Replay | Building the Business Case for Procurement Process Orchestration

that um really really happy to have you here today. So we’ll drive uh drive and

and dive drive and dive straight into it. Uh and I’ll I’ll let my co-host

introduce himself first and then I’ll go ahead. So hi everybody. Some of you may not may know me already. My name is Andrew. I

founded focal point uh after spending 25 years in procurement. So I’ve been chief procurement officer and leader of

procurement for companies such as Fanny May, QBE, Webster Bank, Citizens Bank and the list goes on and on and it was

my experience as a procurement practitioner that made me want to start focal point. So very happy to have you

guys here and I would love to understand where you guys are coming in from. So if you can drop your location in the chat

that would be greatly appreciated and over to you Joel. Thanks so much Anders and yeah Joel K.

So I’m uh the head editor at the peer procurement newsletter and also a solo consultant for procure tech. So I’ve

been helping organizations for the past 13 years make sense of their uh IT

landscapes, their business objectives and then plug the two together to say hey where do we go from here right

what’s the roadmap for technology that’s going to enable us to get get new business capabilities execute on our

strategy and ultimately be a value creator for the business as the procurement function. So um really glad

to to to be collaborating on this Anders and so just to make sure that you know a little bit of housekeeping before we get

into the content who is this webinar for right so if you’re sitting here watching us uh yap away right if you’re a

procurement and IT professional or IT professional uh that has a general understanding of procurement process

orchestration this webinar is for you right it’s about how to justify uh the investment in these types of

technologies I think you know intuitively when we see demo demos uh we go, “Oh my god, that’s awesome, right?

I’d love to have something like that.” But then how do we actually build the case for change in our organization,

especially when procurement process orchestration probably means nothing to anybody outside of procurement. Um if

you don’t know what procurement process orchestration is, focal point and myself have a lot of content on the basics, the

introductions to that, right? So you can you can search uh there for more details. Essentially, it’s really around

plugging together, coordinating together uh stakeholders, systems and processes so that you’re able to get the most

efficient uh function around uh around collaboration around your recurrent

processes. So a very very high level in a nutshell that’s how I would I would

term it. I don’t know Anders if you’d add anything to that definition. Well, it’s really, you know, procurement has

been orchestrating stuff since you and I have been in procurement as practitioners, right? So, we always made sure that the process got executed from

left to right, but it was done largely manually poorly and mostly in Excel. And procurement orchestration brings

together not just the data sources and the data, but also the process flow and

systematize it so that it’s easier to execute, easier to know who to engage where, when, and where in the process

and so on and so forth. And it’s really about thinking about how do you how do you set up a process so that it can be

executed consistently and rapidly using a system rather than manual processes at

a nutshell. Yeah. And allowing variability and and accounting for the realities of of

procurement. Great great stuff. Um, and so one the quote I wanted to start off

with, it’s something I’ve said in the past, right? But it’s that no executive outside of procurement has ever woken up

excited about procurement orchestration ever, right? They probably don’t even know what it is. And so as we’re

discussing it, I’m sure there’s people on the call who who, you know, have seen demos um, you know, are wondering how

they can get their hands on something like this, right? And you see the value, but everybody outside of procurement,

they don’t know what the heck we’re talking about, right? And so today’s uh session the objective if I look at the

agenda is really well how do we make the case for procurement process orchestration outside of procurement

right to our chief financial officer to our chief information officer to our chief operating officer and and and

others in the business who are key stakeholders and purse holders and budget holders. Then how do we quantify

that business case? Right? What what are the hard benefits that come from a solution like this? what are the benchmarks we should be keeping in mind

and working towards and and using as the basis for uh our uh business case and

then the soft benefits as well which can be very important depending on your culture. Then we’ll go through an actual

example, right? Uh there’s many ways to build a business case. We’ve picked one that we’ll uh we’ll uh develop for you

today. Uh and then looking at deployment plan as well, right? Because it’s one thing to build a business case like

here’s what the value would be at maturity and then there’s it’s another thing to lay it out on a deployment

timeline and say here’s how we’re going to actually get it to uh to completion and the impact of that on getting to

those benefits. And then we’ll just, you know, do bring it all together. And Anders will give us a little conclusion

there at the end. And I’ve put a little reminder to let you know that there is live Q&A, right? So we can see uh folks

from Texas, from Canada, from Vietnam in the chat, Bulgaria, Denmark. So quite an

international audience already. If you have questions as we’re going along, feel free to ask them. Uh and uh if we

have the time to, if it makes sense in context, we’ll try to pull it in and answer it live. So even New Jersey, it’s it’s crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. Exotic New Jersey. Uh so so from there,

let’s get into the content. So how do we make the case for procurement process orchestration, right? So even if you’ve

got very supportive executives outside procurement, at the end of the day, everybody has biases, right? And what

they’re your executives end up caring about, what motivates them to act is their own objectives. And so whether

that’s managing costs, reducing risks, risks, improving operational efficiency

or delivering value to stakeholders, right, the the AIDA or earnings per share, etc. Your ability to get someone

to act outside procurement is to be able to tie uh what you’re trying to do and your objectives to theirs, right? Speak

their language. Uh and so folks want to eliminate un unplanned spending surprises that blow your budgets, right?

