“Good marketing is the craft of understanding what people want and need and helping them achieve it.” — Seth Godin What do people want from procurement technology? They want it all. Outcomes If we start with outcomes, they want to make sure that they are buying the right solution for…

Procurement is the first mile of the supply chain. Already, before the Pandemic, procurement teams were spread too thin. When Covid hit with its full force, these employees faced tremendous additional stressors, challenges that persist in many ways. It’s no wonder that there is burnout. …

I have had several careers. I started in finance trading foreign exchange options for a bank right after the British Pound fell out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. This was a great opportunity to learn. It was the blue collar of trading. It was an extension of the money-markets. …

Developing a pricing model for any service is a tricky thing, but following the Global Financial crisis, subscription pricing boomed for purveyors of procurement technology. With subscription pricing, providers sell individual seat licenses. This was an alternative to the prior regime of enterprise licenses and maintenance contracts. …

What is hybrid procurement? It is an extension of elastic procurement™. We’ve written about elastic procurement™ here: Elastic procurement™ is a delivery model that is to Big Procurement technology systems what cloud computing was to the corporate data center. It lowers costs, eliminates complexity, and empowers staff. What does this mean? Most companies don’t use procurement technology from one of the large incumbent vendors. They’re expensive to carry with large fixed costs. They’re difficult to use.

When it comes to the technology and the labor necessary to purchase something (either from a catalog or with a reverse auction), who should pay for procurement events? Should it be the buyer or should it be the supplier? Logically, we know that the buyer is going to pay one…

It’s an interesting question that we don’t ask often enough: why do organizations have a procurement department? Speaking with a supplier recently, he told me that his company refuses to participate in RFPs. This isn’t because he is afraid of competing. He has a compelling solution that creates real value…

What is elastic procurement™ and who should care? CIOs will recognize the word “elastic” from cloud computing. Elastic procurement™ is a delivery model that is to Big Procurement technology systems what cloud computing was to the corporate data center. It lowers costs, eliminates complexity, and empowers staff. Before Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, CIOs managed large private data centers, often in multiple locations. These were anything but elastic. One might characterize them as flabby and inflexible.

What are the biggest problems in procurement? There are no shortage of them when you speak with people in different business lines within the organization. Suppliers aren’t enamored with the process, so much as resigned to it. Even procurement staff see it as the “Devil we know.” Here’s a list…