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

Production rising

Production rising

It has been a great week. As a business we are really growing into our new fase of maturity. Proud to see that what you have started years ago begins to thrive on it's own. The last week was all about setting the pace, agreeing on who-should-do-what and then simply start doing.
But let me start at the beginning...

Over the last few months we were growing. This was not by chance, but strategically planned due to development plans. The hourly-based services we traditionally deliver should be enriched in the future by full-solution-products. This would take two changes within the firm:

Add capacity: we would not be able to combine sufficient turnover with qualitative product development with the capacity on resources we had. So growth was the answer.
Simplify the message in the market: selling solutions instead of only consulting asks for a very clean and clear message, so the core business of the firm had to be identified even more as we already did. A split in two companies with both their own, clean, message was the answer.

Since March 1st we are active with two firms, one focussed on Procurement from a business perspective, one focussed on Procurement from an IT (SAP) perspective. But both with a clear objective: start developing solutions for customers besides only staffing their projects!

It was a hectic month to get the ideas channelled, but last week the business plan for one of our new Interim Procurement Initiatives was closed up. On top of that, yesterday the developers started the build of our first end-to-end (SAP SRM based) software solution..

..the plant is in power, the production is in session!

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

Long hours of testing and fixing

Long hours of testing and fixing

...and discussing what to fix. Check the dashboard picture, see the time, third working day in a row that meal time has long passed before we went home from the customers' site. SAP SRM in an implementation that is divided in Template versus roll-out localizations. Interesting days full of discussion-based fixing of test-defects.

Template-based implementations: hard to do it perfectly. Either you run into unhappy local users that do not feel themselves fully at-home in the new environment, or you will run into an un-manageable (and thus way too expensive) project/investment when you manage the template not strict enough and want to please users! Caught between that rock and that hard case...

What to do then, how to make it work? To my opinion, after some years of seeing it happen, one golden rule: anticipate the localization-factor before you start your template. Sounds simple, here is what I mean.

1. Have a very clear picture of what it is you want to safeguard with the template strategy! Is it a certain policy you want to uphold, or is it just a manageable and maintainable system? Be sure to clearly state that within your managed change process.
2. Make sure that a proper sounding board is enabled before you start workshops. No inbalance between bloodtypes in your company or different attention to importance of Business Units. Every person in that group should count, from content, expertise, as well as validity and mandate perspective.
3. Design and build your custom developments in such a way that not only the development works as designed, but also easilly allows added development in those spots that allow localization from the basic strategy-standpoint.
4. The first thing that needs design in the project is the "request for change" process, only after that you can start your template P2P design.

Having concluded this from the position I had in some of the projects that I have seen: yes, for sure, it sounds simple enough. But having it managed for a few times as well, I know it is certainly not. But then again, long hours for a few weeks make a real project team, and that is priceless...

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