or or shadow technology pre p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p purchases for your CIO that create security vulnerabilities, integration nightmares

and and high maintenance costs, supplier failures on the operations side that you know shuts down a plant or a production

line, right? Project delays and the endless threads and of emails and

meetings to try to track down what happened, why it happened, how can we make sure it doesn’t happen again and or

just coordinating the response to an emergency, right? And so these are the things that that um that we want to

tailor for. We want to tailor our business case to and we want to tailor our messaging to as well.

And so just you know when we think about the CFO, how can we give them real-time visibility and control over spending

before spends for the CIO? How do I I like get them away from like from chaos

and emergencies and high maintenance costs and fire drills and give them more time to innovate and and actually uh you

know simplify their landscape for example and then the chief operating officer how do I reduce disruptions

resolves resolve issues faster and and proactively prevent uh operational

failures. And so at the end of the day it’s all about business outcomes right it’s all about how do I produce those

business outcomes and predictive procurement uh orchestration or PO is

how you would do that right the the uh the vision that laid out for us around

you know seamless coordination of processes visibility and never having to ask that question of like where’s my

request like whose desk is it sitting on what is happening uh never having to to

ask those questions ever again because everyone who needs visibility has the visibility they need and everything is

getting shipped from one person to the next as they need to be involved uh is is really what produces those outcomes

and so uh that’s how I would I would invite you to think about building your business case uh and from there we can

actually get into the nuts and bolts and I’ll hand it over to you Anders to do that.

Yeah. So quant as you think about quantifying business cases right there are hard and soft benefits and oftent

times soft benefits can merge into hard benefits and we’re going to talk a

little bit about both and we’re going to talk about how we can structure a business case sort of quantifiably right

because because oftentimes procurement benefits are doubted and I think as we

start as we created a framework for for business case benefits you can sort of rinse and repeat that as you want to

invest and other infrastructure for your organization. So if you can sort of click forward and and this little eye

chart here is really around how we have created a topology or or a

tree about benefits, right? So there’s cost reductions, time savings, and risk

mitigation. And the hardest benefits are obviously on the cost reduction side,

right? So it’s about making sure that you’re doing business with the right suppliers, using the right deals, making

sure that you have the ability to to acrue and not necessarily duplicate

things and then additional savings that that happen as part of that. Right? So if you think about orchestration, let’s

pick any topic whether that’s sourcing or procurement intake or supplier management. As you’re thinking about all

these three things, there are lots of manual tasks that aren’t necessarily systematized that can be streamlined

and ha and and automated to to drive cost savings. So making sure that as

you’re sitting down with your suppliers and doing a QBR, you know, if you can tell you if you can

tell the supplier what the on contract versus offcontract percentages are right up front and how you can drive on

contract percentages, that’s a beautiful thing and that will then help you save real dollars at the bottom line. So if

you look at the topology chart here, we’ve included some examples of how we would then quantify and justify cost

reductions and ease of these four buckets. Now obviously there are more buckets under cost reductions and as you

start thinking about it for example higher compliance with the business higher compliance with preferred providers those kinds of things that

could be another driver of those things that will help contract compliance and then drive further cost savings right

the next time the next benchmark here is is time savings and this is a squishy um

squishy thing that you have to sort of start thinking about and as I was in procurement We always talked about is

this a body or is it a torso or is it an arm or a leg sort of thing in terms of cost savings. I know that’s obviously

very sort of tongue and cheek, right? But what we have found is folks that

integrate and and automate sourcing for example. So if you can have a sourcing

process that automatically guides people to the preferred providers and then automatically helps you then select

diverse suppliers without having to look for it. And all those things take time. And if you can automate that and help

folks figure things out, you can save significant amounts of time and then drive folks to doing more value added

things. So what we want to say here is the more time you can save in time savings, the more time you can then work

on having cost reduction or strategic stuff done rather than tactical things

done. And that could be having touch-free recto processes. It could be

not spending a lot of time searching Oracle supplier masters but having that

stuff brought to you instead. and then having you know touchless supplier onboarding and all of these things are

