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Fall 2021 » www.procurising.com
The Big Promise Not Yet Fulfilled: Too Many Procurement Solutions Still Fail Users’ Needs by K AY L A GR A H A M
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inda Chuan has a bone to pick with procurement software. Five bones, to be more precise. Linda is the Head of Strategic Sourcing & Procurement Ops at Box—the California-based Content Cloud company—and has over two decades of senior executive procurement-related experience. Her resume includes many “firsts”: first Head of Sourcing & Procurement at Genstar— GE Capital, first Head of Technology Sourcing & Procurement Gap Inc. corporate, first Head of Technology Sourcing at PeopleSoft, first Head of Value Delivery at Siebel Systems, first Head of Marketing Sourcing (and later included HW/SW categories) at Yahoo!, as Salesforce’s first Senior Director of Global Corporate Services & Strategic Sourcing, and as Vice President of Global Technology Sourcing for Thomson Reuters. When someone with Linda’s extensive experience in the procurement field has something to say, the companies that design and sell procurement software would do well to take notes. After many years of being “let down,” she’s feeling that these companies continue to fail their users, primarily by not listening to their customers. “I’m finding that all of these solution providers out there claiming they have the answer to fix the business problem
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that they’re trying to solve—they’re not really talking to the people who are actually using it, and they’re not really solving it. They’re coming at it from an engineer’s perspective and have not really spoken or taken in feedback from the actual end-users. I was really bullish on technologies and innovations from the procurement side catching up to the sales side a while back. However, over the last five, ten years, I have not seen it. I’m seeing offerings that forget so many fundamental functionalities in the solution they’re building.” Linda sat down with us to discuss her five biggest points of failure among many of today’s procurement solutions.
an established company who’s been around years. And even data companies ... Everybody still has data quality issues. Why? Because they haven’t eliminated the need for manual entry.” Even worse, many solutions encourage pushing out that data entry to enduser teams, decentralizing and farming out the work to those who aren’t motivated to ensure data quality. So you end up with multiple teams, each entering data manually, introducing data variations in addition to the usual typos. This is a recipe for bad data, and bad data inevitably means bad results. Garbage in; garbage out; no AI and actionable insights.
1. Data Quality
2. End-to-End Platforms
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iant technological leaps like machine learning are made possible by two things: processing power and data. To be useful, that data has to be cleansed and normalized. Unfortunately, most companies are relying on manual entry of data in their procurement systems. All the processing power in the world can’t compensate for dirty data. “Data is never clean. I’ve been practicing procurement for a while now and I see it at every company, every industry, and at every phase of the life of any company, whether you’re a startup, or
ProcuRising » Insights For Today’s Procurement Leaders
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he reality of the current procurement software landscape is there is no single “best of breed” solution. Instead, many have specific strengths, and customers end up using multiple products to get the results they want. However, too often, developers decide they want to be an end-to-end platform, locking in users and their data. This strategy appeals to investors, but it doesn’t work for users. Developers need to provide true end-toend interoperability with each of the modules within the platform—as it was “pitched” to the customers.
