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We are extremely excited about how our March conference, Commodity Edge: Sourcing Intelligence for the New Normal, is shaping up. With contributions and participation from a number of leading category analysts from the industry and commodity worlds, the agenda is coming together. I've also been working on how best to showcase technologies to help mitigate and manage commodity volatility as part of broader procurement, sourcing and supplier management strategies, and I'm excited about the progress we're making in coming up with an itinerary that includes some interactive solution demonstrations plus company case studies.

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Someone asked me this week: "Why should I go to Commodity Edge when I'm already committed to a bunch of events this Spring?" I responded that the event, taking place March 19th and 20th at the Intercontinental at Chicago, O'Hare, is probably not for everyone in procurement (especially those entirely focused on areas like P2P systems). But I also noted the content and takeaways would be absolutely invaluable for those in a category/commodity management or sourcing role, not to mention those that they report to.

The discussion sparked my interest in creating a list of reasons why people should attend the event or, at the very least, stay current with the topics we plan to address. These topics include an up-to-date view on the directions of commodities (e.g., metals, energy, indirect, packaging, and many more), forecasting strategies and approaches for procurement, technologies to support negotiation, contracting and hedging and the overall direction of the domestic and global economies and their impact on procurement and supply chain strategies. Incidentally, the complete program will count for 9.75 continuing education credits/hours with ISM.

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See previous posts in this series here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4-A
Part 4-B

The fourth scenario in our procurement predictions for the next decade focuses entirely on the central nervous system of procurement and the ability of organizations not only to sense what is going on around them ahead of others -- and the market -- but to also respond accordingly. Specifically, we have titled this scenario: Global Supply Chain Intelligence Dictates Winners and Losers. Supporting the assertion that supply chain intelligence will triumph über alles, our belief is that 2012 (and beyond) will mark a continuation of the volatility we've seen in the broader economic, commodity, geographic and political landscapes. For example, if we add up just some of the factors comprising supply chain risk that have increased dramatically in recent years (e.g., financial, labor, product/material compliance, CSR practices and natural disaster/weather) it becomes abundantly clear how important successfully sensing and responding to distributed intelligence across the globe will become for procurement organizations.

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I'd wager that among Spend Matters readers, I've probably attended more procurement and supply chain conferences than most. Yet virtually no events I've been to have had a consistent focus on economic and commodity outlooks specifically tied to the daily sourcing and supplier management decisions that procurement and supply chain professionals need to make. Every year there are good general session keynotes covering general economic trends at certain events, but almost always, the economist or management consultant presenting fails to make the leap to what such trends mean for strategic and tactical procurement decisions. The only event I've been to that did an excellent job of bridging the procurement, commodity and economic divide was the Purchasing Smart Sourcing Summit, although it was cancelled after its inaugural excellent showing when the overall publication folded.

So we at Spend Matters and MetalMiner put our heads together to develop an idealized conference agenda that took elements of what Purchasing introduced at their event, but further refined the content to provide additional depth on commodity analysis, forecasting and strategy development specifically aimed at the procurement and supply chain community. The result of this planning effort is our first US Spend Matters and MetalMiner event for 2012 -- Commodity Edge: Sourcing Intelligence for the New Normal. The conference is taking place March 19th and 20th at the Intercontinental Hotel, Chicago (O'Hare).

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In late September, I had the chance to attend and speak at the Consol Thought Leadership Forum in Las Vegas. I previously covered a Forrester presentation from the event (see previous coverage here, here, and here) exploring analytics, VMS and the role of vendor management organizations in managing contingent workers, consultants and BPO providers. It turns out that Consol also surveyed its user base on the top KPIs they were interested in tracking and managing to in their VMS environment. The ranking of top priorities is actually a bit surprising overall, though it's fairly easy to guess which KPI came in first.

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Anurag Dixit, Zycus' VP of Marketing, began his talk at his firm's analyst day -- the second of the morning -- by talking about the need for innovative and simple solutions. Incidentally, Zycus' current solutions span the following areas (but expect more in the future, based on the tone at the event): spend analysis (LiveConnect, iCost, iMine), sourcing (iOptimize, iManage -- category management), contract management (iAuthoring), supplier management (iSupplier, iPerform) and financial savings management (iSave). Spend Matters' general view of these products on Zycus' new platform (i.e., everything but spend analysis) is that they are often tops in their class in ease of use, but the deeper functionality is still often in build-out phase.

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Please click here for the first, second and third posts in this series.

Almost without question, the historic poster child for best-of-breed sourcing suite complexity in terms of user interface has been Emptoris. But for many organizations, the tradeoff between leveraging the underlying functional power and ability to customize Emptoris' capabilities in deployments was a decision worth making (versus just relying on more basic configurations of other tools). Yet most recently, with the rise of a second generation of sourcing user interfaces from providers like Zycus and Rearden/Ketera -- not to mention improvements in competitive capability that have brought a range of other providers to the same level as Emptoris in key areas (e.g., optimization) -- the competitive shortcomings in the complexity of Emptoris' interface, especially for non "power-users" with the need to occasionally walk up and use the application without training, became even more apparent. Yet at Empower, Emptoris not only acknowledged some of these weaknesses -- they set out to confront them head-on in their latest product release, focusing on areas like sourcing and contract management. In Spend Matters' view, they've been partially successful.

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Please click here for Part 1 and Part 2 of this post.

With Emptoris' latest release (V9), we sense an evolution in the vendor's strategy focused on tying together the broader Emptoris suite (e.g., sourcing, spend analysis, supplier management, contract management, telecom expense management, etc.) with a new type of front-end rather than complete interoperability and architectural unity between the different suite components. This is an important step in the right direction for Emptoris and alone, does not put them at a handicap compared with Ariba, BravoSolution, SAP, Zycus, Iasta and Oracle, among others, who also sell solutions built on separate platforms and code bases with different degrees of unification from a broader suite perspective. The only vendors we're aware of in the market with an integrated source-to-pay capability built on a single platform come from outside the US and include b-pack, Ivalua and Intenda, although there's usually a trade-off between depth in certain application areas and overall single architectural and stack breadth.

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