done manually poorly in Excel like I talked about earlier and then more stuff you can automate to free up time to do

value added things is is time well spent last but not least risk mitigation right

so I’ve been working for financial services and insurance for quite a bit of time and we had to deal with

wonderful agencies just such as the OC that would come in on a periodic basis and audit does and let me tell you when

you get one of those wonderful audit reports and maybe even an MRA which is a matter requiring attention that’s board

attention all of a sudden bad things happen right to the extent to which you can eliminate those things altogether

it’s a beautiful thing the problem is procurement hardly ever gets credit for the for the accident or mishap that was

avoided so it’s a matter of putting that in people’s minds to say look you know we can have more suppliers be validated

we can make sure they are compliant with whatever guidelines we put forth whether that’s risk insurance certificate

collection sock 2 reviews uh anything like that and having said that you can

mitigate that risk and trust me the board no one in the seauite want a bad audit report from your regulators right

so the more you think about those things the better off you will be so those are the things I would talk about for hard

benefits and can I just add Andre is like on the time savings piece and I I know you

mentioned it but I want highlight it because it’s super important is like time savings on its own usually isn’t

enough to convince an executive that a project is worthwhile. It’s more, hey, here’s the time we’ll save and here’s

how we’re redeploying it to new spend under management, new categories that we’re not actually tackling today.

Better, you know, better uh uh negotiation or or compliance with

existing strategies with business units that we’re not giving any attention to, right? And so, you really need to be

creative. That’s that’s where the creativity comes into play is being able to say how do we redeploy those time savings to something that’s going to

give us another uh another portion of benefits, right? And so you never really

just hang on to one of these buckets, but you you end up uh touching on all three if you want a winning business

case. And so if you’re if you’re really mature in an area, then uh potentially

you’re on the low end of the benchmark or you’re not including it at all. Whereas if opportunity exists, you’re

very immature. Then you’re able to go towards the top of those benchmarks when you’re crafting your business case and say, “Okay, I think we could go, you

know, we can faster. We’re doing the the supplier onboarding manually in Excel with email and phone calls today. If we

use a platform to do that, yeah, we could get 50% faster for sure.” Right. So I just wanted to call that out um

Andreers before moving on to the soft benefits.

Yeah. And the soft benefits you know we all we all strive towards this right. So

one of the things that we are tracking for some of our customers is a net promoter score and it’s basically a one

question survey at the end of an interaction with procurement and say how well did we do today like and then we sort of say the track it’s people in the

middle that yeah it was okay and then people that are ecstatically happy and people that are not and the net promoter

score is sort of telling you like what percentage of folks are net promoters right so we’ve seen this in in in in

customer satisfaction surveys as well as internal surveys so That’s one of the things that we track and what we’re

finding here is that net promoter scores is an indicator for how well procurement is received and how well people are how

willing people are to come back to procurement to receive help. And as we all know, we’ve had the, you know, the

angry users that hate procurement and there’s not much you can do to help them, right? So but at the end of the

day if there’s a ground swell of people that are are you know raving uh

component you know proponents of procurement that’s what we strive towards. So the enhanced user experience

should not be underestimated because that helps compliance and if the easiest

path is also the right path that’s going to make people want to take it. And I think part of the problem today is that

some organizations create these you know monumental policies that are extremely hard to follow without any real help. So

it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask to do the right thing. And that’s what we try to do with

procurement orchestration is we try to make it such that the easiest way is the right way. Um and then you have the

strategic benefits right so having the right datadriven uh decision making

shifting things from tactical to strategic and then the having a proper

alignment. If it’s easier to use your internal accepted and approved providers that are strategic to you, the better

off you are, the you know the shorter path from A to Z and people are going to

want to use that again and again. And I’ve seen some organizations as we are setting up their processes. They say

well I want to make it very clear that if you use a non-p preferred providers we have to go through the onboarding

process we’ll take this amount of time and it require this amount of of red tape versus using one of the internal

providers that’s already can provide that service and that’s a very strong to sort of indicator say you know what I

don’t want to go through the six six month process of onboarding uh a new supplier if I can use one that we have

now the irony here is also through orchestration we can make that six-month process much much shorter but of course

it doesn’t drive the compliance that you’re after, right? And then obviously you want to make sure that as you’re

doing these kinds of things, the enhanced organizational alignment would also help be uh a good thing, right? So

as you sort of think about a procurement process, procurement is very much a team sport. So we can’t do procurement

without you know involving risk compliance it uh any of the sort of what

I would call procurement adjacent functions and is if they have a better way and a better solution where they can

