3 Reasons Why E-Sourcing Providers Have Failed Procurement

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许多采购从业者知道电子采购解决方案的基本组件和功能。他们甚至可以知道采用这种解决方案的诱人益处，包括平均整体储蓄的12％。

然而，让用户充分采用电子采用仍然仍然是在大小和小的采购组织常年挑战。许多组织正在使用他们的电子来源平台only 25%of applicable events, according to one CIPS study.

How can this be, when the technology and purported benefits are anything but new and certainly compelling enough to get the attention of the CFO? For several reasons, the provider community at large has failed procurement when it comes to designing sourcing solutions. Here are three reasons why they’ve gone astray — and how to fix it.

1.太多功能

As solution providers fight to create the most advanced, market-leading technology available, they’ve forgotten the reason they created the solutions in the first place: to create a better way to do sourcing. When sourcing the old way is easier, faster and more effective than with a sourcing solution, why would anyone abandon the old method?

Take spreadsheets as an example. They may be static, siloed documents that lack the organizational efficiencies of a digital tool, but spreadsheets are also a lingua franca, of sorts, in the business world. Both buyers and suppliers know how to fill out a sheet for a bid collection without any explanation or direction.

与之相比,改进了收购形式的解决方案。All bids have to submitted through sometimes complicated, ill-structured bid sheets; attachments have to be added one at a time; and all suppliers have to answer fixed questionnaires, which are often populated with far more questions than the buying organization needs answered.

Many of these features may sound great on paper, but when using the solution actually takes longer — and feels more onerous — than emailing a spreadsheet around, why would anyone use it? No wonder, then, that of the six most significant inhibitors to e-sourcing adoption, half of the reasons CIPS lists have to do with buyers or suppliers not having the attitude or skills for using a tool with which they have no experience.

2.太多的分析师焦点

In an effort get a seal of approval from analysts (and find the “magic” components that will help their solutions stand out from the rest), providers have invested in pushing advanced functionality most users don’t need.

当分析师创建市场景观报告时，他们发布特定解决方案的功能列表“应该有”。这些列表通常运行功能的赌场，从简单招标到组合出价优化。但是，当分析师正在记录解决方案组件时，他们可能无法对采购日常需求的所有人都没有考虑 - 当然不是您的特定业务的需求。

The people selling e-sourcing solutions, however, seem to have misunderstood the analyst’s perspective. Instead of designing solutions around the user’s core requirements, providers have taken analyst lists as dogma. They assume that because an analyst listed every auction type ever conducted since the dawn of commerce, procurement groups will turn their noses up at a solution that does not offer every type right out of the gate.

For most organizations, adopting e-sourcing successfully requires the opposite approach: starting out with simple, quick wins that can be scaled to more complicated projects. A 12-week, 300-hour strategic sourcing initiative to revolutionize your $40 million IT hardware category is likely the wrong place to start your e-sourcing program. Diving headfirst into the most advanced features in the solution is bound to send buyers back to the warm embrace of email and spreadsheets.

3.太强调了满足RFP

用于采购溶液的RFP在表面上看起来无害。采购每年发出数百或数千个RFX，所以在捕捞满足自己要求的提供商时，创建RFP应该是一个禁智的人，对吧？

Not quite. In fact, procurement often does more harm than good when sourcing for itself. By over-researching and planning only for an ideal adoption scenario, organizations end up creating wish lists for things they don’t need (see point No. 2).

但采购并不是唯一一个犯有overcomplicating the vendor selection process. Consultants, ever the technology analyst’s partner in crime, have contributed to feature list overreach, as well. Because the integrators and subject-matter experts at consultancies know technologies like e-sourcing so well, they frequently overwhelm practitioners with extraneous information about solution features.

Consultants would do better to follow a “crawl, walk, run” approach, starting clients off with the basics of creating and sourcing an event with a small number of items and suppliers before moving onto, say, advanced optimization exercises for a major category.

在努力击败竞争中，供应商在其营销材料中挑选了彼此的“单一”互相挑逗的诗意。分析师和从业者相似地重复这些点，直到他们对自己的生活带来，而且没有人能记得在此类功能成为“必须拥有的时候”。

So how can procurement organizations and solution providers come back down to Earth? Approaching solution adoption like a game, where users must reach a certain level of expertise before they unlock a new (feature) level, provides a promising way forward. To learn more, be sure to check out Part 2 of this series.