You know what REAL procurement excellence and digitization of top 1% players looks like? ✨
The most transformative and game changing work is boring, difficult and extremely tactical.
There is absolutely zero chance of being philosophical in Procurement Transformation and Excel at the execution. (So filter out firms/people who lack execution & tactical capabilities. Goodbye Ineffective Project Managers/Consulting Firms/Conferences).
Let me give you an insight what goes under the hood. These are my 3 out of many learnings. (Video to follow soon)
- Develop a use case library.
This is my step 1. If you dont have a very specific, granualar Use case library, most likely you will end up running behind tools and conferences to get your 30 seconds of spotlight on stage and will always be looking to copy others.
I have about 60 use cases and their potential solutions, mapped with the available and required data sets, their impact on business (high or low--skip medium, you will love not having a safe option)
And most importantly, my use cases are not "visionary" types. These are boring use cases such as detection purchase price variations before the next purchase, identification of bid collusion before event ends, fraud detection before the next event (have about 20 rules on how I define fraud). (Shameless promotion: Supernegotiate is building a Procurement Fraud platform, DM me if you want to collaborate)
- Data Cleansing, Enrichment, Normalization and Fuzzy Matching :
When I am designing and writing my next algorithm for a Procurement use case (I use Python and Open Source libraries), I spend 40% of my time dealing with Data issues. Cleansing, Normalizing, Dealing with Bad dates/inputs. Boring, isn't it? Why CPOs will be interested in speaking about Data quality anyway. Its not fancy or shiny.
The next 30% is spent on Fuzzy matching. My most successful use cases in Procurement are all based on extremely sophisiticated fuzzy matching algorithms.
Again, Fuzzy matching is my magic formula to stitch various data sources in Procurement. Yes, you can theoritically mention integration but I dont have time to wait for PMO functions to add 10 month integration project delay!
Over the last 3 years, the amount time and complexity I have learnt in manuvering Fuzzy matching is my biggest secret sauce in building comprehensive Procurement tools inhouse.
Never ever under rate the impact of Fuzzy matching in Procurement. (Also, next time if some visionary speaker undervalues Fuzzy logic, yawn!)
- Rule based Engines:
The next project is building a rule based engine. Again, its "non visionary" and not keynote worthy. It is a non AI, non Gen AI, non LLM driven model. But, its autonomous.
Do you see the differention now? My Engine will work based on rules but it will work autonomoyusly. I will have full control on the working controls and will be able to explain the output of my autonomous model.
Lots of work to do to finish off this year! #Supernegotiate!
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