
Source-to-Pay: Selecting More Than One E-Sourcing Tool
Later this week, Spend Matters will publish our latest Compass research brief covering the source-to-pay technology market: Next Level Sourcing and Commodity Management: Evaluating the Capabilities of ERP Providers Compared to Independ…

SAP and Ariba: Initial Customer and Competitive Takeaways
Last night, Spend Matters published our initial detailed comparative analysis (for Spend Matters PRO subscribers) of the SAP/Ariba acquisition announcement from a customer vantage point in the areas of sourcing, spend analysis, supplie…

Trade Extensions: Sourcing Its Own Growth Rules (Part 2)
Click here to see Part 1 of this post.
Continuing to investigate Trade Extensions’ auction capability, the next area worth pointing out is how their latest enhancements to the tool provide real-time information on bidder activity…

Worse Than Drugs, Booze and Nicotine — Why Can’t Procurement Shake the Excel Addiction? (Part 2)
I reckon that I personally spend between one and two hours per day in Excel, and that’s without doing any active sourcing projects anymore. Back when I was directly involved with sourcing events and the product planning associated with rolling out new technologies around them, I was probably using Excel for 3-4 hours per day. I’m not alone. CombineNet’s recent study looking at the Excel addiction in corporate procurement teams found similar high-usage patterns. In looking at 100 organizations in April and May of 2011, CombineNet found…

Friday Rant: How Will the Spend Management Technology Landscape Look in 2013 (Part 2)
In the first rant in this series, I proffered an opinion about how the Spend Management P2P technology landscape might look in 2013. Today I’ll turn my attention to the e-sourcing and related category management, advanced sourcing…

Will Ariba’s Currency Serve as a Means to a Dominant End?
We’ll be reviewing Ariba’s most recent quarterly earnings performance in detail starting later today, looking at clues about its implications for customers, competitors and the broader market (if you want financial analysis, there…

Is SAP E-Sourcing (or now just “Sourcing”) Still Competitive? (Part 1)
Earlier this fall, I sat through a product update with the SAP E-Sourcing team to discuss the latest solution developments in their solution area. Perhaps most important from a nomenclature standpoint, the “E” is no more. The prod…

Emptoris Empower Kicks Off — What’s on My Mind to Focus on?
Emptoris Empower kicks off this week in Boston. I’ll be on a flight to my old stomping grounds later today (I lived and worked in the city during my first job out of college/graduate school). Regarding the event itself, I’ve got q…

Digging Behind the Recovery for a Solution: When the Numbers Tell a Risky Inventory Story
Kudos to Procurement Leaders for a great article about how current inventory numbers are telling a risky story for the potential of inventory shortages, stock-outs and overall supply risk than appears on the surface. The author no…

CombineNet Opens a New Chapter (Part 2)
In the first post in this series examining CombineNet’s most recent chapter, I provided background and context behind the history and current details of the CombineMed investigation, nearly all of which is fascinating yet irrelevant when it comes to CombineNet’s current solutions and go-to-market approach. CombineNet’s President and COO Rich Wilson, who previously oversaw part […]