A Spend Matters fan favorite (and ours to write), the Friday Rant often spawns a lot of dialogue. Please enjoy the following collection of the most popular posts from this fall.

Friday Rant: Do We Need a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for Supply Chain CSR Practices? -- Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) has now become one of the drivers in deploying technology platforms to monitor and assure certain practices of supply chain partners in terms of supplier management. The FCPA is a rather elegant piece of policy that essentially prohibits businesses and individuals from engaging in behavior that would not be allowed domestically -- when it comes to bribery and related activities to solicit business involving foreign officials and the companies/entities they represent. Businesses must also keep audit trails of activities that monitor transactions and related interactions (hence the benefits of deploying an automated supplier management platform to manage some compliance aspects of the act).

Friday Rant: Unilever and Beyond -- The Rise of Purpose-Built Procurement Applications (Part 1) -- If we look back the history of spend management tools in the past decade, we've seen a constant march to sameness from providers. Far too many vendors have been racing in a functional parity derby, jockeying their applications horses to a type of sameness designed to be the 80% solution -- inclusive of software and sometimes services -- that organizations must fit their processes around (at least in the case of more sophisticated buying organizations who have a point of view over what an application should do). As an example, in the area of spend visibility, one of the largest providers in the broader sector has designed a data acquisition process for a typical buying organization with specific system request fields. Yet when a more sophisticated company worked with this provider and sent over extensive AP and invoice line-item level details from across their spend categories, the initial situation was...(Part 2)

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We've covered a lot of viewpoints on Ariba over the years. In a series of two "best of" posts, we'll reminisce on the ups and downs of 2011 and looking into 2012.

Ariba Supplier Network Alternatives: Oracle (Part 1) -- This post is part of a Spend Matters series looking at Ariba Supplier Network alternatives. We will cover each Ariba supplier network alternative in a series of three-part posts beginning with the provider's basic background in the area. Following this initial installment, we will then examine their solution approach and Ariba/third party systems integration. Finally, we will provide our own summary and analysis of the provider's overall capabilities. Of the two largest ERP providers, Oracle decided early on in its eProcurement... (Part 2 and Part 3)

Ariba Supplier Network Alternatives: Ketera/Rearden (Part 1) -- This post is part of a Spend Matters series looking at Ariba Supplier Network alternatives. We will cover each Ariba supplier network alternative beginning with each provider's basic background in the area and then their solution approach and Ariba/third party systems integration. Finally, we will provide our own summary and analysis of the provider's overall capabilities. Ketera was recently acquired by Rearden Commerce (for more information on this news, please see our coverage: here and here). Before the acquisition, however... (Part 2 and Part 3 and Part 4)

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Oracle OpenWorld Dispatch 1: Overload, Openness, Fragmentation, Glimpses of Some Solid Applications -- I spent two completely scheduled days at Oracle OpenWorld this week (apologies to everyone else I know in the area who I did not have a chance to visit, but I can't recall packing so many things into 48 hours before). Even though I'll be sorting through my notes and sharing the highlights around Oracle Fusion Procurement, Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management/Supplier Hub, Oracle Spend Classification, Oracle PeopleSoft's new faceted SRM navigation and more, I thought I'd first sum up some general procurement-focused impressions from the show.

Oracle's Endeca Acquisition -- An Initial Take -- Earlier this week, Oracle announced it had entered into an agreement to buy Endeca. For those in the procurement, supply chain and manufacturing worlds who don't know Endeca, you should. They represent what Spend Matters believes is a truly next generation toolset for managing not only general ledger, invoice and related spend data, but more important, combining these financials insights with material information, part specification data, warranty claims insight and many forms of third-party structured (and even unstructured) data. Yet because they've been going in so many directions (e.g., fueling lots of consumer sites from a search/faceted/guided navigation/shopping perspective), the manufacturing vertical as well as the emphasis on selling into procurement and supply chain was only given limited focus at Endeca. Here at Spend Matters, we hope Oracle changes this.

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A company's sourcing strategy can be a make it or break it element of success or failure. This year, Spend Matters (and sister site MetalMiner) have put a lot more focus into smart sourcing and the tactics behind it. (Shameless plug: we're even throwing a conference on it!)

