SMaaSh This! Aberdeen's New On-Demand Benchmark
Sudy Bharadwaj, who is trying his hardest to fill Tim Minahan's Size 15 Air Jordans at Aberdeen, forwarded me a link to participate in his latest latest benchmark report: Supply Management as a Service Benchmark, or SMaaS, as they are referring to it internally. Sudy has been cranking out some solid work of late, and I have no doubt that this forthcoming report will be well timed given all of the debate going on about On-Demand and SaaS.
Even though I've not seen any survey results yet, I'd wager that ease of use, price, and time-to-value will be the major drivers of On-Demand usage that the report finds. But if this benchmark were taking place in 2015, I'd bet that advanced features would drive buying decisions as much as cost or any other factor. Call me a dreamer, but I think we're only in the top of the first inning when it comes to On-Demand and what the future will bring. But just as IBM rose to dominance in the mainframe world, and SAP and Oracle dominated the client/server and early web application environment, the question remains which vendor(s) will lead the On-Demand revolution when it really takes hold. I'm not holding my breath that it will be a household name of the likes that I just mentioned, but who knows!
- Jason Busch
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In “Creating, Scoring, and Using Your Personal Scorecard for Professional Development” by Mark Thompson and Robert Kemp, presented at the 91st annual international supply management conference last month, the authors reiterated the top trends in supply management for 2010 identified by professors Larry Giunipero and Robert Handfield in their 2004 CAPS Study. These trends, which were far less ambitious, were:
1) pressure to reduce costs will increase
2) strategic cost management will increase
3) supplier selection will focus on total cost analysis
4) electronic commerce applications will replace paper-based systems
5) sourcing will focus on more strategic issues
6) global sourcing will increase
7) strategic sourcing will increase in importance
8) cross-functional teams will coordinate sourcing efforts
9) sourcing management will replace order placement
10) performance of purchasing will be more closely monitored
I’d like to point out trend (4) in particular. Today, many corporations (especially those dealing with global suppliers) still rely on telephone and fax communication for order placement and tracking and spreadsheets for financial analysis, and many of those with electronic systems still rely on archaic forms of EDI. If integrated e-commerce and e-sourcing applications really do replace antiquated systems across the aboard in large and mid-size enterprises by 2010, as a former full-time software developer, I must say that I’d be thrilled.
And that’s where the real promise of on-demand lies today. The ability to bring in an end-to-end e-commerce enabled purchasing system without compromising your current mainframe-based house-of-cards IT infrastructure with archaic ERP and accounting systems. As I’ve said before, I think the vision of advanced systems that natively integrate business intelligence and community instances that operate on a service basis is great, but what industry desperately needs right now is the ability to quickly and cost-effectively evolve to the next phase of operations and fully enter the web-enabled era. Only then can they truly understand what visibility and insight truly is and even hope to understand the call of the revolution. As long as they are stuck in the dark mainframe cave, they’ll never see the light.