Spend Matters Publishing recently wrote a fantastic analysis of a rapidly growing area of focus from practitioners and vendors. It is available for download, from its sponsor, Archstone Consulting.

I will not rehash Jason’s points in this paper, it is well worth downloading. I will say that I can corroborate virtually everything he has stated. This is a massively growing area for Iasta, and likely all eSourcing companies that can work with F1000 sized companies. Integrated services components are critical to success of a coordinated eSourcing roll out. Some times, companies have the internal experts and bandwidth to pull this off, some times, they think they do, and most times, they do not.

To add to his statements with my own experience, companies generally need a standard set of dedicated resources:

• Tactical: This implies just having some one to execute sourcing projects that are teed up, but do not have the necessary bandwidth to complete. This is generally short term and very quantifiable.
• Categories/Assessment/Advisory: Here the company needs more than people to use software to complete tasks. Many times it involves a team of people that are loaded into a particular category or location with a specific savings target, as the goal. There is a large amount of data collection, strategy and execution needed and the time frame could be 1-6 months.
• Process transformation: Much more involved than the previous levels, with less structure and a goal being conceptual, rather than finite. This again is a longer term strategy, but well worth the investment, if the sourcing organization has no..well, organization.

I make a habit of speaking to the leadership of our clients on a regular basis. One thing I can be very confident in, is that no one has extra resources. Procurement staffing is an area that will not go away and based on the results that we have provided, it is one of the absolute locks for ROI.