Procure IQ

Mostly Harmless, Part XXIV Previous Post The first post of the series indicated that this brief guide will define what e-Procurement is, isn’t, and how it relates, or fails to relate, to e-Purchasing, EIPP, P2P, and e-Sourcing. Now that the basics of e-Procurement have been covered, this post will address the terminology before the series concludes. EIPP stands for Electronic Invoice Presentation and Payment. It is not the same as e-Procurement because any system capable of accepting invoices, processing invoices, and queueing them up for payments can be labelled an EIPP system. Such a system …

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Today’s guest post is from Dalip Raheja, President and CEO of The Mpower Group (TMG) and a contributor to the News U Can Use TMG blog. As we pointed out in our last post (where we killed off the old sourcing process), Strategic Sourcing has always been fundamentally flawed. It clearly did not deliver the promised results years ago and it isn’t delivering the right results today. Furthermore, I would argue that the results that Strategic Sourcing is delivering may not be totally accurate because the unintended consequences that the function creates (more on this later) may actually destroy …

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Today’s guest post is from Dalip Raheja, President and CEO of The MPower Group (TMG) and a contributor to the News U Can Use TMG blog. And if it’s not, it should be. In our last post, we talked about one of the major challenges in a transformation journey for Sourcing/Supply Chain organizations — namely, the vowels A, E, I, O, and U (which stood for Adoption, Execution, Implementation, Optimization, and Utilization). In this post we’re going to address the second, equally important, challenge. Strategic Sourcing has not delivered the promised results years ago, and it isn’t …

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It’s good business. In fact, for most businesses, it’s good innovation. Innovation is difficult and costly for most businesses, and most innovators are unable to capitalize on their innovation to become the market leader. In contrast, most of the market leaders are companies that perfected innovative imitation, where they come up with cheaper and better versions of the innovative technologies developed by their competitors (which use new and improved technologies and processes that “invent around” whatever patents the competition might possess). Good examples are given in this Harvard Business Review article which explains why imitation is …

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A recent article in the Harvard Business Review on how best practices get you only so far had some good points, as did the article on how imitation is more valuable than innovation, which illustrated how best practices can be used to get you further than your competitors (who you borrowed the ideas from), but neither of the articles address when you need to go “next”, when “best” is the right choice, and when there’s no reason to go beyond “good enough”. This is a critical question when formulating your supply chain strategy, just as it is when formulating …

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And you don’t have to go waiving NDAs around either. You can stop pretending that you’re still innovating when we all know discovery ended long ago. Thanks to the breadth of today’s marketplace, you have options beyond selling out to a bottom feeder who’ll amalgamate your technology with five other dying products, cross-sell existing product lines, and then milk the maintenance dry. You can instead choose a strategic bold retreat. So if you lack the finances, necessary capabilities, or simply the drive to transition to new technologies and invent new solutions, you can choose to retreat to …

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Mostly Harmless, Part I e-Procurement, while commonly used, is often misunderstood and confused with e-Purchasing, EIPP (Electronic Invoice Presentation and Payment), P2P (Procure-to-Pay), and even e-Sourcing. Thus, this brief guide will define what e-Procurement is, isn’t, and how it relates, or fails to relate, to e-Purchasing, EIPP, P2P, and e-Sourcing. This guide will start with a definition of e-Procurement and then go on to cover the basic cycle. Along the way, it will discuss some benefits, challenges, and best practices while differentiating between the procurement of goods and services in the public and private sector when …

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Ditch the budget. First of all, as per this Financial Times article, there is no correlation between R&D spend and innovation success. Secondly, as per this Harvard Business Review blog post, fixing an innovation budget puts your people into a mindset that their innovation is limited to the budget they have. Third, and most important, while you can budget the cost of product development (based on what the market is expected to bear), you can’t budget the cost of innovation. That relies as much on inspiration as it does perspiration. Plus, and this …

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While the life expectancy of the average human in many developed countries now approaches 80 years, the life expectancy of the average company is much shorter. Only 44% of companies make it to the 4 year mark, and only 31% to the seven year mark. Only a handful of the tens upon tens of thousands of companies started every year will live to see the end of their fifth decade. Why is that? Well, while it’s hard to succeed, it’s easy to fail. Perhaps the product isn’t appealing to enough prospects. Maybe the marketing team isn’t reaching …

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After reading first break all the rules in the special report on innovation in emerging markets in the April 17th edition of The Economist, I have to wonder if the charms of frugal innovation will be the salvation for supply chain leaders who have hit a brick wall in supply chain optimization. According to the article, the future lies in “reverse” or “constraint-based” innovation, which is being relabelled as “frugal” innovation. In frugal innovation, product companies take the needs of the poor consumer as a starting point and work backwards. Instead of adding ever more bells and …

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