11-12-13 14:15

11-12-13 14:15

Nice date to have put it all together. Yesterday, december 11th 2013, at about 15 minutes past 2 PM, during my third meeting of the day (and after a few of those inspiring days), the business plans for coming year(s) kind of materialized. There were more then enough plans of course, but reality makes sure that you cannot do it alone! You need people to help, partners to play along and a little bit of luck every now and again.

The partnerships we wanted to explore seems to be picking up and the checks with the ourside world seem positive. The plans we had surrounding SAP SRM, and in the broader sence SAP Procurement are yesterday more or less concluded as "feasible" by the rest of the world (to put it mildly). That is for an entrepreneur an important step, because that makes sure that people can be persuaded in place, that surroundings can be managed toward desired outcome and, important, that you can have some fun in the process...

Of course, now the accountant part starts...and the bank wants to get involved somehow as well... So oke, there will be parts with less fun surrounding the process, but as it appears now, during the next year, I will be able to take you along in some nice activities:
1. Partnerships with SAP
2. Marketing / branding campains
3. Joint (venture?) developments on SAP with technology-/businesspartners
4. Travels abroad, far and close, to prepare for some real growth
5. New employees
6. and...an important bonus...some new clients of course!

Some more days of calculation for me, some inspiring meetings to finalize things towards Christmas, only about two more weeks to prepare the practical sides, but I am starting to be convinced that we will double our business again, for the third year in a row, keep reading!

Doede van Haperen
www.lakran.com
www.postulit.com

New year dawning

New year dawning

It is December already! My agenda is exploding on client meetings, partnership coffees and strategy solutioning. Great fun, but also very time consuming..

But the most positive side of this development, apart from the personal fun, is clear: we are moving, no corrected, we are running towards the dawning new year of 2014! All kinds of news is supporting the situation:

- uplift in temps hiring

- uplifts for months now in de NEVI PMI index

- our own jobs portfolio

- every expertise bureau I talk to

- ...etcetera

The new year is dawning. The truth will be exciting, experts are announcing "a new reality" for months and years now, but what will this reality be? IT markets in the western world seem changed structurally, but we still see a lot of movement on our worlds of SAP SRM and Procurement / P2P in general. But the biggest mistake would be to "just carry on", so we too will keep on changing and re-inventing ourselves.

Still, the picture of this morning seems to hold sone truth, the sun dawns through the mist, the new year...?

Doede van Haperen

www.lakran.com

www.postulit.com

Best Value Procurement

Best Value Procurement

New trends in procurement, always great to encounter as an entrepreneur, because it brings opportunity to an existing arena! Dean Kashiwagi started on the BV PIPS (Performance Information Procurement System) and this concepts were picked up, and even advanced in Kashiwagi's own words, by Dutch experts Sicco Santema and Jeroen van de Rijt. "Prestatieinkoop", as it was baptized in Dutch, brings back the value of expert suppliers in the landscape of 'tendered to death' procurement. As an expert supplier of course I valuate this insights, but as an IT-supplier and Procurement entrepreneur I also see the complexities involved...

How can we automate a tender which is based on BVP?! There is only an outline of an endstate requirement available; suppliers are selected based on their added value instead of clean-cut requirements; added value is based on experience and approach instead of tick-in-a-box counting of tender-points!
The IT guru's out there will certainly know what I mean: automating something which is not pre-defined and based on a comparison that is fluid because the value comes from the input delivered by suppliers: nightmare!

Still, the procurement world embraces the new approach, so do we. Because real success is based on added value (as we have just learned), and what more added value to deliver as an entrepreneur when there is absolute challenge involved. The time has come that Big Data will meet Procurement, I guess, new and smooth data processing, near-to-artificial-intelligence meets the dusty fields of supplier and tender comparisons. Now the only thing that I have to do: invent integration of this concepts with SAP SRM and SAP Sourcing, guarantee performance and make it user friendly. This should be interesting....

Doede van Haperen
www.lakran.com
www.postulit.com

Facing the weather

Facing the weather

Autumn is here again in the Netherlands, feels almost like I skipped summer altogether! The fact is clear that I was pretty much away from the blog, but also the rest of the world spun by in rocket speed.

We landed, and already delivered, within planning and budget (:-)) a huge new account on our eHiring template on SAP SRM this summer, we were able to wheel in a new long-term client for support on their P2P plans and we had the joy of an old client that broke al ties with our most important competitor to bring all the business back to our experts... And this was only the usually summer-slow new-business department...

