM systems. Susan is also currently working on an exciting project outside of the procurement space for retail category management.

Basically, if you've got a data problem, Susan can help with it.

Because Susan's service isn't a tech solution, it's not the sort of thing we'd usually cover here on procurementsoftware.site. But Susan's niche is a really interesting perspective from which to view procurement.

So how has her business been impacted by the rise of procurement technology over the last few years?

 

The impact of procurement and technology

Susan thinks that the expansion of procurement tech has helped her business.

There are so many solutions saying “buy our software, it'll fix your data”. But the reality is, you have to clean that data before a tool can do anything with it.

People are realising the importance of data, but at the same time they don't have the know how to manage it. They don't fully understand the tools they're using. There's an assumption that this process will be 100% automated, but that's often not the case.

It's so important to get it right, and clean the data before you automate it.

There are hybrid solutions out there. These either offer consultancy alongside automation, but are usually more focused on enterprise level complex material master data more than vendor master data.

There are also solutions that use AI to scrape, clean and sort the data - Tealbook and Scoutbee for example. But they're not classifying data, they're essentially just supplier discovery platforms that can help to categorise data as part of that offering.

But where's that data coming from? How do you know it's valid? Is there a human behind it?

You should always have someone who knows the industry double check data. Verify whatever you're buying in with what you know, just to make sure it's right.

Automation can be successful and accurate when you focus on a specific area. But if you're buying a tool that tries to cover every single industry in the world, it's not going to hit the mark as well, because it's trying to be everything to everyone.

 

Bigger data, bigger problem

Generally, the bigger the organisation, the bigger the dirty data problem.

Because they've grown through acquisition, big companies often have multiple ERP systems. That can very easily lead to a real tangle of complicated data.

But mid market businesses also have an issue here. Their data is not going to be as dirty as an enterprise company that's grown through acquisition over the years, but a smaller company might not have the in-house expertise to clean it's data effectively.

Data can be real trouble, and not everyone knows where to start. When Susan hears that a company is going to try and do it in house, it gives her shivers because she knows The Categorisation Guru could do it quicker, more efficiently and accurately.

In-house, it could take something like 6-12 months. The Categorisation Guru could get it done in two or three.

 

What area of procurement has the biggest impact, from a data perspective?

Susan sees so much going on in this space right now that it's hard to call out one specific thing. 

But she's interested in the advancements in P2P and fraud prevention tech: The kind which scans invoices to minimise things like fraud, or paying the same invoice twice because it's named slightly differently.

The biggest data problems start with people. So if you can remove the points where there are most likely to be errors caused by people, then that's great.

For smaller businesses that haven't even started with any sort of digital transformation yet, having something like a process automation bot in AP can be really valuable. 

Just getting a company to build a bot for you to automate or simplify some of the most repetitive tasks can be a game changer: It's efficiencies, its accuracy, it's helping to minimise fraud. 

Especially if you're a small business, the impact of fraud or paying an invoice twice is so much more devastating than in a larger organisation where this can be absorbed.

But again, you always just need someone who is knowledgeable in the area, overseeing everything and checking that it's still working.

 

Using digital technology to liberate your talent

Digital technology is a means to enable procurement professionals to do what they should be doing.

It's a topic we keep coming back to – the real value in this tech is that it frees up expensive, valuable knowledge workers to be able to do something more relevant to their profession and skillset.

Often, Procurement don't do a very good job of promoting themselves and the value that they bring.

If you free up their valuable time, they can then focus on the more strategic effort. Whether that's cost efficiencies, rational, rationalising suppliers, negotiating better deals with existing suppliers, finding new ones...

Automation allows procurement to focus more on these things, which in turn will benefit the business.

There's still a lot of manual intervention going on in the whole procurement process from contracting to managing suppliers to spend analytics. Which means that it's prone to errors, mistakes, fraud, etc.

If you can automate as much of that as possible, you're minimising all those things, and hopefully increasing profits for the company.

 

Future Proofing

As a small business owner, one of the things that you have to be very mindful of is future proofing. One of Susan's key USPS is doing a lot of manual work to maintain data accuracy.

But with tech getting smarter, at some point there will be a spend analytics platform that can get 95% of the job done using AI and machine learning.

Without giving away too many trade secrets, what is Susan doing to future proof her business?

Susan thinks that, even if such a solution comes out in the near future, it's not going to be affordable to anyone but very large organisations. So the need for human input isn't going away any time soon.

But she's not sitting on her laurels. Susan also wrote a book last year, where she shares a lot of her knowledge on classifying and fixing dirty data.

She's also working on online courses through which to share her unique perspective and experience.

Some will be generic data cleaning courses, and others will be procurement specific.

Her next plan is to build an actual product. A SaaS tool that she thinks is going to blow up massively, and that could create jobs as well.

But she's not going to give away any more clues on that one, for now…

 

Wrapping Up

If you want to get in touch with Susan Marsh, The Classification Guru, you can find her on LinkedIn, YouTube, or her website.

You'll find links to these, and to Susan's exciting new book, below.

Stay in touch

Buy Susan's book, Between The Spreadsheets

Visit The Classification Guru website

Follow The Classification Guru on LinkedIn

Check out Susan's YouTube channel

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

Welcome back to series 3 of the Procuretech Podcast!

We bring you the hottest startups, thought leadership and conversation from visionary industry experts, and definitely no stiff corporate content.

We’re switching things up a bit for the new series. 

We’ll now be releasing episodes twice weekly, and expanding our scope on guests. In the past we’d typically speak to startup founders, CEOs or CMOs of procurement tech companies. But we're now going to be talking to industry leaders and influencers in this space too. We’ll bring you their thoughts, opinions and projections around digital transformation of procurement. 

