After some weeks of no posting, I have to share to some news. I just delivered an ISM seminar on Spend Assessment at the Hilton Santa Clara, at the heart of Silicon Valley, to an audience of spend management professionals from world class tech companies. And, caramba, what an eye opener that was. Every single one of them is having a lot of difficulties in understanding their spend. And no good tools to do an even passable work to address their spend visibility woes. Just their relentless manipulation of huge amounts of data and likely a humongous amount of work and pressure to get it done. Kudos to them, the unsung heroes in procurement. I also thought that based on previous cancellations of other seminars organized by the ISM-Silicon Valley, mine was going the same way. I was wrong.
Clearly there is a need for spend analysis solutions out there. What I didn’t know was how unaware people were about the requirements to get the data ready for a manual spend assessment exercise, which was the core of my presentation. Now they know and hopefully are ready to make a case to perform a structured category assessment at their companies and have tools to deliver a successful strategy for managing their spend. I also made clear that, as we, the ones in the trenches who went through such an effort know, that a corporate spend assessment is a gargantuan undertaking if you don’t have the right amount of resources. I emphasized the fact that a one-off manual assessment was OK. But since refreshing the information is NOT an easy task, I recommended looking into an automated solution from the Spend Analysis vendors out there, like the ones here.
The idea of the seminar was to acquaint people with some of the common tasks associated with spend analysis, best practices, terminology and project management. Based on the feedback forms, looks like my delivery was a success. Very encouraging.
So, all in all, a good experience doing the thing that I like the most which is teaching people how to do their job in a better way.
See you soon.
