The ProcureTech Cup Is Born

The quest for the most 'popular' ProcureTech solution

Author

Joël Collin-Demers
March 24, 2024 • 📖 13 minutes

📰 In Today’s Edition…

Hi there,

In today’s edition:

I hope this proves useful!

Have a great week ahead.

Best,

Joël

📋 Job Board

Here are 5 job openings that caught my eye this week:

Manulife is looking for a Manager, Procurement Strategy
Full Time | Hybrid | Toronto, Canada

OpenAI is looking for a Senior Manager, Strategic Sourcing
Full Time | Hybrid | San Francisco, California

iHerb is looking for a Vice President, Procurement
Full Time | Irvine, California | Salary: $220-386K

NASA is looking for a Procurement Analyst
Full Time | Hybrid | Pasadena, California | Salary: $142-184K

DHL is looking for a Head of Sustainable Procurement
Full Time | Remote | United Kingdom

Are you looking for a digitally-minded procurement professional?
Reply to this email with your job posting.

🔑 Key Takeaways

No time to read the full 🌙 Sunday Night Note? Here are the key takeaways:

Read the full note below for all the juicy details.

🌙 Sunday Night Note

The Birth of the ProcureTech Cup

Last week, as I was going through my normal LinkedIn post creation process, I had a thought…

“Hmmm the NCAA March Madress basketball tournament is starting… I wonder if there’s something fun and interesting to do with that in relation to Procurement Technology…?”

20 minutes later, I was posting a “call for players” with the following picture where I asked anyone to nominate their favorite ProcureTech solutions in the following categories:

  • Procurement Performance Management

  • Intake Management / Process Orchestration

  • Spend Analysis

  • Sourcing

  • Market Intelligence

  • Contract Lifecycle Management

  • eSignature

  • Purchasing solutions (P2P)

  • Contingent Workforce Management (CWM)

  • Accounts Payable Automation

  • Financing & Payments

  • Supplier Relationship & Performance Management (SRM, SPM)

  • Third-Party Risk Management solutions (TPRM)

  • Supplier Data Platforms (address, diversity, governance, environmental, etc.)

March Madness style tournament bracket

Note that my imagination is limited to 16 solutions 😂

I thought it was probably a “throw away post”…

I thought I might get 8 or maybe 16 solutions suggested by LinkedIn connections if I was lucky. A few dozen people would nerd out on ProcureTech together… We’d learn about 1-2 new solutions and call it a day.

Well, 3 hours later when checking LinkedIn over lunch, I had more than 64 nominations and lots of excited people at my doorstep. 😖 (oops)

I quickly capped the nominations at 64 and fear came over me… I now had to figure out how to run a proper tournament via LinkedIn posts… (and politely exclude a dozen other solutions 😓)

Sweaty Guy

Sure… That’s exactly what I meant to do…

With a full afternoon of meetings, I parked this problem until later.

That night, when the kids were sound asleep, that’s when my full panic mode set in… I decided to:

  • Turn to the friend we all have but don’t bring to public events, Excel…

  • List out all the solutions.

  • Tag them to general categories, researching a few I had never heard of (there are 430+ software solutions on the market for Procurement after all…). This was a ‘square peg, round hole’ exercise given solutions do not fit neatly into boxes…

  • Make a tournament bracket, assigning solutions to matchups based on the order of when solutions were nominated within their categories as I didn’t have time to come up with a proper seeding methodology.

  • Settle on a 13-day schedule to get through all the rounds.

  • Put together a graphic with all the company logos (this was the longest part 😂).

  • Come up with some loose rules (I believed being too strict was going to get me into trouble).

    • 8 matchups to start

    • Anyone can vote for up to 8 solutions (once per matchup)

    • I don’t care how or why you are voting

    • The solutions with the most votes move on

  • Wrote my post for the next day and was in bed by 12:30pm…

When I posted the next day, I stressed that the main objective was (and remains) to expose people to solutions available in the ProcureTech space, learn something and have some fun while at it.