So without any more delay, let’s jump into this episode’s conversation with a guest from the finance community: Chris Argent, of GenerationCFO.

 

Procurement and Finance: Natural Allies? – Chris Argent from GenerationCFO

Finance and procurement are often sparring partners, but it doesn’t need to be that way. Chris and I recently met a P2P transformation conference in London, where the message was that procurement and finance are really natural allies.

 

Chris’s 20+ year journey in finance 

Chris’s journey began as a financial controller and finance director in small to medium sized organisations. There was a key moment when he stumbled across a fraud that had been committed due to poor systems and poor technology. This inspired Chris to enter the finance transformation arena. 

There, he was lucky enough to work with some big players including John Lewis, Amazon and Vodafone. This opened his eyes to shared services and procurement technology. Chris became more tech savvy, and saw the future of what we now know as digital procurement on the horizon. But this was maybe 15 or 20 years ago, and the people around him didn’t understand all this new technology. 

This need to educate people was the birth of GenerationCFO. It all began as a LinkedIn group. And now, some 19 years later, GenerationCFO has a reach of about 100,000 people who all gather regularly to talk about these transformation issues.

This community is predominantly UK-focused, but there are members all over the world - from Europe to the US and Asia.

An experienced perspective on finance transformation

Chris shares some observations from his long-standing career in this space. What have the main trends been over his time in the industry? And where do procurement tech and FinTech crossover?

There’s always been an acknowledgement that technology could be used for the better. In a way, this sprang the shared service environment. Back then, you’d get conversations about the cost of labour: “We can save 20% if we move everything to India”, and so on. But that’s not the case any more. The savings in that area are negligible. What we need to do now is to understand technology and optimise on that. 

Technology is important, especially with things like ESG now coming down the track, and the need for increased responsibility and transparency. A siloed approach doesn’t work any more. Procurement teams are thinking about solving business problems, CFO’s feel responsible for managing ESG risks. There’s loads of crossover there - procurement can’t ignore finance and finance can’t ignore procurement. 

What are the challenges in communication between procurement and finance? 

Procurement professionals often struggle to get finance to recognise their wider value. There will always be ‘invisible’ work being done by procurement, below the surface of the value iceberg.  And hopefully technology can lead us to a more centralised, collaborative form of project management, where everyone’s contributions can be factored in. 

And it’s not just technology - Chris suggests that there are three key factors when it comes to transforming collaboration and project management. 

The first is technology, which definitely shines a light on all the invisible work that gets done. 

The second is people: People need to communicate, and people need to be open to communication. If you don’t have a finance business partner to talk to, then you need one. You need to ask your CFO or finance directory for that person. It’s their responsibility to represent you, and without that representation it’s very hard to communicate properly. A collaboration-first, business partnering approach is critical to solving the problem here. 

The third, and this a weird thing to say, but the third is a pandemic.

The last pandemic changed the mindset overnight of: How we view our processes, how we view our roles within the business, what's really important. All of a sudden, we got a lot of airtime within the business. It was no longer about sales and revenue and growth, it was about survival. That survival mindset really opened businesses up to examining their processes.

Technology and People 

Technology is going to change the way we do business, it's going to change the way we maintain high performance within our teams. But Chris also thinks that the people element shouldn’t be underestimated. Having worked in change programs, technology and people are equally important. 

But the the learning journey, and the time to value is on the technology side. We’re seeing this in procurement, and Chris is having exactly the same conversation on the accounting and finance side, where generation Z (or even generation A, whatever the next one is) - they don't think of technology in the way we do. 

People are, in general, still very change resistant. And this can be a big problem when rolling out these platforms. The obvious stinker is if you choose a really clunky piece of software that both suppliers and stakeholders hate using. And there's a big famous name that I think we can all think of that is notoriously not very user friendly. 

But you can get any technology successfully adopted with the right change management process. 

We need to be creating a community of people who are coming together around these transformations, these changes, and making tiny changes, incremental changes. People on the ground within companies who are trying to adopt this technology need to be improving a little every day, so they become their own internal consultants. So their internal intrapreneurs as they call them, rather than entrepreneurs. 

We don't have enough visionaries in procurement. And we have too many technocrats. And that is hamstringing our profession.

An international perspective

Chris’s access to a global network of finance professionals gives him a unique vantage point. Does he see much difference geographically, in terms of maturity of digitization? 

The UK is steeped in professional history. And you know, procurement is quite a new profession compared to accounting, that's been going 200 odd years. So we've got 200 years of historic mindset that we're trying to change. It's a conservative way of approaching these things. 

Europe is somewhere more committee based, but they are quicker to move. 

In the US it’s very much “let's do this! Let's make a change!”. There are shorter decision cycles on buying some of this technology. Maybe it's just because of the number of people in the US who aren't necessarily qualified in those senior positions. They're democratising a lot of the conversation. They're using social media and channels, they want to be seen, to get their message out there. There's a lot less of that going on in the EU and the UK. 

In the US, if you have a tech/ social media savvy CFO they're called Rockstar CFOs? They're called out as these amazing people.

If you did this in the UK  the board might want to sack you for misconduct, especially if you’re a rock star! You wouldn't want a CFO coming into work on coke after two bottles of whiskey.

Well, if Elon Musk can do it, why not? 

 

Wrapping up and final thoughts 

Reflecting on our time at P2P Transformation in June, Chris and I both agree that there’s huge value to getting out of your echo chamber and talking to other professionals. Communication is a huge part of what we do, and there’s little to be gained from navel gazing. Otherwise you’ll never understand where the other side of the table is coming from.

As well as his website GenerationCFO, Chris is a self-confessed LinkedIn junkie and a YouTube content creator.

If you want to get in touch with him, you’ll find all the links you need below.

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn

Check out GenerationCFO

Find GenerationCFO on Youtube

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