Blog
Procurement, in plain language.
Essays, manifestos, and field notes from the team building Sextant AI.
Mar 16, 2026 · Chand Sooran
The Procurement Industry Has a Dirty Secret. It’s Called ”Best Practice.”
Every major procurement vendor and every Big Four consulting practice is selling you the same thing: someone else’s solution to someone else’s problem. There’s a reason why procurement technology…
Feb 26, 2026 · Chand Sooran
Software Procurement Will Never Be the Same Because of AI
The recent Citrini “scenario” (written primarily for investors) showcased a dystopian vision of the future in which vast swathes of human labor were replaced by AI agents, leading to a spike in unemployment and a…
Jan 14, 2026 · Chand Sooran
The Collaboration Imperative in Procurement
Why enterprise technology fails and what collaboration-first organizations do differently Last year, a mid-sized company spent nine months selecting a new enterprise system. Fourteen people were involved. There were…
Sep 25, 2025 · Chand Sooran
Bridging Africa’s Infrastructure Gap: Unlocking Economic Potential Through Innovative Procurement
1 Executive Summary Africa’s infrastructure financing gap—estimated at $50–90 billion annually in 2025—represents a critical barrier to sustainable growth, costing the continent up to 2% of GDP each year and…
Sep 21, 2025 · Chand Sooran
The ROI of a Product Nobody Uses Is … -100%
When discussing technology used for strategic sourcing such as RFPs, much of the conversation boils down to the solution itself. How much does it cost? How difficult is the implementation? Will it integrate with the ERP…
Sep 5, 2025 · Chand Sooran
The Crawl, Walk, Run of RFPs
We live in an AI world. It’s still early in the transformation but this is clearly a persistent trend. For all the change AI promises, though, success has been elusive. Here’s MIT Nanda talking about the current state…
Aug 27, 2025 · Chand Sooran
Starting the Digital Transformation Journey – Lessons Learnt from Successful Engagements
Caveat Lector: This article is based on my actual experiences. While I usually try limit my opinions, I remind the reader that opinions are like noses – everybody has one. The interested reader would be wise to consider…
Aug 7, 2025 · Chand Sooran
What Can Figma Teach Us About RFPs?
The biggest problem in procurement is the existence of silos. Siloed data means that teams draft and issue RFPs with a subset of the information they require to write a comprehensive document soliciting supplier…
Jun 2, 2025 · Chand Sooran
Agentic AI Should Drive Change
They say that generals always fight the last war. This means that generals fail to adapt advances in technology or changes in tactical thinking to the way that they prepare their forces for the next conflict. They don’t…
May 12, 2025 · Chand Sooran
AI Agents Will Not Be What You Think
Let’s think about AI from first principles. Imagine the early days of the automobile industry. Cars were made by hand. Skilled individuals used tools (screwdrivers? wrenches? hammers?). The quality of the cars was…
Mar 24, 2025 · Chand Sooran
To Fix the RFP Process, Invert the Problem
In business, people take a lot of things for granted. “We’ve always done things this way,” they say. That’s true, but a more relevant question is, “Would we do it this way if we were starting from scratch?” With the…
Mar 17, 2025 · Chand Sooran
Don’t Default to Picking the Polished Supplier
One thing that never fails to impress me is how polished some salespeople are when it comes to the RFP/RFQ/RFI process. They are very good at steering the buyer to weight certain features heavily and to discount other…
Jan 25, 2025 · Chand Sooran
What’s the Best Way to Train Procurement Staff?
