Please click here for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this series.

In our final installment of this series, we'll close with our final five predictions looking at how a falling euro may impact sourcing strategies, focusing primarily on the increasing linkages between IT, procurement and treasury strategies. The early posts in this series have been well received, so we're likely going to flesh out the thinking a bit more and combine these four separate posts into a paper for access in downloadable format. Be sure to check back in the coming weeks if you'd like to see some additional thinking on the topic. Continuing on with today's installment:

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Please click here for the first post in this series.

In the first post in this rant, I came out swinging at a fastball coming right down the middle of the Spend Management systems plate with a prediction that is pretty hard to get wrong. Prescient? Maybe not. But no one else has said it yet, at least as far as we can find. And that's the fact that nearly all of the most important shortcomings in ERP procurement and P2P are likely to become irrelevant starting in 2012. The second argument I'll make in support of this discussion is focused on yet another major area where ERP procurement has traditionally been rough around the edges in the past -- the general user experience.

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2012 will mark a turning point in ERP procurement adoption, upgrades and sales. And no, I'm not just saying this because ERP procurement capabilities have improved to a degree to catch up from a functional perspective with best of breed providers. Based on solutions that were shipping at the end of 2011, there are still material gaps, for example, between the functional capabilities of Ariba P2P and SAP SRM and Oracle eBusiness suite (although Ariba Buyer (CD) development and functional parity lags the SaaS version, ERP and ERP BPO partners are closing the gap here, however). Moreover, folks like Coupa continue to pull away from ERP on both the user interface and overall look/feel fronts, not to mention their philosophical orientation toward capturing all spend through the tool (direct and services included). Yet for a number of reasons, I think these gaps are somewhat -- and ironically, as I'll attempt to show in a minute -- irrelevant when it comes to ERP procurement growth and adoption in 2012.

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This is a post of within a broader series looking at supplier enablement and P2P roadblocks. The material is based in part on our recent research paper: A Foundational Look at P2P Technologies. The paper can be downloaded for free via the above link.

When it comes to getting a purchase-to-pay environment up and running, supplier on-boarding is a critical yet often overlooked enabler of bringing spend under management. Yet many companies that have ventured down the ERP procurement path were not able to onboard suppliers as quickly as they had hoped. No doubt, initial supplier enablement (i.e., capturing and validating supplier information) is often more tricky and time consuming than it appears. In the first post in this series, I covered a number of the challenges and use cases associated with typical supplier enablement examples. But beyond the basics, there are many scenarios and situations that organizations often find themselves in for needing a systematic and automated approach to accomplish the following types of additional on-boarding tasks and requirements.

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It's the Friday before I head down to SAP Sapphire, so let's flip convention on its head for a moment. Suspend disbelief and consider a world where the ERP giants aren't fast (or even slow) followers in a procurement or general business application way, but true innovators in the market in their own right, pushing us all forward and changing what's possible. That's right -- changing what's possible as we evaluate our entire procurement processes, supply market analyses, sourcing strategies and overall approaches to reducing supply chain risk exposure. Just as Peter Kraljic forever changed our approach to analyzing categories, suppliers and supply markets to inform sourcing strategy and broader supply management approaches, so too might the ERP giants change the basis of how we think about buying and managing suppliers.

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Perhaps the most useful thing Forrester's recent Wave achieves is to put SAP, Oracle and Peoplesoft on high ground in the topological eProcurement map -- a place they finally deserve to be. Yet despite the progress ERP providers have made in eProcurement over the years -- albeit within the context of a rising tide of best-of-breed providers and the continued strength of Ariba -- they still face a number of fundamental challenges when it comes to delivering a truly integrated purchase-to-pay capability on their own. Still, I agree with Duncan's fundamental premise that "the ERP giants have enhanced their products greatly overly the past few years, so their functionality matches the specialists in most criteria and event exceeds it in other."

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When I was over in the UK a couple of weeks ago, Peter Smith and I caught up with jCatalog's Head of Marketing and Business Development, Kelly Babbit. Even though I've known Kelly and jCatalog for sometime, it was Peter's first exposure to the organization. jCatalog is one of a number of lesser known vendors supporting the ERP procurement ecosystem, thriving by addressing shortcomings in the behemoths' SRM and related offerings (in jCatalog's case, their emphasis is entirely on catalog management and enablement, in both buy- and sell-side contexts, not to mention master data management for SKUs, products, pricing, etc.). If you're interested in learning more about jCatalog's core offerings, please check out our past posts on them (Catching up With jCatalog Part 1 and Part 2).

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Note, this is a repost because of a hosting/server error this morning

It's rare that I encounter an absolutely novel idea in procurement technology circles. Most truly innovative companies that I've recently taken a close look at (e.g., Co-Exprise, Endeca, etc.) have focused on extending existing features in new ways or mashing together functional capabilities from different segments into new offerings whose chemical composition looks different than the parent contributors. Yet perhaps once every couple years, something entirely new comes along. Simplifying IT is just such a new vendor, whose value proposition to enhance ERP procurement technology is like nothing I've seen.

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Spend Matters is thrilled to announce our most recent Compass Research brief, Making ERP Procurement Technology Work -- Essential Third-Party Technologies, Solutions and Deployment Models to Accelerate Returns, part of our third Compass volume series: Getting the Most from ERP Procurement and Spend Management Applications. It's based not only on our recent research in the area, including dozens of interviews with practitioners, systems implementation experts, and vendors, but also our many years of past analysis and deep dives into examining what's been successful or not in SAP and Oracle P2P implementations. The best part about it -- like all of our other research -- is that there's no cost to download. It's free.

Our analysis takes a detailed look at three separate areas where third-party vendors and ERP partners (including those which are not formally aligned with the ERP ecosystem) can help practitioners greatly improve the returns they get from their procurement and general P2P investments. These three areas are: supplier onboarding, catalog and master data management (MDM) and invoice automation/connectivity.

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