New Research -- Market-Informed Sourcing: A Game-Changer for Procurement -- Peter Smith (my UK colleague) doesn't give himself enough credit for his deep knowledge of how procurement technology works. He also fully understands the importance of approaching technology from a pragmatic business perspective first rather than through the geeky lenses that we're sometimes guilty of including in our Spend Matters research from this side of the pond. Peter's latest Spend Matters research paper, Market-Informed Sourcing: A game-changer for Procurement, presents an ideal case for changing procurement's functional approach to negotiation and supplier management by leveraging advanced sourcing technology.

Supplier Discovery via Networks/Marketplaces Must Correctly Fit In Sourcing Processes (Part 1) -- In the early years at Spend Matters, I remember being impressed by the concept of Open Ratings, a vendor that sat between the software and content worlds. Open Ratings' solution attempted to predict whether or not a supplier would remain financially viable based on a combination of financial, credit and related inputs. Although their execution was not always perfect -- and they were held hostage by some of their content providers over third-party data until D&B, one of their major content sources, finally acquired them -- it is clear that Open Ratings was the pioneering solution voice in the supply chain risk management sector.

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Supplier Enablement and P2P Roadblocks -- Catalog and Content Management (Part 1) -- One of the areas where companies often fail when it comes to bringing as much indirect spend under management as possible is catalog and content management. These tools enable the P2P experience by focusing on supplier self-service, multi-catalog search, configuration, and what we'll term "virtual punch-out," which includes distributed content search, aggregation and presentation of information (not to mention the application of specific rules to this distributed data). Providers in these areas can enable technically savvy business users (not IT) to administer the overall content and catalog management program once it's up and running. (Part 2)

Examining SAP Supplier InfoNet (Part 1) -- In the early years at Spend Matters, I remember being impressed by the concept of Open Ratings, a vendor that sat between the software and content worlds. Open Ratings' solution attempted to predict whether or not a supplier would remain financially viable based on a combination of financial, credit and related inputs. Although their execution was not always perfect -- and they were held hostage by some of their content providers over third-party data until D&B, one of their major content sources, finally acquired them -- it is clear that Open Ratings was the pioneering solution voice in the supply chain risk management sector. (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5)

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For the next week and a half, the Spend Matters team is taking a much-needed holiday break (we have a lot of eggnog and 10%+ holiday beer to source). We'll be running a lead post every day (so you can still get your analysis on if the mood strikes), and will be featuring a daily "Best of" through January 2. Happy Holidays, and be sure to check in on the 26th for our Santa vs. Hanukkah Harry smack down!

SciQuest: A First Step to Integrating Sourcing and Supplier Management with P2P (Part 1) -- SciQuest made the rather smart -- in terms of both valuation and product and upsell synergy -- acquisition of AECSoft late last year (see our coverage of the deal here, here, and here). Just over half a year later, the company has taken the first integration steps to joining the two separate solutions together. According to this announcement from last week, "the solution reflects the first phase in integrating SciQuest's eProcurement suite with the supplier management and sourcing technology from AECsoft...The new release integrates Sourcing Director into the base modular source-to-settle solution suite. This integration includes seamless process flows from requisitioning to conducting sourcing events and from sourcing events back into the requisitioning process." ( Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 )

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Spend Matters would like to introduce Brianna Tonner, a new "catch-all" editor and best-of post composer extraordinaire in the office. Bri just finished her Masters in English Literature at DePaul University, and we're thrilled to have her around. Today's post is compliments of her (and of Peter's wonderful blog work too, of course).

Public sector procurement outsourcing – why is nothing happening? -- As part of our series around procurement shared services / outsourcing, we're asking today why there hasn't been more activity in the public sector? Sure, there has been a lot of talk about mutuals and social enterprises by the coalition government, but I can't think of a major new outsource since the election in central Government. And in the shared services arena, the strategy we featured last week was noticeably vague in general and about any role for the private sector.

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It's one of our favorites to write and from the traffic, the Friday Rant is oftentimes the most read column of the week. From putting AP into its rightful place to looking at SAP and saying "you know, there's a problem when they're the most innovative procurement technology..." to a primer on ground meat safety, the Friday Rant has taken us into some meaty (yeah yeah yeah, meant the pun) issues.

Friday Rant: An Enemy of Treasury, Procurement: Time to Blow Up A/P (Diagnostic Included!!) -- Accounts payable is a wretched function. It's mere existence, to pay vendors, strikes of something begging to be automated or absorbed into another function. And that would be if it did it right. All too often, AP organizations do a horrible job at forecasting liabilities -- they simply don't have access to the information necessary to forecast specific payment dates, let alone to enable suppliers to take advantage of early payment programs that could, theoretically, turn the function into an asset.

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