Transcript 0:00 It's business case season. Labor Day's around the corner, and budgeting season is starting in most organizations. 0:07 And now you're gonna have to do the business case dance to secure budget for next year's procure tech initiatives. 0:14 In today's episode, I wanna share a cool story about how an experienced procurement team managed to quickly jump through the business case hoop and build trust and credibility at the same time. 0:23 It might be just what you need to get things going this year. Let's get into it. 0:28 [upbeat music] Welcome to ProcureTech Unpacked, the show for procurement professionals who want to cut through marketing and understand the technology shaping our function. 0:49 I'm Joel Conneen Demers. Every year, the business case dance works the same way. You want budget for a new project, so you start with a blank page and ask yourself, "What new value will this create in our context?" 1:03 And whatever you come up with ties back to usually one of three levers: productivity, doing more with the same effort; cost reduction, doing the same things for less; or new value, enabling something or a capability that you couldn't do before. 1:19 Every benefit you've ever put in a business case usually ladders up to one of those three things. So the blank page dance is always the same. 1:27 You pick a lever, identify the new upside based on the technology you're looking at, and then go hunting for the data to defend it. You might leverage vendor data as well if they have a business case accelerator. 1:39 It works, but it's slow, and every year you're starting over from zero. So a while back, I spoke with a very experienced procurement team that shared a really cool story with me. 1:49 A few years earlier, they'd rolled out a full source-to-pay suite. Big project, big business case. 1:55 And like most source-to-pay rollouts, it hadn't fully delivered over the years the value that was promised because adoption never got to the original spreadsheet assumption that was on the business case. 2:07 This is the quiet reality behind most procure tech implementations. 2:11 There's a gap between the business case you sold and the reality that you got, and that gap exists largely because your users never adopted the solution the way your business case model assumed they would. 2:22 Now, a few years later, budget season rolls around and this team wants to fund an intake and orchestration initiatives to close that adoption gap. 2:32 But instead of pulling out a blank page and inventing a new shiny projection, they did something much smarter. They went back to the original business case. 2:42 Step one, they pulled out the real numbers, the benefits that they'd committed to when they bought that source-to-pay suite in the first place. Step two, they measured the delta. 2:51 What did they actually deliver versus what was promised? Step three, and this is the discipline part, they isolated the piece of that shortfall that they could honestly pin on low adoption. 3:02 Not market shifts or org changes, not scope changes either, but adoption specifically. Step four, that number became the new business case. The pitch wasn't, "Trust us, here's fresh new upside." 3:16 It was, "Here are our lessons learned from the last time. We left this much value on the table, and we believe this next investment is how we finally collect it." They weren't inventing value out of thin air. 3:27 They were reclaiming value that the company had already paid for but never received. 3:32 Now, you'd think that walking into a business case review and saying, "Hey, our last project under-delivered," would cost you credibility. 3:41 But in this case, it did the opposite because the pitch was honest, it was specific, and it was grounded in numbers that were already recognized. 3:49 Not a rosy hockey stick projection that everybody started to analyze fresh and poke holes in. Just a clear-eyed accounting of a known gap and a plan to close it. 3:59 Trust and credibility came from the willingness to be honest about the first project, not trying to spin it positively over time. So why doesn't everyone do this? It's obviously simpler than starting from scratch. 4:11 Well, because it forces you to say three things out loud. One, we had the wrong assumptions around user adoption in our original business case. 4:20 Two, by fixing those assumptions, we can finally realize the value we left behind. And three, this business case is smaller than the original investment, but it's still worth doing. 4:32 Admitting that the first project fell short feels like admitting failure. And if your company culture buries failure instead of learning from it, you'll never write this business case, unfortunately. 4:43 You'll go back to the blank page, promise a bigger number, and repeat the exact cycle that created that gap. And I'm sorry if that's your context. 4:51 But the team in this story could do it because their company culture treated the miss as part of a climb, one step up the maturity curve, not an eternal black mark. 5:01 So here's what I'll leave you with as you head into your own business case season. The value from your last project is very likely still sitting there. It got approved once when you had less digital maturity. 5:13 The fastest, most credible business case you can make this year might not be a blank page invention at all. 5:18 It might be going back and collecting on what you already sold with more maturity, more capability, and being clear-eyed about what it takes to be successful. 5:28 All it takes is a bit of organizational history and a lot of organizational humility. That's it for this week. This episode is adapted from a Sunday night note in the Purr procurement newsletter. 5:40 If you'd like to read the longer written version of this story, I'll link it in the show notes. I'll see you next week. [upbeat music] That's a wrap on this episode of ProcureTech Unpacked. 5:50 If this one resonated, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for the Purr procurement newsletter for weekly insights between episodes. 5:58 If something we covered sparked a question or an idea, we'd love to hear from you. All the links for the reports we discussed are in the show notes. We'll see you next time. [upbeat music] Resonate.