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Nov 8, 2024 · Chand Sooran
Agentic AI Is the Future of Procurement
EdgeworthBox announced its Generative-Procurement-as-a-Service offering for the Request for Proposals business process last month. We have built Generative AI tools to address the workflows of the three stages of a…
Oct 3, 2024 · Chand Sooran
EdgeworthBox Announces Launch of Generative-Procurement-as-a-Service to Transform RFPs
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Sep 16, 2024 · Chand Sooran
Complex Group Procurement Needs the Right Meta-System
Imagine an organization with a troubled history of procurement. Let’s think of it as a bank, but it could be anything large and complicated. In this story, there are many different players. First, there is the business.…
Sep 3, 2024 · Chand Sooran
EdgeworthBox, an AWS Public Sector Partner, Now Available in the AWS Marketplace
September 2024 | New York, NY – EdgeworthBox, a procurement technology company and AWS Public Sector Partner, is excited to announce its listing in the AWS Marketplace. This new procurement channel simplifies access for…
Aug 21, 2024 · Chand Sooran
How Can We Maximize the Productivity of Procurement Committees?
We’ve written recently about a core problem with Requests for Proposals: poor internal stakeholder coordination. It creates a number of derivative issues: Poor specification of requirements: the organization fails to…
Jul 29, 2024 · Chand Sooran
Coordinating Stakeholders in a Procurement Is a Big Problem
In its first phase, procurement technology digitized the business process, but it didn’t radically change it. Instead of email and spreadsheets, there were systems, many of them integrated as Enterprise Resource…
Jun 1, 2024 · Chand Sooran
Group Purchasing Organizations Serve Suppliers, Not Buyers
Everyone is familiar with Costco. It is a staple of North American life. It is a club. Individuals or families pay a fee to become members. The purpose of the club is, “To continually provide members with quality goods…
May 13, 2024 · Chand Sooran
How to Take Risk in a Large Organization
This post appeared first on Closest Point of Approach in May 2024. How do sophisticated investors behave in financial markets? The professional acts on her assessment of the tradeoff between risk and reward. She acts…
Apr 9, 2024 · Chand Sooran
EdgeworthBox on AWS
EdgeworthBox has joined the AWS Partner Network as an AWS Public Sector Partner April 2024 | New York, NY – EdgeworthBox, a procurement technology company, today announced it joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner…
Mar 29, 2024 · Adam Straker
EdgeworthBox Canada and SkyFly Solutions Partner for Software Licensing Supply Arrangement with the Government of Canada
March 2024 | Vancouver, BC and Ottawa, Ontario – EdgeworthBox Canada, a procurement technology company, and SkyFly Solutions today announced their listing in the Government of Canada’s Software Licensing Supply…
Mar 21, 2024 · Adam Straker
Elastic Procurement Is Better than Traditional Procurement
A good procurement event is one in which the buyers find the best combination of problem-solution fit, a reliable supplier, and a reasonable price. We call this value-for-money. Problem-solution fit refers to the degree…
Mar 4, 2024 · Adam Straker
Improving SME Procurement Enables Social Procurement
B2B buyers have multi-fold corporate responsibilities. First and foremost, they must obtain value-for-money in purchasing solutions that solve problems their organization faces. This means buying the right solution,…
Feb 22, 2024 · Adam Straker
Social Procurement Needs Us to Ask the Right Questions
Organizations buy goods and services to solve problems. If there is a subsequent issue with the procurement, if it turns out that what they bought didn’t fix whatever needed fixing, it could be for many different…
Feb 14, 2024 · Adam Straker
The Game Theory of Procurement and RFPs
Jeff Bezos is one of the wealthiest men in the world. He is extraordinarily good at management. He has a useful analogy for decisions. “Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way…
Jan 24, 2024 · Adam Straker
Supplier Relationship Management Is Not an Adversarial Process
In the movie “Jerry Maguire,” the inciting incident is the protagonist’s departure from his established agency to pursue his own principled approach to managing professional athletes. After a rousing call to action on…
Jan 9, 2024 · Adam Straker
What Do Vendors Want?
Many suppliers tell us that they don’t respond to RFPs. They see them as “rigged” or “wired.” They think that the outcome of the RFP is pre-determined. It is nothing more than a pro forma exercise in compliance. Others…
Dec 19, 2023 · Adam Straker
How to Make Digital Procurement Transformation Succeed
Digital transformation involves implementing technology to effect change. This shift we seek may refer to improved business processes, products, or business models, or some combination of improved outcomes. At a high…
Nov 30, 2023 · Adam Straker
How Can Procurement Attract and Retain Talent?
