To answer my own question, I'd probably say not much faster than the speed with which Henry Hwong describes an outsourced Oracle Category Spend Manager implementation over his blog, Procureville. For those who don't know Henry -- our sector's newest blogger and a great fellow to boot -- he runs marketing and strategy for Provade, a boutique BPO firm that specializes in outsourcing services spend categories such as legal, professional services, etc.

Provade uses an Oracle platform -- actually a PeopleSoft platform, in most cases, at least from what I've heard -- as the basis of their technology solution, and then they layer on the processes, headcount, etc. on top of it to deliver an outsourced category solution. In his latest blog post, Henry describes a "big bang implementation" of Oracle Category manager at a client who "really wanted to get off their legacy solution as soon as possible." How fast did the implementation go? Here are some statistics from the first week: "$242M active Work Orders in system, 2,929 Timesheets entered, 44 Progress Logs entered, 996 Invoices created, and 103 Requisitions." Not bad Henry, and thanks for sharing and giving us an insightful benchmark for others getting such a system -- whether outsourced or internally managed -- up and running!

- Jason Busch