A recent Purchasing article on what $100K buys in spend analysis has already had some rotten tomatoes hurled at it by an irate blogger. In his response to the article, Michael Lamoureux, who posts as “The Doctor,” gets only one of his criticisms wrong (e.g., Insight Sourcing), and nearly all of them right, at least as Spend Matters keeps the spending visibility functional score. The fact that Purchasing overlooked BIQ, Rosslyn Analytics, Spend Radar and others, while driving to a $100K price point by comparing apples to oranges, provides a potential disservice to the market. Still, I do think we should applaud a trade publication to some degree for at least trying to analyze a software market that its readers should be thinking about. But I’m not clapping my hands too loudly.
In my view, the question should not be what $100K can buy — the answer varies widely from vendor to vendor depending on a range of factors — but rather, what do you need if you only have $100K to spend, based on your individual priorities. Moreover, the article ignores the frequency — and potential benefits — of spend analysis as a service delivered by solution/consulting firms to potentially identify sourcing savings and reclamation areas (e.g., invoice audits) more quickly. Moreover, from a technology perspective, companies need to ask themselves whether or not it’s important to have their spend analysis capabilities integrated closely into their sourcing, contract management, and supplier performance-management processes and tools. If the answer is “yes,” they may very well choose to spend $100K differently than if not.
If Purchasing had reached out to either myself, Michael or other non-traditional analysts…
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I agree with ‘the Doctor’ I do not think the original article was one without its criticisms. Overlooking the likes of rosslynanalytics and spend radar devalues the article in my opinion.