I often remark that “nobody grows up wanting to be in procurement.” Maybe somebody out there did. I have not met them yet. When children are in school, they dream of more glamorous occupations: professional athlete,…
Nov 17, 2023 · Adam Straker
Reference Checks Reign Supreme in Vendor Risk Management
There has been an explosion in services that seek to help buyers vet suppliers. These services take unstructured data from a variety of sources online and develop a structured set of data, specific to an individual…
Nov 15, 2023 · Adam Straker
What Important Procurement Truth Do Very Few People Agree With You On?
Peter Thiel wrote the book on entrepreneurship: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, In it, he talks about the principles that he believes work well for people looking to solve problems. For him,…
Nov 6, 2023 · Adam Straker
Augmented Procurement Reality
Enterprise Resource Planning (or “ERP”) systems are core to the way organizations do business today. Think of them as a general ledger for all kinds of workflow, or as the definitive source of truth for various…
Oct 29, 2023 · Adam Straker
Good Procurement Practices Massively Lower Costs
Internal discussions about procurement tend to focus on cost above all else. The procurement department exists to beat down suppliers and ensure that they get the best price or to enforce policies and procedures…
Oct 11, 2023 · Adam Straker
Reverse Auctions Are the Superior Procurement Approach
For business-to-business buyers, what is the best way to buy something? Looking at it from the other side, what is the best way to sell something to a business-to-business buyer? Well, as an economist, I naturally defer…
Sep 22, 2023 · Adam Straker
Suppliers Don’t Respond to RFPs Because They Think They’re Rigged
A Request for Proposal (RFP) is a reverse auction. Unlike a regular auction in which there is a single seller and an audience of buyers bidding up the price of the item, in a reverse auction there is a single…
Aug 29, 2023 · Adam Straker
In Procurement, Value Isn’t Price and Price Isn’t Value
Imagine a new procurement officer named Jill who joined an established manufacturing company recently. She has been put in charge of her first project. She needs to purchase 1,000 pounds of Grade C Copper. It’s a…
Aug 8, 2023 · Adam Straker
Joint Procurement Does Not Have to Be Slow
Every large sourcing event is now a team event, as we wrote about previously in “Procurement Is a Team Sport,” quoting Gartner: “The typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision makers,…
Aug 5, 2023 · Adam Straker
In Procurement, Margins Are More Important than Cost Savings
The conventional wisdom about procurement is that cost savings are the fundamental priority. One sees this emphasis all the time. Here is Procurement Magazine referring to the 2023 Hackett Group survey:…
Jul 20, 2023 · Adam Straker
Competitive Sourcing Leads to Diverse Sourcing
Deloitte found in its 2023 Chief Procurement Officer survey that the top three priorities were: driving operational efficiency, enhancing ESG/CSR, and digital transformation. ESG has become more important over time. As…
Jun 26, 2023 · Adam Straker
Procurement Is a Team Sport
Procurement, especially for complex purchases, involves groups of people from different functional areas within the buying enterprise. Here is Gartner: “The typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six…
Jun 20, 2023 · Adam Straker
Interoperability Is a Force Multiplier for Procurement
In science fiction movies and television everyone speaks English. Often, there is a convenient poetic device called something like the “Universal Translator” that enables beings from wildly different backgrounds to…
Jun 19, 2023 · Adam Straker
How to Rescue a Failed Digital Procurement Transformation
Digital transformations of procurement fail just like any other digital transformation: frequently. There is a way to turn these situations around, though. What Is Digital Transformation? Here is CIO: “Additionally,…
Apr 19, 2023 · Adam Straker
What Do People Want from Procurement Technology?
