
Friday Rant: Treat Contracting as a Business and Sourcing Process, Not Just a Legal One
In last Friday’s first rant, I shared some thoughts and anecdotes about the role contracting can play in helping companies more quickly realize identified savings. In this rant, I?ll focus on some of the roles contracting can play in identifying addi…

Friday Rant: The Receivables Exchange Needs to Market Less Like a Loan Shark
I’m a big fan of collaboration between supply chain financing and procurement/accounts payable to reduce supply risk and enable vendors to access working capable at more reasonable rates. I’m even a fan of The Receivables Exchange, one of the pioneer…

Friday Rant: Coupa Sam Talks Smack to Ariba Spendman
This is a rant. I won’t pretend to dig into details of the accuracies, fallacies, and potentially overlooked comparisons in Coupa’s latest napalm drop on Ariba. No, I’ll save the meat of my analysis for a regular post or two next week that takes a more objective look at some of Coupa’s claims in its […]

Friday Rant: What’s Holding Ariba Back? (Part 2)
In the first part of this column from last Friday’s Rant, I shared a few thoughts on what I thought was holding Ariba back from even larger growth, from the perspective of solution and customer communications. In the second installment of this rant t…
Friday Rant: Doubling Down on Spend Matters (Part 2)
In a column from last Friday, I provided some background details on the current state of Spend Matters as well as intimating what might be around the corner. To summarize, for those who missed it and don’t want to read the first installment in this s…
Friday Rant: Doubling Down on Spend Matters (Part 1)
There comes a time in the evolution of any idea — or business —
where rapid introspection is preferable to any long, drawn-out
goal-setting or visioning development process. Over the course of 24
hours in early November, I had one of these…