Creating Flow Instead of Friction in Services Procurement Tech

Services procurement is complex, variable and hard to measure consistently. Clear data, a strong business case, "best of breed" and adaptable support are key to improving control and value.

With Niul Burton, Procurement Advocate and Advisor

00:04:46 - The services procurement landscape

00:14:39 - The unsolved challenges in services procurement

00:29:45 - Criticality of change management in successful implementations

00:59:38 - Building a business case

01:04:37 - Merits of a ‘best of breed’

Episode Highlights

Transcript

Auto-generated. Please excuse any minor errors.

00;00;00;23 - 00;00;19;03

Jonny Dunning

Okay. So I'm very pleased to welcome to the podcast, Niul Burton. Niul, you are a procurement advocate, and adviser. And, we were introduced recently, had a very interesting conversation and I thought it would be, the perfect sort of thing to really bring to this podcast. To have a bit of a chat about services procurement.

00;00;19;10 - 00;00;22;15

Jonny Dunning

So welcome. And thank you very much for joining me.

00;00;22;18 - 00;00;27;15

Niul Burton

Yeah. No thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to have the chat. So this is great great forum.

00;00;27;17 - 00;00;52;26

Jonny Dunning

Excellent stuff. So I know you've just got back from a nice holiday at some various interesting places in Europe, but we're going to dive straight in and go into a bit of your background, if that's all right. So just in terms of your, your kind of your background and your, your journey in procurement. Could you just, could you just give a bit of an insight into what that journey has been like for you up to this point?

00;00;52;29 - 00;01;16;18

Niul Burton

Yeah, sure. And I'm happy to. So, and essentially my entire career has been spent in the, in the procurement space. I started off with, with BP and the materials and contracts group back in the back in the 80s. And I spent three years in the oil and gas industry, in the upstream, doing contracting, buying supply chain and so on.

00;01;16;20 - 00;01;45;24

Niul Burton

Then I transitioned into consulting. I was with Kearney for 15 years at a point when we were Kearney was developing a strategic sourcing methodology, and I think we're kind of leading the industry in terms of thinking strategically about procurement, developing the seven step methodology. I used to joke that I had the seven step tattoo. But we found that it was a really impactful way of, driving new value out of out of the procurement space.

00;01;45;27 - 00;02;11;19

Niul Burton

I then took a little bit of a detour from consulting and, co-founded a startup during the.com era called abbreviate, where we were looking to use, internet technology to bring value to procurement processes. I think in a in a fairly unique way. We were one of the, one of the original kind of SaaS solutions that were that were out there and worked through a lot of kind of interesting technical challenges as we were doing auctions and so on.

00;02;11;22 - 00;02;31;25

Niul Burton

But that convinced me that technology has a a bigger and bigger role to play in enhancing the way that we go about procurement. And then I spent some time at Accenture, and then ultimately at, EY where I led the global procurement practice for, for a number of years, until I retired about five years ago.

00;02;31;25 - 00;02;51;27

Niul Burton

And I've been working as an independent advisor since then. So, yeah. So my entire career and I think I like to think of myself as a procurement professional. I have a real passion around it. I think that it's an opportunity to, have a significant impact on a business business's performance. In a way that's not always appreciated.

00;02;51;29 - 00;03;08;04

Niul Burton

And it's also given me the opportunity to work in multiple industries. Oil and gas, media and entertainment, aerospace and defense. Consumer products, which has been a great fun in understanding new industries and how to how to make a difference.

00;03;08;07 - 00;03;23;00

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, it's really interesting. I was I was looking at some of the work you've done, actually, I saw the Abbreviate stuff. What was the what was the procurement technology landscape like? Because that was like early 2000.

00;03;23;03 - 00;03;51;02

Niul Burton

Yeah, it was it was 99, 2000. It was basically kind of a Ariba as the main tool. The overwhelming focus was on transactional efficiency. And at Abbreviate and we were modeling ourselves a little bit after free markets, but with a slightly bigger, kind of scope. But looking to see how we brought technology to the strategic aspects of procurement rather than the transactional aspect.