interact with procurement and procurement stakeholders and procurement clients the better off it is. Now again

getting raging fans is a beautiful thing and I think procurement orchestration is one of those things that can help drive

that you know across the organization and those are the soft benefits that will then drive things that would go

into hard benefits. You probably have a lot to say there Joel. No well I was just going to I would add that uh so one of the books that I read

on this topic that that changed completely how I think about it is how to measure anything. Um, and essentially

it’s like, you know, you were speaking speaking to NPS score for example, like there’s a way for me to to measure NPS

score over time and to tie that to for for example, uh, contract compliance,

right? And say like if I’m able to bump up the NPS score, here’s kind of the impact that that that isn’t necessarily

100%, but we see a correlation with contract compliance, right? Because people want to use the system. it

becomes the easiest way to do things and so it has a hard benefit impact at the end of the day, right? And so being

creative on okay, how do we we don’t need a perfect measure, right? But how do we uh measure something over time

either with survey or with observation or what have you um and trend it over time and and be able to tie it to other

metrics so that these soft benefits become hard benefits or can be tied to hard benefits, right? So being creative

around, you know, if if a soft if a soft benefit is not landing as something

valuable within your company culture, how do I tie it to something that is, right? Because uh everybody every

company has a culture where certain value levers are more important than others, right? And so depending on the data that you have or or don’t have, how

can we turn things into data uh so that we can then justify u putting the

investment in in a way that resonates with with the business? Okay.

Uh yeah. And so and so if we were to take what Andre’s just laid out and and walk through an example. Uh so I put I

love SNI diagrams and I put one here just to to illustrate right like if we were to build a business case around the

contract compliance uh value lever for example at full maturity right so once

everything is is deployed with a solution like focal point. Let’s take a global industrial manufacturing company

with about 4.2 billion in annual addressable spend. All right. So, let’s say they’re today they’re at 58%

contract compliance. So, they are measuring that with their existing tools and they’re able to to get a a good

handle on what is compliant with contracts. But that also means that the

uh 42% that’s remaining, right? So, the 1.76 billion is escaping these pre

preferred purchasing channels. It’s not going on contract. to go back to what you were saying, you know, at the very

outset of the the webinar on there’s um right and so there’s leakage there. There’s value leakage. We’re buying

stuff that we could be buying another way and we could get get the exact same thing, exact same quality, but at at a

cheaper price uh if we had only put it through the correct purchasing channel. And so each non-compliant purchase we

can see cost us on average 5% more than negotiated rates. Right? So if you’re doing this within your own business,

you’re going and pulling this data to to bring this together. And so if we look at the diagram here, right, we have 2.43

uh6 billion or 58% of the total spend that’s compliant and then 1.764 that’s

not compliant or 42%. Right? And so if I think about, okay, I go do my my market

research, I look at the uh the licensing cost for one of these tools and the fact that it’d be able to give me that

additional uh compliance spend. Let’s say 22% here in our business case. So an additional 924 uh million in compliance

spend that breaks out to okay, there’s the spend itself, but then there’s my recurring savings of 5% uh which is

about $45.2 two uh million dollars a year on that spend and then I can I can

self-fund in those savings my license cost and my onetime implementation cost for a tool like this right and so it

becomes very um very compelling in terms of okay right like it you know yes

putting a there’s risk when putting a a tool in place and there’s project management to do and all this good stuff

but it’s a fairly easy uh business case to demonstrate with one of those value

levers right and then if it needs to become more compelling then I can go and pull on other value levers as well as I

build my model uh to uh to explain how and why we should be doing this and then

it’s all about messaging right how do I turn this around and say okay how does what does this mean for the CIO it means

that we can we can actually focus on identifying okay what is our ticketing app if we have seven of them right we’ll

connect to it make sure that it uh privacy impact assessments are done in that in that one ticketing app and

everything else we could kind get rid of as we centralize that function, right? And same thing with legal or with with

other things, right? So, orchestration is really around being purposeful with the processes we’re going to put in

place. And so, for the CIO, that’d be that’d be one of the the messaging uh factors that could could be a soft

benefit, right? Standardization of applications. They may get hard benefits from from portfolio optimization later

down the line, but you’re you don’t have to make your business case out of it. So anyways, just a quick example of, you

know, where you can start from and then you could start tacking other other things on to it based on um what is

relevant to to the stakeholders that need to approve the the project uh while keeping it as simple as possible, right?

Because the last thing you want is like some some some huge business case that’s very hard to track afterwards.