Doing serious things without taking ourselves too seriously is definitely a motto of mine…

Generally speaking, the game has been well received. Lots of love on LinkedIn, as usual. People are learning new things and having fun.

Awesome✨

If this is the first you’re hearing about this and want to follow along, go to my LinkedIn profile and hit the 🔔. You’ll get notifications in the next 2 weeks as I post about the new rounds.

I promise you’ll learn something you can use to bring your procurement function to the next level, regardless of your team’s size.

And Then the Direct Messages Started…

However, as with anything that garners a bit of attention, the criticism started coming out of the woodwork… Here are the main things I was criticized for:

1/ The approach to choose the initial 64 solutions was flawed.

There are huge hundred million dollar companies all the way to tiny 1-person initiatives included in the 64 solutions in the tournament. I just picked the first 64 solutions that were thrown my way by connections/followers. Some took issue with that…

I come back to the fact that this is a game… With literally no prize… 😂

I wanted to reward engagement with my post (Remember… My imagination was limited to 16 solutions…).

That being said, I think this might be a feature and not a bug… TBD for lessons learned after the tournament.

If you’re after a ranking of the top solutions, the most promising startups or even an exhaustive directory of available solutions, go check out the work of people who are much more able than I am in these 3 domains:

2/ If I’m going to pick “the best” ProcureTech solution, I should have better criteria/rules.

I am not on a quest to find “the best” ProcureTech solution…. This is not what this is. It’s about who can mobilize the most votes to win, for whatever reason. That’s it (I’ll draw the line at bots 😂).

Besides, asking for “the best” ProcureTech solution is like asking what the best type of car is…? Well, what are you trying to do with it? What are your objectives? Your constraints? Your budget?

Context is everything.

Anyone who tells you a software solution is “the best” without asking you questions about your context first needs to be shown the door… 🚪

And then call me… 📞

3/ Employees are going to vote for their company. That’s not fair.

Yup. Don’t you want to learn more about solutions and companies where employees are willing to publicly associate their name to their work? Where they believe the heck out of what they are doing?

You would think huge companies would always have an advantage here but that’s not what the data tells me so far…

I might switch things up in later rounds (TBC) but I think a ravenous, mobilized and enthusiastic employee base is not something you have in every company… It’s also rarely highlighted as a differentiator in ProcureTech.

“Employees that care” goes a long way towards making a good product.

What I Can Promise You…

The main guiding principles behind tournament design decisions will always be:

  • How can I best educate on digital procurement best practices?

  • How can I showcase a variety of ideas and perspectives?

  • How can I make it fun?
    (Seriously. Have you ever tried talking about ProcureTech at a regular party? This is not easy. 😂)

That being said, I’m always open to constructive feedback. If you have some, just reply to this email. I read all replies.

So What’s Next for the ProcureTech Cup?

Well, as we whittle down the field to 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 and, ultimately, 1 solution, this will allow for more content to be shared on each solution.

The objective is to serendipitously expose you to cool stuff happening in ProcureTech.

This game will self select the companies and fanbases who are most excited about sharing it with us…

I’ve got a few surprises for the rounds to come… So stay tuned by hitting the 🔔 on my LinkedIn profile. You can always remove it when the tournament is over.

I’m also hosting a 20-min LinkedIn Live event on Thursday, March 28th @ Noon ET to give an update on the results and next steps.

Back to regular “best practices” content next week.

Here’s my free guide on how to best manage your procurement business processes if you’re aching for something right this second.

*tip of the cap*

💭 Quote of the Week

A long one but a good one this week:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;

who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;

but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions;

who spends himself in a worthy cause;

who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

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Best comment from last week:

If I ever get tired of law, this job board will provide the financial security I need. (referring to the new job board section)

My Lawyer friend who humors me by reading my newsletter on ProcureTech

I died reading this.
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