“Good marketing is the craft of understanding what people want and need and helping them achieve it.” – Seth Godin What do people want from procurement technology? They want it all. Outcomes If we start with outcomes,…
Apr 19, 2023 · Adam Straker
Generative Text is the Procurement Junior Staffer You Didn’t Know You Needed
Procurement is the first mile of the supply chain. Already, before the Pandemic, procurement teams were spread too thin. When Covid hit with its full force, these employees faced tremendous additional stressors,…
Feb 4, 2023 · Adam Straker
Procurement Is Investment
I have had several careers. I started in finance trading foreign exchange options for a bank right after the British Pound fell out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. This was a great opportunity to learn. It was the blue…
Jan 27, 2023 · Adam Straker
Procurement Is the Most Important Function CFOs Neglect
Perhaps it is because they think that the Chief Operating Officer has it covered, but procurement is the most important function Chief Financial Officers neglect. Maybe they think that the Chief Supply Chain Officer (or…
Dec 26, 2022 · Adam Straker
Subscription Pricing Is the Wrong Business Model for Procurement Technology
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Sep 22, 2022 · Adam Straker
What Is Hybrid Procurement?
What is hybrid procurement? It is an extension of elastic procurement™. We’ve written about elastic procurement™ here: Elastic procurement™ is a delivery model that is to Big Procurement technology systems what cloud…
Sep 6, 2022 · Adam Straker
Who Should Pay for Procurement Events?
When it comes to the technology and the labor necessary to purchase something (either from a catalog or with a reverse auction), who should pay for procurement events? Should it be the buyer or should it be the…
Aug 29, 2022 · Adam Straker
Why Do We Have a Procurement Department?
It’s an interesting question that we don’t ask often enough: why do organizations have a procurement department? Speaking with a supplier recently, he told me that his company refuses to participate in RFPs. This isn’t…
Aug 20, 2022 · Adam Straker
What Is Elastic Procurement™?
What is elastic procurement™ and who should care? CIOs will recognize the word “elastic” from cloud computing. Elastic procurement™ is a delivery model that is to Big Procurement technology systems what cloud…
Aug 1, 2022 · Adam Straker
What Are the Biggest Problems in Procurement?
What are the biggest problems in procurement? There are no shortage of them when you speak with people in different business lines within the organization. Suppliers aren’t enamored with the process, so much as resigned…
Jul 23, 2022 · Adam Straker
Managing Opportunity Costs Is More Important and More Difficult than Reducing Transactions Costs in Procurement
Why are opportunity costs more important than transactions costs? They’re larger. Why are opportunity costs more difficult to manage than transactions costs? They’re hidden. There is no line item for opportunity costs.…
Jun 30, 2022 · Adam Straker
Complexity and Price Volatility in Procurement
We’ve written previously about the conceptual difference between complexity and complication. “To say that a process is complex is the not the same thing as saying it is complicated.” For example, we can imagine the…
May 30, 2022 · Adam Straker
What Is the ROI of a Procurement System?
When making any kind of a decision about digital transformation, people like to talk about the Return on Investment (ROI). What is the ROI of a procurement system? How can we think quantitatively and qualitatively about…
May 16, 2022 · Adam Straker
How Can We Improve the Performance of Procurement?
Historically, there has been a tradeoff between the strategic, internal connectivity of the generalist and the tactical, external expertise of the specialist. Generalists ended up running the show, while accomplished…
May 16, 2022 · Adam Straker
What Is the Buyer’s Journey?
The right platform can accelerate sourcing, lower transaction costs, and lower opportunity costs. We wrote this post originally as a White Paper for the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO). The…
May 16, 2022 · Adam Straker
How Can B2B Buyers Collaborate Across Organizations?
When multiple buyers collaborate to issue an RFP or RFQ jointly, it converts a one-to-many process into a many-to-many process with the attendant increase in benefits, offset by higher complexity. What if we could…
Feb 19, 2022 · Adam Straker
How Can We Improve the B2B Buyer’s Journey?
