Fractional Chief Research Officer, Procurement/Supply Chain Expert, Optimization Guru, Solution Engineer, Technology Management, Due Diligence, Writer, Leader, Board Member, Scholar, Futurist, & "the doctor" (IEEESM,HKN)
Outside the Enterprise, The Days of Intake - to - Orchestrate are Numbered! There's a lot of mid-market mania now around intake and orchestrate, but this is not necessarily a good thing because, in the long run, someone's going to get hurt. Why? As I laid out in my marketplace madness article (linked below), I expect a number of these to fail over the next 18 months or so (even though they definitely won't be the first, second, or even third line casualties of over-explosion in the number of startups, the drying up of funding in general, and delayed/reduced "solution" buying at many organizations), and the reasons are very simple 1) 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞 = 𝐏𝐚𝐲 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐕𝐢𝐞𝐰 Now, PPV might work great for big-time sports events that you can't see in person (or couldn't afford an in-person ticket to), especially if you don't want to pay for a 24/7/365 premium sports channel, but let's face it, 𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐋𝐃 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐘 𝐁𝐄 𝐏𝐀𝐘𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐓𝐎 𝐀𝐂𝐂𝐄𝐒𝐒 𝒀𝑶𝑼𝑹 𝐃𝐀𝐓𝐀? If your solutions are all SaaS based, then ANYONE should be able to access them, so if your sourcing/procurement solution doesn't support intake, why not switch to one that does?!? 2) 𝐎𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 = 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐰𝐥 Sure, it ties your apps together, but it's yet another solution to manage AND pay for. Why not get a core procurement application with a fully open API that can bind all the other modules you need -- why get yet another solution entirely? 3) 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞-𝐭𝐨-𝐎𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 = 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐞𝐞𝐟? Talk to an old Pro who was doing Procurement back before the first modern tools began to be introduced in the late 90’s and they’ll tell you that they don’t get this modern focus on “orchestration” and managing “expenses” and low-value buys because, when they were doing Procurement, it was about identifying and coming up with methodologies to strategically managing multi million (10, 50, 100+) categories across the organization ... not counting nickels and dimes (that was the job of Finance) ... 4) And, 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭? Enterprise who can't easily rip and replace anything, yes, but there are only 500 Fortune 500s and 3000 Global 3000s and that won't support many providers. However, mid-market down, it's not that hard ... there are a number of integrators that specialize in data transfer and will consolidate, cleanse, and enrich your data in the process, which you want to do anyway if you want to use modern analytics / machine learning applications! https://lnkd.in/dz4qukwu
Just yesterday I was chatting with Joël Collin-Demers about this and I don’t get In take and Orchestration too. Get it for mid market or enterprises who have way too many systems that they can’t change. At midmarket level that solution won’t find a good commercial viability, at enterprise level, companies will move over to mature S2P.
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1moLove differing viewpoints. They make you refine your thinking... For #1, you don't think the companies charging per API call will change their pricing models when it doesn't work? For #2, you don't think a good orchestration tool can become your core procurement application? Or, at the very least, push S2P suites to develop better orchestration functionality within the suites? I've implemented suites dozens of times over the last decade and customers always have the same issues... Suites are still transaction-based and users/requesters need lots of training to know how to use it correctly... So they don't. Adoption always sucks. We need technology that caters to the "perpetual novice" (a term I've gleefully stolen from Shaun Syvertsen) and brings the training needs way way down. For #3, I don't think it's an OR discussion but an AND. Generic Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) have been around for a decade + so orchestration isn't new... But no-code, procurement-specific orchestration tools are. That's the big difference. Your take on market consolidation is a good one. What's your take on what a good, industry agnostic, no constraints procurement tech stack should be today? How do you think about this?