I Have No Resources To Do This
Maybe you've resonated to some of the ideas we've put
forth here, but you're faced with a show-stopper:
there simply isn't anyone in your organization with
sufficient spare cycles to master a new system, even
a system like BIQ that's alleged to be easy for business users to operate.
We've watched customers struggle with this dilemma, and
we understand. That's why we're suggesting, starting
in 2006, some interesting new service alternatives that
have been made available by two of our business partners.
1. Gain-share consulting
One of our consulting partners makes you the following
offer: they will build you a full BIQ spend cube; i.e.
load your data, family your vendors, and map your spending
into a useful Commodity hierarchy. Then they will perform
an opportunity assessment on the mapped cube, pointing out
potential areas for savings.
They will do this work for free — providing that you agree
to allow them to source a category or two on a gain-share basis (or
a fee-for-service basis, if you prefer).
Their reasoning is simple: in order to source effectively, they
need to build a useful spend map as a first step. They
use BIQ on all sourcing engagements anyway, since (in their view) it's the best tool
available. But the resulting BIQ spend map is not
only valuable to them, it's also valuable to you. It is work of
high value that you can leverage at low cost. And, the spend map can be extended
and maintained for the long term, rather than (as
is the case with many such efforts) simply discarded.
2. Fixed-price services
Another of our partners is in the business of offering both
procurement advisory services as well as BPO Procurement To Pay
services. They provide spend transparency to their customers using
BIQ as part of their broader service offering.
They will build you a full BIQ spend cube; i.e. load your data,
family your vendors, and map your spending into a useful Commodity
hierarchy; at a low fixed price. For companies with one or only
a few AP systems, their price is significantly less than the
cost of hiring your own data analyst. If you want, they will
also offer to perform monthly refreshes of your dataset, at a
low fixed price per month; or they will transition the process to you,
with complete documentation,
so that you can
do it yourself with BIQ.
They are doing this for clients because it allows them to showcase
their unique approach to saving money in procurement related
spending and the quality and effectiveness of their onshore and
offsource resources. Using the detailed information available
in a spending cube, they can make a targeted business case to
you for delivering their broader range of services. They do not
require you to sign up for their broader services, just that you
will discuss it with them.
These options may allow you to fire up a BIQ spend
analysis effort much sooner than you otherwise would
be able to. For example, you could use option (1) to
jump-start a cube-building process and plan for a sourcing
program and savings, as well as start
to source a promising category — while recruiting for
a BIQ resource in parallel. If there is no
internal resource on the horizon, option (2)
allows you to outsource the entire job of building and maintaining a cube.