Anything you want to add, Anders, on how how you’d build a business case in this example or otherwise? Well, I think you

build a business case also around the having structured information so that

you don’t things aren’t sitting in Excel spreadsheets or SharePoint drives, those kinds of things like you have a good

place to find things for for future audits and for for for how decisions

were made and those kinds of things, right? So, and with that also comes the possibility of retiring legacy platforms

that are just utilized because they’re there, right? if everything if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a

nail and that’s I think how a lot of things end up in SharePoint these days. So you know thinking about that as well.

So I think you know you make the business case depending on what hurts in the organization and there’s not a

one-sizefits all and that’s why it’s so important to think about all the drivers right

yeah and then yeah to pick to pick and that’s why I think this morning I posted in in before this webinar that building

a business case is an art in the sense where you know it needs to be based on

the pain and the value drivers that are important in the culture of your business but then you know you have the

the two trees that we put together so that you’re able to go pick and choose based on what is relevant to you

and I and so while the numbers are compelling the the real story is how

orchestration is going to translate to u and transform your operations for for

these different functions right we use the executives as like the personas but could be directors you know you need to

speak the language of of your other stakeholders right so for finance we’re able to see 80% of spend that’s going to

be visible before commitment. Right? So if it’s compliant, it means it went through the proper purchasing channel,

which means we have the correct approvals before going out, right? It increases forecasting accuracy,

proactive management for the CIO. Every single technology purchase is is routed

through a process for technology purchases. It makes we have the right security reviews. Uh there’s less

emergency uh initiatives. Resilience, operational resilience is is stronger.

So that’s how you want to message to it and then your operations right like how are we reducing supplier related

disruptions uh you know and the resolution time as well because we have all the stakeholders that were for

example you know related to that stakeholder uh relationship uh in our tools as well. Uh and so once you have

that then the question becomes and I’ll I’ll turn it over to you in terms of your perspective on deployment plans but

it becomes okay well if we have that 42 million from my example that’s going to be our recurring savings at maturity

like how do we get there and that’s the the deployment plan. Yeah and I think the biggest challenge

or the biggest thing we try to avoid as we advise customers and prospects about

how to go live is don’t try to bite the elephant in one bite. it it’s basically

getting quick time to value is is number one thing. So, we have one customer that

started UAT this morning and they are a 11,000 employee uh professional services

company uh and we went live with them or we’re going we’re having UAT now four

weeks after we started the project and they were four weeks not four months and they very much went after you know the

intake part of the equation like we need to solve that first so that we can then know what’s coming in the funnel and how

to dispose of those things as they’re coming into the funnel. And you know, phase one for them was really like

pinpointing what hurts the most and go fix that first and then build through to downstream. So for them, phase one is

going to be putting the foundation in place. Getting 11,000 users set up in the system so they can start using it

and starting interacting with procurement. The next phase for them is then taking all the stuff they learned

from phase one and building their procurement, sourcing and supplier management processes into the tool. So

that once so that once people get into the sourcing process, the users requesting the service will then

understand where the things are sitting in the pipeline and how it’s being disposed of so to speak. And then phase

three for them will be to do um more on the category management side and pulling

in strategies and managing metrics and all those kinds of things. So we chose sort of like a rather than using a small

segment of the organization to go after like we chose a small process to go after and expanding that as we went

down. But there’s not a there’s not a one-sizefitsall here. It’s more about

how do you find time to value and what that means for the organizations. And I

think some organization will say well I want to go allin with one category or one business unit. Well that’s admirable

and that also works. Um also starting small from a process

perspective also works. So it’s basically how do you get to that full deployment full value in a short amount

of time. And if you can prove as part of phase one that this is really worth

investing in, you can build some excitement and hype in the organization and get good good uh suggestions and

good sponsors along the way. But there is no time there is no uh one-sizefits-all and it’s really like a

consultative way. And I think that’s what sets focal point aside is we don’t come in with pre-baked processes and say

all right this is best this is best in class you should be doing this. We sort of take a step back and say well where

does it hurt? what do you what do you want to what do you want to fix and how can we help you get there? Now, of course, we also have pre-baked

processes, but we don’t come in guns blazing saying that this is how you should do it based because we’re right.

Uh we we take a step back and try to figure out like what works for that organization.

And and it’s it’s funny you mentioned that, right? Because I I think I I me I mentioned this yesterday in a meeting

with a client where I was going like every implementation is essentially a world first, right? like because you’ve

got a different org structure, different set of systems in the background, different strategy and objectives that

you’re trying to get to versus a competitor in the same industry, right? And so there’s always a combination of

factors that make it that you’re essentially a unique a unique uh in a unique position or a unique context.