Now we are already at the approach of a new year. A new year that seems to get some more positive economic news, considering the uplift in all kinds of statistical, macro-economics ratios. As I said to my crew last week: the waves are coming, so get ready to surf! Myself I am preparing the new steps we want to take: marketing offensives, growth plans, more ready-to-run products on our shelves, new partnerships to explore, new....business!

Our weather looks great, I will be preparing my "surfboard" over the coming period, hopefully all that activity gives me room to keep the world more updates than the "slow" summer did.

Doede van Haperen
www.lakran.com
www.postulit.com

The management guru's in one day!

The management guru's in one day!

At this moment I am in the train, returning from a seminar based on management theories. Filled with ambition and renewed energy to guide te business through these times, I am tired and asking myself what it was that I learned most today?

Most of us know a lot of the stuff that was presented, Mintzberg, Porter, Goldratt, golden oldies that you have learned during your college and university years. But how different does the message arrive when you have been managing your own company for some years in comparison to the times that your biggest worry was which bar to visit that evening..

For me the word Focus rings through most at the moment. As the most valuable confrontation of today. Yes, confrontation, because be honest, the main message is: "you have learned this almost 14 years ago, why don't you act like it?". 

Focus!

- focus on what you are as a company,

- focus on what your clients need your company for,

- focus on the skills at hand to do that what is aimed for and required.

And using a lot of techniques to mold those focusses together in one proposition.

A nice day, a fun day, not a dull moment, guidance for me as the entrepreneur who is to guide.. It was another great day in business!

Doede van Haperen

www.lakran.com

www.postulit.com

When to optimize?!

When to optimize?!

...and when just automate?

The other day I was involved in a conference call with a client of mine. Plans involving P2P related steps in SAP. So we where called in to think along based on our experience and known creativity. Torn between current business wishes to make things more simple and future policies to come to more extensive integrations, the IT department had to come up with an idea. But waiting for the future, the budget was limited, and being pushed by the business, the time to solution was limited as well...

That made me think, when do you advice on optimizing, when do you advice on just automating and when do you decide to not advice at all and do as asked?

Is there simple ruling for this dilemma? I think there is, and it is one of the simplest rules in the project book, but a lot of IT guys (and girls too, really) tend to forget it: keep on focussing on the business case!

1. Keep asking you client/internal business "why"?

2. Keep calculating on the result, do we gain by this idea in money, and if not, is that covered by qualitative motivators for the solution?

3. Be careful the moment a project just becomes qualitatively motivated. These are the projects that usually derail on cost!

4. And an important one which is more difficult to assess: is it worth the fuzz?

In P2P related projects the quantitative business case is often huge on price reduction, and slim on process improvement. But still, when playing it right, this second category can cover a complete project by itself. When you focus on the part that is enough, in my experience you get the correct focus. Eliminating unneccessary fuzz, building a lean project and covering your business needs. From there on start using and start optimizing.

So when to advice what? Drop your own boxed thoughts and listen to your client, do not do for the doing, but do for the goal!

Doede van Haperen

www.lakran.com

www.postulit.com

Confronting

Confronting

Maintaining a weblog was fun I thought, a nice channel to express your experiences and let the world have an idea of what you are busy with. But it appears to be also very confronting: it tells you when you are (behaving yourselve?) too busy! Before you know it, about two weeks have passed. And again, what a few weeks those were...

Potential clients asking for a lot of attention, current clients reaching project deadlines, employees are taking their spring-vacation, discussions on internal product development and on top of that you try to execute some billable hours yourselve at important projects.
All keeping you up late, keeping you busy during the day and keeping the "up-time" at more and more stressful levels...

Yesterday we had a bank holiday in The Netherlands (we got a new King and Queen!), I was at a celebration where one of my friends, entrepreneur as well, kept on checking his iPhone to see what his abroad susidiaries where doing. As a person, you tend to take over that habit imediately, so I was handling mine pretty soon... Fortunately I ran into the attached picture-perfect-moment that same evening: a staring contest with a pigeon in my garden, that seemed to tell me "just enjoy this sunset now...".

...Pigeons are wise, able to confront me the same way my Blogger-account does. For the rest of the week, my time is vacation time! Taking the down-time to compensate for the rushes of up-time required at the moment, reading a book and doing some study, playing with my daughter and...who knows, run into some pigeons again;-)

Doede van Haperen
www.lakran.com
www.postulit.com