Spend Matters welcomes a rant from lead analyst Thomas Kase.

Even though Apple gets the most press about poor working conditions in China these days, we'd argue there's something else much larger, nefarious and cultural lurking beneath the timecard surface. As appealing as it might be to blame Apple for the errors of their Chinese suppliers' extremely abusive practices, this looks a lot like the results of a culture gap.

I'd argue it's not so much a China-specific issue either. Based on first-hand experiences from spending seven years in Japanese manufacturing industries in the '90s, the same workload expectations and obsessive/martinet managerial approaches were clearly on display all over Japan as well, with 'karoshi' or 'death-by-overwork' entering the vocabulary.

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As a former consultant, I've spent more than my fair share of time coming up with maturity models for this and that. I've found over the years that in many functional areas as well as the technologies that support them, the nuance between one step and another in a various maturity framework might seem small, or even difficult to detect. But for procurement, there's such a vast discrepancy between the sophistication of organizations, perhaps owning to how long it took for the function to gain a voice inside most companies -- not to mention how long technology evolution evaded the function.

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I write a lot. Probably more than 99% of people I know. For a while, I thought a lot of my output had to do with really enjoying the intellectual and analytical exercise of putting thoughts on paper. From casual blogs, essays and rants to formal papers or PowerPoint presentations, it's hard to deny the analytical rigor that good expository writing asks of us (fiction or screenwriting is something else entirely, and as someone who can't even write a single line of realistic dialogue let alone come up with a crafty response on the fly when my wife accuses me of something, I won't pretend to be an expert in these areas). But as I get older and busier -- and as I have less and less time to pursue writing for the heck of it -- I've realized that I really write for one reason alone. And in reality, it's quite simple: I write for the process itself and what the act of writing teaches and does for me.

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Earlier this week, we provided extensive coverage (Part 1 and Part 2) of ISM's recently announced acquisition of the North American practice and assets of ADR (ADR North America) and ADR North America's China business. For some, our coverage raised more questions than it answered about the future of ISM, including how it views itself on the global stage alongside organizations like the UK's Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS), which appear to have a much more imperialist -- or would that be mercantile -- approach to fulfilling their mission by prioritizing for-profit initiatives at the expense of what some might argue is in the best interests of a charitable organization.

For example, CIPS has ironically offended the relationship it has built over the years with folks like Peter Smith, a former CIPS Chairman nonetheless! CIPS' for-profit media arm views Peter's blog, Spend Matters UK/Europe, as competitive with their own publications (since when money grubbing journalists/publishers in the trade publishing world trump senior executives in the profession in relationship decisions, I'm not sure). Regardless, as a result, they've banned Peter and Spend Matters from active reference or participation in their own material.

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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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That's right. It's resolution week and I'm fully on the fitness bandwagon (FOR REAL THIS TIME). Thing is, I'm really not that out of shape. I suffered through a half-marathon back in September with Jason and the Spend Matters crew (never again) and I've at least made an effort to be a member of a big-box gym. But as a former collegiate rower, I have to say: I want my guns back. I want the back muscles that people used to envy. I want to be able to do multiple (real, not knee) push-ups and something else I've never been able to do (no matter how many two-a-days I huffed through): the elusive pull-up. Thing is, I hate running. I hate working out solo, period. Unfortunately, I'm also not 18 anymore.

So in 2012, I've vowed to create my perfect weekly routine through trial and error. I'm aiming for a mixture of strength training, cardio, and something to promote mental wellbeing and flexibility. Now on to the rant part: what's it going to cost me??

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As my family members and close friends know, one of my favorite iconic stores that has now served multiple generations of hard-working (and in some cases not so hard working) East Coast preppies and business folk is Brooks Brothers. While the store undoubtedly represents a unique American white collar "work hard, play hard" sartorial business type -- after all, who needs Saville Row suits that can make fat European cats look thin when fit US workers can look just as trim in the relaxed Brooks 3 button "sack" or draped jacket if they can find an hour in the day for a squash game or jog -- the brand has also come to represent a truly hypocritical trend in retail marketing. To wit, some organizations like Brooks Brothers are capitalizing on how they're creating -- or sustaining -- manufacturing jobs in America. Yet their true revenue and margin makers are coming from: you guessed it, China.

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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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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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