That being said, I think you you want to tend towards using best practices for sure and and coming to the table with

those as a as a starting point, but there is always a bit of of um uh you

know fit fit that needs to happen from both ends to get to the outcome that that you want. Right. And so I

appreciate that uh that point you’re making, Andreers. Um I had a question for you unless you want to add to that

first. I I used to have a boss back in when I worked for Bank of Montreal and he used

to say everybody’s special. Some are more special than others, right? And I think that’s that’s that’s still true. Oh, for sure. For sure. And it’s Yeah.

And it’s finding that balance, right? Because you don’t want to be too special where you’re doing stuff that is so unique that it it it’s it’s heavy,

right? It’s because you were you’ve been doing it the same way um for for a long time. Like I remember just a quick

anecdote where you know I remember working with an insurance firm where after contracts had been written there

was like a three-day or or signed there was a three-day waiting period before um

before the contracts were uh were activated and this was a really really old like hundred-year-old company and I

kept asking why why why this delay and and you know never got a satisfactory

answer and we eventually worked it up to like they you know They were they they were paper contracts before and so there

was a there was a um a delay to just ship to to wait for the contracts to get

shipped and for like the inks to sign and all that, right? And they had just kept that delay uh for no reason over

time like oh we we wait three days before we activate the contracts, right? And so you don’t want to get too spe you

don’t want to get special to that point. Uh um and then the question I had for you

on the on the UAT example you were giving earlier is for that spec I was curious about that specific client like

are they standing up procurement from uh from nothing like is it a new function or is it an old function that they’re

they’re trying to give new capabilities to it. It’s it’s a it’s a relatively new

function in a company that’s been growing by by acquisition quite aggressively. they’re trying to get

things uh get things normalized. Cool. That gives good good context as well. Um and to to add like to this

deployment plan thinking, right? Like I I always try to bring it back to business units and spend categories. And

so in a a very mature uh organization like you might have you might have to

hit a business unit first, right? and then give them a tool that’s going to allow them to support 100% of their

requests for the different types of categories or different things that they buy. And so some people get bogged down

in oh well we have to design processes for like for IT for human resources for professional services for staff for

staffog for x y and z and you get like this huge barrier to entry in their mind

and what a trick that I’ve seen is being able to and I’d love your feedback on it and is is going okay what’s what’s like

the five six categories that represents 80% of the spend and let’s map those out

but then let’s just have a catchall process where it’s it’s more generic and we can we can put a human in the loop uh

to to action it but we have that structure around say it purchases right

where we’re looping in it and we’ve already got that in the process but we give it give ourselves a way to cover

100% of the spend without having to define 100% of the processes per spend category is that something you’ve seen

yeah I mean I feel like we can bore everyone to tears here about setting up procurement processes right but what we

tend to do is set up a base process that can then be contextually and conditionally flexing up and down

depending on the category, the risk, the geography, whatever the case may be. But

I find that very few organizations are ready for that discussion that day one. But that’s yeah to me that’s you know if

we look at this other model here that’s what the considerations become when you

get to that deployment plan discussion right before you even get here you need to think about okay what’s the business case at at um at the end of the day

right and then this is more okay well how do we deploy it and what is the impact on spreading that business case

over time and I think I’ I’d leave it uh I’d leave this topic unless there’s questions in the chat on uh trying to do

that hockey growth of your business case, right? So, to your point, giving yourself time to to start small, right?

And you may not see huge benefits at the beginning, but it gives you that solid base that creates excitement and that um

that proves the concept and then you’re able to deploy it either multiple business units at the same time,

multiple categories at the same time, and get all the spend uh that’s going to drive the benefits from your business

case. But it gives you it gives you that time to uh to experiment and get it right before you open the floodgates. so

to speak. Uh all right. And so bringing it all

together here, uh Anders, like what you know, what would be your key takeaways for for if I’m sitting in the audience

here wanting to build my uh procurement process orchestration business case?

Well, I would first of all figuring out like what need what are the pain points of the organization. So what are people

complaining about the most and what will it get you if and when you solve those

things? And then you need to figure out okay how are you going to solve those things and being able to tell that story that okay

I have this problem I want to solve it this way and that’s just going to give us this is the outcome that will get to

you Mr. CEO, CFO, COO, whatever the case may be. And then you need to sort of

paint the picture and tell the story about what the future looks like once that’s there and the benefits for them.