Buying goods or services for your business isn’t like buying things for yourself or your family. B2B buying is difficult. When you consume things as an individual, you may do some research, but you have a need and you…
Jan 24, 2022 · Adam Straker
How Does Bureaucracy Affect Procurement?
Bureaucracy, for all its intent to protect the buyer, ends up hurting the buyer by limiting competition far more than it protects the buyer from bad actors.
Jan 5, 2022 · Adam Straker
Effective Procurement Change Is Evolutionary
Effective change, especially for small and medium-sized organizations (even those housed within a larger enterprise context), is focused and limited in remodeling business processes. Given the way we work today, any…
Dec 27, 2021 · Adam Straker
Everything Is Sourcing
Sourcing is matching: finding the best solution to a problem.
Nov 2, 2021 · Adam Straker
How Many Sourcing Systems Should a Buyer Have?
“Nearly half (49%) of agency respondents indicate that they are failing to attract enough interest among vendors and contractors to their competitive solicitations.”
Oct 12, 2021 · Adam Straker
Why Choose a Best-of-Breed Sourcing Vendor?
The defining aspect of the 21st century supply chain will be the need to connect people, data, and processes.
Sep 28, 2021 · Adam Straker
How Best to Change Procurement Technology?
Proponents of change need to ensure that there is a balanced, complete conversation around costs and benefits by challenging the standalone case for the status quo approach.
Sep 8, 2021 · Adam Straker
EdgeworthBox Launches Platform to Enable Rapid, Inexpensive, Risk-Free Digital Transformation of Procurement
SMALL AND MEDIUM BUSINESSES NOW HAVE A RAPID, INEXPENSIVE AND RISK-FREE OPTION FOR TRANSFORMING PROCUREMENT DIGITALLY WITH EDGEWORTHBOX New York, NY | September 9, 2021 – EdgeworthBox announces the launch of its…
Jul 7, 2021 · Adam Straker
How Do You Educate Your Customers?
Perhaps the most interesting scenario would be if the buyer invited several suppliers to send her their individual Model RFPs. Instead of having a single, common RFP document to which every supplier responded, each…
Jun 15, 2021 · Adam Straker
How Should You Measure Procurement Performance?
Perhaps the best way to measure procurement’s strategic performance is to do so qualitatively.
Jun 8, 2021 · Adam Straker
How Do Buyers and Suppliers Create Trust?
People in a relationship collaborate to obtain a better joint outcome.
May 25, 2021 · Adam Straker
Make It Easier for Suppliers to Give Buyers What They Want
Buyers have taken so many steps to protect themselves that they have made it significantly more difficult to maximize the benefit from an acquisition. The tradeoff between risk and reward is out of whack.
May 20, 2021 · Adam Straker
What Can Dating Apps Teach Us about Procurement?
Procurement poses a similar problem: efficiently matching buyers with the right suppliers for the best combination of value and risk.
Apr 28, 2021 · Adam Straker
What Should CPOs Prioritize Post-Pandemic?
“It turns out that agility is indeed a sort of antidote that helps inoculate firms against complexity and risk so that they deliver healthy performance results even in the toughest of times.”
Apr 13, 2021 · Adam Straker
Why Use Templates in Procurement?
The best way to improve acquisition performance is to make it easier for suppliers to give buyers what they want.
Mar 9, 2021 · Adam Straker
How Do You Write a Good RFP?
How do you write a good RFP? A good RFP event is one in which you get a sufficient number of relevant responses to generate competition. You receive enough submissions so that the marginal benefit of the incremental…
Feb 17, 2021 · Adam Straker
How Do We Reduce Complexity in Procurement?
Procurement in the contemporary context is both complicated and complex. Most companies have evolved complicated bureaucracies around procurement, requiring systems to implement the rules, with administrative…
Feb 9, 2021 · Adam Straker
How Should Organizations Manage the Decentralization of Procurement?
Culture is defined as the substance behind the statement, “People like us do things like this.” In a world competing for talent, trust is key. Can we trust the people within the organization to do the right thing? If…
Feb 2, 2021 · Adam Straker
How Do You Drive Collaboration About Procurement Internally?
