How Should Buyers Deal with Small Suppliers?
One of the key problems enterprise buyers have is that they do not have enough of the right suppliers submitting bids in response to their Requests for Proposal.
What Is Supplier’s Risk in Procurement?
Fraudsters impersonated the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Defense, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Railway Retirement Board to steal hundreds of thousands of […]
Why Is the Request of Information Bad?
The cool kids use an expression, “RFx”, to cover three different types of solicitation: a Request-for-Proposal (RFP), a Request-for-Information (RFI), and a Request-for-Quotation (RFQ).
How Does the RFP Distort Outcomes?
There are all kinds of companies in the marketplace today. Which ones are likely to survive and thrive for the longer term? As an investor, isn’t this the fundamental question to ask before all others? Darwin wrote that “… if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the […]
How Do Suppliers Develop Capacity?
When it comes to winning RFPs, small and medium-sized businesses are caught in a Catch-22. Let’s assume that our scrappy company happens to figure out that a buyer is in the marketplace for a solution that we offer. Let’s assume that our crack sales team gets a hold of the RFP, either by getting onto […]
What Can Procurement Learn from Financial Markets?
When I talk to people with experience in financial markets about the RFP process, they shake their heads at the primitive nature of it all. They are accustomed to speed, transparency, and efficiency. The New York Stock Exchange alone traded $169 billion daily in 2013. Global equity markets trade trillions in dollar value annually. […]
Crowdsourcing Procurement Beats Outsourcing It
It is not uncommon for companies to outsource procurement to third parties. For management teams who see procurement as a clerical function of repetitive tasks, the prima facie appeal of outsourcing is obvious: ostensibly lower transactional costs, lower capital expenditure on procurement systems, greater economies of scale, better procurement process expertise, and greater vertical category […]
How Do Buyers Get Procurement Synergies?
Synergies. They are used to justify all kinds of activity, but no more so than in corporate mergers and acquisitions. Quantify the amount of this value to be created in terms of incremental revenue or cash flow (depending on the method investors prefer to use in valuing the acquiring company) and you have a pie […]
Would Procurement Transparency Lead to Better Outcomes?
Would Procurement Transparency Lead to Better Outcomes?
How to Get More Data for Procurement AI
There is a lot of talk about AI in the enterprise. But you can’t train models without a tremendous amount of data. The good news is that corporations and other organizations generate a ton of it. The bad news is that most of it is so-called “Dark Data.”