So, everyone cares about what’s in it for me. They, you know, but executives will care about that, but also how it

will impact their people, which again, we’ll come back to that indirectly. So, that is you really the story that you

want to start telling as part of the business case. And um just to to to tack

on to the end there then it becomes crunchy like if you’ve sold that project

you know the questions will start uh strong and fast around okay well what about you know how are you actually

going to roll this out and what’s the plan for that and so you as soon as you get these crunchier questions you know

you know that you’re on the right path in my mind right you know once you start getting challenged it’s because the

stakeholders are engaged and they want to know okay how do we actually make this a reality and they start testing you on, have you thought this through?

Right? And so that’s where knowing your numbers well, knowing the inter relationship and making sure you’re not

double dipping on benefits, right? So if you’re actioning multiple value levers, you’re not uh you’re not double counting

certain savings or certain benefits that you would be getting. And then thinking about, okay, well, we would actually,

you know, how would we actually get this into a productive state, right? Or a live state so that people are using it.

and how are we giving each other each other and the business the the time to adopt this correctly without breaking

our face, right? Because the the tendency and I don’t know if you’ve seen this honors with clients is like

on paper the fastest way to get the most benefits is like to to put the most amount of scope at the beginning of the

of a deployment plan. And so it’s very uh alluring, it’s very tempting to do

that, but to me that’s the it’s like the easiest way to break your face with a project like this. Um so I’m I’m curious

to know if that’s if you’ve come came across that in the wild. Yeah, I mean it’s it’s it’s procurement

people tend to be idealistic, you know, as as a people and very optimistic, right? And people want to go to the

perfect process with the perfect stakeholder mapping with all like everything baked in. It just you know

the the truth is it just takes too long and the amount of resistance you’ll get from internal stakeholders. So, go I

need to do my process in your solution now. Like, and without them having an idea of what it looks like and how much

better it is. Um, it’s kind of hard to bring them along the journey with you.

So, I think going starting small is the way to go, but yeah, we we’ve gotten

stuck in in processes where perfection is the enemy of great or even good enough, right?

And that usually takes a long time and it’s a much harder way of of of getting

to the end point than than sort of slow and steady, right? And it’s kind of like if you want to lose weight, I’m going to

pick myself here for a minute, right? Like you cannot eat for two weeks and you can probably lose a lot of weight, but it’s not healthy. Uh but you can,

you know, just decrease your consumption a little bit and you know, do healthy stuff. It’s probably gets you there and

it’s longer longer term better for you and everybody else. And it’s probably not a good analogy, but hopefully you

get it. Yeah. But it actually leads because I see we have a bit of time here and if you have questions guys, make sure to

put them in the chat and we’ll we’ll have time to get to them. Um, but is like once you know we’ve talked about

building the case for change, the the value levers that you can pull on and then how to actually deploy that uh to

get live. I’m curious to get your perspective on like once a customer is live, how do they maintain what are the

good habits they need to maintain to keep that weight off, right? To go to go on your uh on your analogy a bit

further, right? How do I make sure that the investment we put into this tool uh

keeps realizing my savings uh over time? Well, I think a couple of things, right?

So continuing to build on the platform is is been what we have seen the most of.

Right? So once you get your first few processes up and running and people understand how to build their own

processes and configure their own processes, we find that folks in the wild are basically starting to use the

solution for things that they weren’t originally envisaged for. We have customers who have come to us and say,

“Oh, look, you know, now we have uh items reconciliation on the solution and we can pull a trigger off of this system

to run this workflow and then we can” and I’m like, “Oh my god, like I never thought that this was a use case for the

tool.” So because we don’t charge for extra users or extra processes or extra

spend people are then starting to think about how can we use the solution for more things you know across the

organization not just in procurement as well and I think that’s very healthy because number one for us the tool gets

stickier number two it increases the ROI for the for the purchaser even more and

people have one place to work which is which is kind of Um, so what I would say is that as long

as you start thinking and continuing to innovate, it’s a beautiful thing and you can do stuff with like with the solution

that you didn’t originally think it it could be doing, right? The second thing and this is motherhood and apple pie for

procurement people, right? Is once you source something, you also want to make sure you manage the deal post signature.

