Dateline: A snow-bound Raleigh, North Carolina for NextLevel, SciQuest’s Annual Conference held Feb. 1-3. SciQuest is a SaaS solution provider best known for its P2P prowess and a supplier network that has enabled it to become a category killer in the higher education sector and make strong in-roads in the public sector and environments that conduct scientific research, like pharma and bio-tech. Day One of the three-day event featured a keynote from Steven S. Little discussing his “Milkshake” Moment (archived video from another conference) and how to overcome policies and systems that impede productivity followed by three panel discussions that featured a set of procurement leaders, suppliers, and analysts respectively. Stephen Wiehe, SciQuest’s President and CEO, concluded the day with an update on SciQuest and the presentation of customer awards, before hosting an evening event at a nearby museum.
Although each of the panels offered a unique perspective on strategic procurement in the “new normal” economy, I’ll focus on the analyst panel of which I was a member. The analyst panel was moderated by Frank Quinn, Editorial Director of Supply Chain Management Review and co-author of the new book Diagnosing Greatness: Ten Traits of the Best Supply Chains and included myself, Patrick Connaughton who contributes to Forrester’s offerings for the Sourcing and Vendor Management professional and is also Forrester’s resident expert on services procurement solutions and, Debbie Wilson, Gartner’s Research Director for ERP and Supply Chain Management. We each spent about ten minutes highlighting our recent research. Frank began the discussion with an overview of some of his recent research which suggested that there will be continued emphasis on sourcing activity in 2010 and presented his “top ten” traits that make the difference in Supply Chain Management. Patrick highlighted a few recent findings, including his view that supplier performance and risk are top of mind within procurement, that CEO’s are increasingly interested in knowing/having a “green” strategy and that services procurement is a “hidden gem” of savings that continues to elude many procurement teams. Patrick and Forrester also believe that the supply management solutions market will bounce back strongly in 2010, growing by 12%, which will resulting in more than $3.8 Billion in total revenue. Debbie displayed her “Procurement Heat Map” from Q4 2009, which tracks Gartner inquiries as a proxy on market interest and activity. Debbie found that the ‘hottest” topics were Procure-to-pay and enterprise contract management applications while the “coolest” topics were services procurement, procurement MDM, and vendor vulnerability assessment.
The final hour of the panel was an interactive Q&A discussion which broached a wide range of economy, people, and technology issues including: “What supply management application would you deploy first and why?” (My Answer: eSourcing for speed to launch, speed to value and lack of integration among others; Debbie preferred a more linear approach and would start with Spend Analysis), and one real doozie: “What can a procurement organization do over the next six months to save $1,000,000?” (My Answer: demand management, extend payment terms, and bring in a firm to conduct a post-payment audit recovery).
It was great to participate in NextLevel for a third straight year and to connect with many of the attendees that I have either worked with or met at this event in years past. The SciQuest team intends to share event highlights via YouTube. I will post those links when they become available.