How do you drive collaboration about procurement internally?
Jan 19, 2021 · Adam Straker
How Many Sourcing Systems Should Buyers Employ?
Sourcing systems come in several different types:
Jan 5, 2021 · Adam Straker
Should Buyers or Suppliers Pay for Procurement?
More buyers than one might think use a piece of legacy software or some combination of email and spreadsheets to manage their procurement activities. In these cases, the buyer bears the cost.
Dec 15, 2020 · Adam Straker
What Is Next for Digital Procurement?
Digital procurement promises that it will rescue us from the tedious bureaucracy, the pre-occupation with cost over risk-adjusted value, distortions stemming from the pro forma attempts at gaming the compliance regime,…
Dec 10, 2020 · Adam Straker
Who Is Qualifying Whom in Procurement?
What is the link between marketing and procurement?
Dec 5, 2020 · Adam Straker
Is Problem-Solution Fit More Important than Cost in Procurement?
Companies buy goods and services to solve problems.
Nov 22, 2020 · Adam Straker
Should Supplier Networks Be One-to-Many or Many-to-Many?
Buyers get the most out of suppliers when they make it easy for suppliers to give them what they want. Suppliers want the ability to sell with a fast cycle and low transactions costs to as many potential customers who…
Nov 11, 2020 · Adam Straker
How Do Buyers and Suppliers Game the RFP Process?
Consider an analogy for buying with an RFP.
Nov 5, 2020 · Adam Straker
Procurement Needs to Have Skin in the Game
Buyers who treated their suppliers as vassals who would (and presumably should) do anything for “the business” suffered disproportionately during the Covid supply chain shock of 2020.
Nov 2, 2020 · Adam Straker
How Do Buyers Know They Obtained Value for Money?
We purchase goods and services to solve problems. The right solution is the one that solves the problem most completely. With complicated problems or ones that have complex implications for other systems, this can be…
Oct 13, 2020 · Adam Straker
Suppliers Are Customers and Buyers Are Vendors
Buyers are prone to a naïve conception of suppliers as vassals, bonded and dependent on them for life-sustaining business.
Oct 12, 2020 · Adam Straker
What Is Value-for-Money in Procurement?
People in procurement often talk about “value-for-money.” But what does that mean?
Oct 6, 2020 · Adam Straker
How Should Boards Think About Procurement?
In a pre-Pandemic world, if I were to have asked a procurement officer or a chief financial officer, “what do you hope to accomplish with procurement?” the answer would have been straightforward: cost savings. In a…
Sep 15, 2020 · Adam Straker
How Should Buyers Engage with Small Suppliers?
To win contracts with large government buyers and private sector purchasers, big suppliers need to demonstrate how they engage with smaller suppliers as subcontractors. Initially, this ability will be a competitive…
Aug 19, 2020 · Adam Straker
When Will Companies See Procurement as Strategic?
“Organizations should build financial models that size the impact of various shock scenarios and decide how much ‘insurance’ to buy through the mitigation of specific gaps, such as by establishing dual supply sources or…
Aug 18, 2020 · Adam Straker
Spend Analysis vs. Spend Risk Management
Procurement departments should focus on value and risk, but instead they prioritize cost. Value-for-money means buying the right solution from the right supplier at the right price.
Aug 7, 2020 · Adam Straker
The Best Way to Purchase Contingent Workforce Services
Contingent workforce services, also known as extended workforce, refers to the use of third-party labor to supplement the firm’s base of employees. Typically, hiring managers will obtain these services from one of…
Jul 28, 2020 · Adam Straker
Corporate Social Responsibility Procurement
In the plans for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, Bayard Rustin wrote of “the twin evils of racism and economic deprivation.” This remains true today as Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President…
Jul 13, 2020 · Adam Straker
What Can Big Business Do to Help Smaller Firms?