And I think that is the other thing that sort of comes to mind is if you think about it as a sourcing tool or as a

first of all if you think about it as a transaction processing tool it can be done like that but that’s not really what procurement is all about right

that’s purchasing but then you sort of start well then you start sourcing stuff and okay you get more value out from

there but after that you also want to manage those transaction postcontract and I think that is also how you

maintain and retain those savings going forward as well. Yeah. And so and so I love that you’re essentially telling me

the the premise of my question was wrong, which is I say like how do I retain the the value from the business

case and you’re telling me so that it doesn’t degrade and you’re telling me actually what we’re seeing with the most successful clients is that they figure

out they figure out a way to keep increasing ROI on the tool uh while using it because they you know

essentially when you get in there you see all the potential uh for uh for additional value and and to your point

right you you’ve you’ve paid for the sandbox and so you can build the sand castle that that uh to your heart’s

content. Um that’s great and see I I see we have a question here. Let me just go to the

end slide here. So as as folks as we’re going through questions here uh we have two QR codes for you. First of off thank

you for being here. On the uh left hand side you can subscribe to the pure

procure pure pure procurement newsletter. So funny because I founded my my company during COVID and I didn’t

say it out loud because nobody was talking to each other and I didn’t realize it was a tongue twister until like you know 2023 but it is uh but if

you want to follow the newsletter uh weekly give you little tips and tricks on how to leverage technology to get

results in your procurement business and then on the right hand side everything we’ve covered today and more like talk

tracks with your executives you know what your CEO could say at the end of a uh an implementation of a tool like this

on a an an earnings call or a shareholder uh meeting or even a board meeting. That’s all in the in the brand

new ebook that Focal Point is releasing today uh based on how to build your business case. So, it’s really a step by

step that’s a bit more detailed than what we covered today on how to build your business case. So, if uh what we

discussed today resonated, you can grab it with the QR code here. And I’m sure uh Maya and the team at uh at Focal

Point uh will also be distributing it through their normal channels on email and LinkedIn and all that good stuff.

So, watch out for it um as you uh as you get feedback from this webinar. So, just

wanted to get that out of the way. I’ll leave it on screen so that folks can grab it. Uh but Fet Fetali and I’m I

hope I’m saying that right had one question. I don’t know whether or not my question is relevant but what is the single most important problem in

procurement you know I’ll throw that one to you Anders because I know you probably have a perspective on this that there’s not one but

yeah so so I I’ve built procurement organizations many times in the past right and it

really depends on the maturity that you’re at if you’re just starting out and you’re coming in with a green field

then it’s really figuring out where your money is being spent and the commitments that you have already right so we’re

helping your customer right now. Basically, it’s a $2.8 billion um $2.8

billion company and they’re setting up a procurement organization for the first time. And they really want to figure out

like where are they spending their money, what do they have contracts with. Once that’s been sorted out, then you

need to figure out like what are the opportunities that that you can have either for increased uh compliance or

savings or whatever the case may be. But really what you need to figure out at the beginning is what you know what is

the current landscape and then where do I want to get to and how am I going to get there and I think it’s sounds like

motherhood and apple pie but it’s true and as you the more mature you get the problems be get smaller typically

speaking because you’ve solved a lot of things and it’s a journey right um and what I will say is this you know very

few people get points for perfect procurement you should probably never strive for perfect but you want to strive for good enough or even great. Um

because I think that’s going to be much more appreciated than having the best intellectual procurement process with everything ticked and tied, right?

Because perfection costs a lot of money. And and I love that, right? Because as soon as you say that, my mind goes to

like, you know, my 8020 Pareto rule, right? I probably have 20% of my spend categories where I have 80% of the

impact that I’m able to generate as procurement, right, for the business. And so focusing on the other 80% of the

spend that we do like how we’re going to get those processes perfect etc might be nice from a a theoretical standpoint and

my desire to do the best work I can do um you know to get it perfect uh but at

the same time is it going to move the needle for the business maybe not right and so living keeping those two things

uh true in my head at the same time right my my desire to yes do good work across the board but also focus more

heavily on the things that are going to move the needle for the business is probably the uh uh the best thing that

someone could do. Now, I’m uh I apologize, Anders. I just realized that I thought we were going all the way to

uh to 1 pm here. And folks, uh I think we’re we only had half an hour on the

call. So, we’ll meet halfway here and end at 12:45. Uh so, I hope everybody here had a great time uh with the

webinar that it provided value. If you have follow-up questions, I know Anders, we can find you on LinkedIn. you’re

kicking there. Me, me as well. And so, anything around building business cases,

uh, if we can help you out or anything else that we discussed on the call, please do make sure to to, uh, to reach

out and we’ll make sure to be in touch and and plug you with the right resources if we are not the right resources. Yeah.

Thank you. Uh, thanks for having me, Joel. And if anyone just wants to nerd out about procurement, like I love doing that stuff. So, Fah Holly, if I can help

you at all or anyone else for that matter, just reach out. I just love talking about procurement and and uh how

we can grow this and I’ll attest to that which is one of the reasons I I enjoy so much collaborating with uh with you Andre and

the focal point team right it comes from the heart so thanks again for for being here everybody thanks Anders for joining

me and we’ll talk to you again next time have a great time yes sir thank you guys cheers