Please click here to Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this interview series with TPI's Bill Huber.

When it comes to offshore BPO providers today, Bill categories the typical firm as housing "smart people who are really motivated." Some also have "significant" and "differentiated strengths" they can bring to the table. Going forward, these providers are more likely to "integrate technology with solutions" on a path to driving "true technology-enabled BPO." But right now, many are as focused on attempting to bring "a new level of analytical rigor" to the BPO space. They can do this because they can afford to. Indeed, the cost of strong analysts in India remains materially less than similar, senior procurement analyst-type roles in the West. As Bill observes, "Indian providers will tell you they can more cost effectively invest resources in studying data sets and coming up with insights." For some providers, this is "core" and "embedded as part of their offering" like Genpact with its "SEP methodology." Others "charge for it" on a value-added basis.

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Please click here to Part 1 and Part 2 of this interview series with TPI's Bill Huber.

I next asked Bill which BPO firms, in his experience, bring the best knowledge and capability around sourcing and category management. In this regard, Bill suggests that "currently, the leaders are those who have been in the space the longest. These include firms like ICG Commerce, IBM and Accenture, which picked up FreeMarket's advisory business." However, you must also look at other acquisitions in the sector that have helped larger BPOs with sourcing and category knowledge. Here, Bill points to smaller players like IBX, which CapGemini recently acquired. He also suggests another niche player with some level of category knowledge is GlobaleProcure. According to Bill, firms excelling in category management are like Infosys, which "has been in the space for a longer period of time." Firms like Genpact, Wipro and others are "moving aggressively to assemble the pieces" when it comes to sourcing and category management.

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In today's post, we continue our interview with CombineNet's recently hired new CTO Steve Brooke. See Part 1 here.

Spend Matters: Do you plan to further simplify the existing ASAP solution - or create a CombineNet Lite self-service version for the SaaS masses?

Steve: We will continue to focus on usability and feature expansion to drive wider adoption of the ASAP solution. Our ASAP solution is deployed in a self-service mode for all of our customers, and our expert services is there to assist with product training and best practices. Given the progress of the product today and customer adoption behavior, a "lite" version is not currently in the plan. But of course, we will continue to assess customer and market feedback along those lines.

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See Part 1 and Part 2 of Spend Matters' interview with CombineNet's Steve Brooke.

Thomas Kase: What are your R&D objectives at CombineNet -- what can we expect?

Steve Brooke: Core R&D is focused on taking our optimization engine further, primarily through evolution of fundamental capabilities, further improving numerical stability and performance. That said, we already see outstanding performance in our optimization engine, with over 90 % of scenarios completing in under 10 seconds! This is an order of magnitude (or two) quicker than what we were capable of at Procuri – and with far larger and more complex data sets in CombineNet. Some specific short-term examples:

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Please click here to Part 1 of this interview series with TPI's Bill Huber.

When it comes to best practices around company and BPO provider incentives in the overall total cost management arena (inclusive of supplier performance management), Bill suggests it's a certainty that you'll need alignment at the compensation level between company and outsourcing firm. Otherwise, he points out, you'll have an overall program that will be imperfect and incomplete in how it measures actual savings performance and program effectiveness at the stakeholder level. While the evolution of supplier performance management as a central component of BPO thinking is just starting to evolve, there are a number of other fundamental changes that continue to take shape in underlying procurement BPO market dynamics.

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Click here for Part 1 of this interview with Steve Brooke of CombineNet.

Thomas Kase: How should companies go about building internal skills to put advanced sourcing solutions to full use? Is there any other groundwork that they should address first -- e.g. other technology, data cleanses, master data management approaches, policy changes, non-solution specific end-user training?

Steve Brooke: You point out several areas that are applicable -- sourcing comes after many other steps in the process; regardless of whether this process covers 7, 13 or any other number of steps. Blindly following a prescribed process, irrespective of which consulting firm crafted it, is not always the best approach, more flexibility is often needed. Companies need to define their own processes, and follow them. Many tools mandate that the user is confined to a specific process and workflow, but the better approach is to provide a tool that can be modeled around customer's own process. In our case, the solution is flexible enough to be adapted to fit any given process through configuration.

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CombineNet recently hired a new CTO, Steve Brooke, who has a track record in the industry. A few years back, he served as Procuri's CTO. Spend Matters was offered a chance to interview Steve and we did so on the grounds that we could ask him the questions we wanted answered. So hopefully, you won't find just marketing fluff in his responses. We hope you find his insights and parallels as valuable as we did. Yes, there's some spin. But dig into his answers and we promise you'll learn a thing or two.

Spend Matters: Procuri's secret sauce combined ease-of-use and customer intimacy -- e-sourcing and contract management (with CMSI) for the masses with a great sales face. Your current employer is at the other end of the spectrum in terms of solution depth and focus in a market that is still a niche (albeit a growing one) versus an established one where competing on price, ease-of-use, etc. was a common strategy. Are there any lessons learned worth applying in this case or is the market entirely different?

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While we were both at Procuri, Steve and I were often in the office around 6 in the morning, taking turns brewing the first batch of java. That was a few years ago. After Procuri was acquired by Ariba, Steve took a few years away from supply chain technology solutions, but he hasn't stayed away from the game. Over the past two years, he has spent a good deal of time honing his skills on cloud technology -- in particular, Amazon web services -- as well as taking his golf handicap down to the single digits! Earlier this year, CombineNet engaged him to provide product and architecture consulting, and the mutual fit for both sides led him to joining the company to head the technology side. I recently had the chance to catch up with Steve about e-sourcing and some of his plans at CombineNet.

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Earlier this year, I traded notes and thoughts with TPI's Bill Huber. It's hard to not like Bill when you meet him. He's down-to-earth, yet radiates an air of knowledge around the overall procurement and sourcing marketplace in an expert yet never arrogant of pedantic manner. And of course, working at TPI, he knows more than a thing or two about procurement BPO. I had the chance to interview Bill about his own background late this spring and his thoughts on where the procurement BPO market is headed. To explain the delay from the interview to today, I have a few reasons: my notes got lost in offshore transcription, the procurement BPO dog ate my homework, they were taken by my Chinese translator and passed off as an interview with a Chinese BPO expert, etc. Regardless, today we begin our interview series with Bill. I hope you enjoy his observations as much as I do, including who will likely pull ahead in this market from a provider perspective.

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