Small and medium-sized businesses are critical players in corporate supply chains. Sometimes their participation is opaque in that they exist as undisclosed sub-contractors. The policy response to the current crisis has…
Jun 24, 2020 · Adam Straker
Strategic Sourcing Is Risk Management
We live in a connected world. Personally, we’re part of families, companies, and social networks. Our organizations are tied together inextricably. We have suppliers, customers, partners, regulators, tax collectors, and…
Jun 8, 2020 · Adam Straker
When Should You Use an RFP?
The proliferation of eSourcing or eProcurement systems in the last twenty years has transformed the way large organizations purchase goods and services. We were told digitization would lead to cost savings, faster…
May 12, 2020 · Adam Straker
Buyers Should Collaborate on Sourcing with Competitors
When we speak with procurement departments, I am always struck by the need for secrecy. They have non-disclosure agreements in place with their suppliers that prevent their suppliers from revealing anything about the…
May 6, 2020 · Adam Straker
Is Sourcing More than Cost Minimization?
In 2008, leveraged financial positions collapsed in value. Investors assumed incorrectly that American housing prices were unsinkable. Margin calls and firm failures cascaded as hidden risks emerged. Similarly, today, a…
Apr 27, 2020 · Adam Straker
Did Digital Sourcing Work during the Pandemic?
Before we jump into a report card on how digitization of sourcing performed during the Covid-19 crisis, let’s think about what a framework would look like. One way to do this is to make an analogy to another business…
Mar 31, 2020 · Adam Straker
What Is Most Important in Procurement?
It is wonderful to see people come together in these times of coronavirus-induced uncertainty to solve problems.
Mar 17, 2020 · Adam Straker
Primer On Procurement and RFPs
Supply chain refers to the operational part of running a business, i.e. all of the processes necessary to making and distributing the goods or services the company sells. It does not include sales and marketing. It does…
Mar 12, 2020 · Adam Straker
Coronavirus Exposes Weaknesses in Sourcing
Warren Buffett has a famous saying, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
Jan 6, 2020 · Adam Straker
Using Email and Spreadsheets for RFPs Is Risky
Managing RFPs with email and spreadsheets is risky, expensive, and counterproductive. What is the value of technology? One key benefit is the automation of boring, less valuable activities to free up time for…
Dec 18, 2019 · Adam Straker
Why Does Diversity Matter in Procurement?
You can make ethical decisions in diverse suppliers — and also make a positive impact on the bottom line The Business Roundtable recently released a high-profile “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.”
Dec 10, 2019 · Adam Straker
The Procurement Workforce Is Evolving
The makeup of the procurement workforce is changing.
Dec 3, 2019 · Adam Straker
How Should Companies Purchase Innovation?
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Nov 25, 2019 · Adam Straker
Is Bid Rigging a Risk in Procurement?
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Oct 5, 2019 · Adam Straker
How Should Buyers Procure Services?
Many of today’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) were built in the 1990s, while the derivative procure-to-pay systems they inspired were built over the past ten to fifteen years, reliant on the ERP approach,…
Oct 3, 2019 · Adam Straker
What Are Procurement Ethics?
Procurement fraud is something we don’t talk about enough.
Sep 23, 2019 · Adam Straker
How Can RFP Templates Help?
What is the most common complaint about the archaic RFP business process? Time. It takes time to research a category market (even if you have deep domain expertise). It takes time to develop the statement of work, a…
Sep 10, 2019 · Adam Straker
How Can Procurement Partner with the Business?
The promise of digital transformation of the RFP process (and procurement, generally) is not the use of technology for its own sake. It is the opportunity to change the business process, and with it the role of the…
Aug 20, 2019 · Adam Straker
Social Justice and Procurement
Teaming refers to an agreement between two companies to work together in bidding for business, often with a government buyer.
Aug 13, 2019 · Adam Straker
What Is a Good Procurement User Experience?
Dark data is probably one of the most relevant concepts today that people don’t discuss enough.
Aug 9, 2019 · Adam Straker
How Should Buyers Deal with Small Suppliers?
One of the key problems enterprise buyers have is that they do not have enough of the right suppliers submitting bids in response to their Requests for Proposal.
Aug 7, 2019 · Adam Straker
What Is Supplier’s Risk in Procurement?
Fraudsters impersonated the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Defense, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor,…
Aug 1, 2019 · Adam Straker
Why Is the Request of Information Bad?
The cool kids use an expression, “RFx”, to cover three different types of solicitation: a Request-for-Proposal (RFP), a Request-for-Information (RFI), and a Request-for-Quotation (RFQ).
Jul 23, 2019 · Adam Straker
How Does the RFP Distort Outcomes?
There are all kinds of companies in the marketplace today. Which ones are likely to survive and thrive for the longer term? As an investor, isn’t this the fundamental question to ask before all others? Darwin…
Jul 15, 2019 · Adam Straker
How Do Suppliers Develop Capacity?
When it comes to winning RFPs, small and medium-sized businesses are caught in a Catch-22. Let’s assume that our scrappy company happens to figure out that a buyer is in the marketplace for a solution that we offer.…
Jul 1, 2019 · Adam Straker
What Can Procurement Learn from Financial Markets?
When I talk to people with experience in financial markets about the RFP process, they shake their heads at the primitive nature of it all. They are accustomed to speed, transparency, and efficiency. The New York…
Jun 21, 2019 · Adam Straker
Crowdsourcing Procurement Beats Outsourcing It
It is not uncommon for companies to outsource procurement to third parties. For management teams who see procurement as a clerical function of repetitive tasks, the prima facie appeal of outsourcing is obvious:…
Jun 9, 2019 · Adam Straker
How Do Buyers Get Procurement Synergies?
Synergies. They are used to justify all kinds of activity, but no more so than in corporate mergers and acquisitions. Quantify the amount of this value to be created in terms of incremental revenue or cash flow…
May 28, 2019 · Adam Straker
Would Procurement Transparency Lead to Better Outcomes?
Would Procurement Transparency Lead to Better Outcomes?
May 20, 2019 · Adam Straker
How to Get More Data for Procurement AI
There is a lot of talk about AI in the enterprise. But you can’t train models without a tremendous amount of data. The good news is that corporations and other organizations generate a ton of it. The bad news is that…
May 13, 2019 · Adam Straker
What Is the Optimal Number of Suppliers?
There are two competing theories when it comes to the number of suppliers a purchasing organization should have in its vendor database.
Apr 29, 2019 · Adam Straker
What Are Some Common Errors in Sourcing?
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Apr 22, 2019 · Adam Straker
What Is Social Value for Money?
There is a notion in procurement called “value for money.” Here is the definition from the website of the Northern Ireland Department of Finance in the United Kingdom, approved by their Procurement Board in 2010:
Feb 11, 2019 · Adam Straker
Why Is Business Process More Important than UX?
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify…
Feb 4, 2019 · Adam Straker
What Is the Biggest Risk in Procurement?
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Jan 30, 2019 · Adam Straker
What Is the Best Way to Assess Supplier Risk?
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Jan 22, 2019 · Adam Straker
How to Make Sourcing Strategic
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Jan 14, 2019 · Adam Straker
Why Do Shaped RFPs Ultimately Fail?
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Dec 10, 2018 · Adam Straker
What Is Category Management?
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Apr 23, 2018 · Adam Straker
What Does Blockchain Mean for Procurement?
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Nov 19, 2017 · Adam Straker
Risk and Procurement
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Oct 25, 2017 · Adam Straker
How to Find and Keep Procurement Staff
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Sep 25, 2017 · Adam Straker
How to Encourage More Vendors to Participate
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Jul 26, 2017 · Adam Straker
How Can We Improve Government Procurement?
The function of government procurement should be to purchase the goods and services government agencies need to execute their missions in a timely fashion, obtaining the best value-for-the-money, while safeguarding the…