00;03;51;02 - 00;04;18;13

Niul Burton

So we would have been a, a complement to, to an Ariba. And I think with the, the background of work I'd been doing at Kearney I had a belief that there was the opportunity for greater impact by having by bringing technology to the strategic aspects of procurement, and driving real value out of the total spend, rather than improving the transactional efficiency, which was important.

00;04;18;15 - 00;04;25;23

Niul Burton

But it wasn't drive cost savings in the same extent that strategic strategic sourcing and category management can do.

00;04;25;26 - 00;04;46;18

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. Which brings me brings us very nicely on to my kind of first point around services procurement, which is just to get your take around, you know, what is services procurement. I often say joke that it's the biggest thing that isn't a thing in procurement. But you know, it just in terms of where that fits into the procurement view of the world.

00;04;46;19 - 00;05;10;19

Jonny Dunning

Because I absolutely agree with you. You know, moving from that transactional approach to a strategic point of view, absolutely increases the value that procurement provides within an organization. And I always, I always kind of feel that the procurement function is a relatively young function, compared to some of the kind of other typical business functions like finance or marketing.

00;05;10;25 - 00;05;31;21

Jonny Dunning

And if you look at the finance technology stack, it's very well developed. If you look at the marketing technology stack, it's very well developed with an enormous amount of market capital. The procurement technology stack is going through its growth phase. I would argue probably steep as part of the growth phase around now in the last few years, it's really exploded.

00;05;31;24 - 00;05;43;10

Jonny Dunning

Talking about Kearney looking at the, the the kind of, Doctor Elouise Epstein's tech kind of market map, which is just, you know, got bigger and bigger and bigger.

00;05;43;13 - 00;05;43;26

Niul Burton

Its insane.

00;05;43;28 - 00;06;04;07

Jonny Dunning

I think she may have had to kind of, like, almost discontinue it and not really kind of continue to grow. And it's got so crazy. But I but I always think within taking that strategic approach, you need data and I won't go too far down the road of this right now. But that's where I start with my conversation around services procurement.

00;06;04;10 - 00;06;20;14

Jonny Dunning

That's the thing I feel is, is kind of, is missing. But but going back to my my original point, how would you see, how do you see services, procurement of the procurement of services, fitting into the overall landscape as it currently stands for most people?

00;06;20;16 - 00;06;48;10

Niul Burton

Yes. I think just kind of stepping back a little bit in a couple of your earlier comments. I think sometimes we do ourselves a disservice by talking and thinking about procurement as kind of a monolithic, discipline that we're bringing tools to, because I think, in my mind, procurement actually is more complicated than many of the other disciplines in that it is trying to create a, a link between the outside and the inside, whereas a lot of other functions, HR is dealing mainly internally.

00;06;48;10 - 00;07;15;08

Niul Burton

Finance is mainly internal, marketing is pushing out. But but procurement has this challenge of being able to deal with the outside world and the inside world and bringing them both together. And, and there's a lot to that. And I think that's kind of what part of what leads to Elouise’s complicated map is the so many different aspects to procurement that we're trying to enable with technology.

00;07;15;11 - 00;07;45;20

Niul Burton

At the that there are literally hundreds of providers and many have got their own little niche within that, that, that big picture. So I think services procurement probably it is huge. I know for my time in the gas industry, the majority of the spend is on services. If you look at, you know, aerospace and defense, massive amount of services spend, media and entertainment, you know, similarly, it's majority of services spend in different, you know, flavors.

00;07;45;22 - 00;08;07;12

Niul Burton

So so the services aspect is enormous. But it's also, I think, uniquely complicated because it's different for every customer. In terms of, you know, what's their internal operating model that they're looking to bring these services into. What does their landscape look like? You know, how do they operate? How do they run their business? What do they want to do themselves?

00;08;07;12 - 00;08;34;15

Niul Burton

What do they want a third party to do? And that uniqueness adds to the kind of complexity of services procurement and makes it then the, the bigger challenge, you know, to how to how to how do I use the term solve. But I think it's it's not just solving services procurement. It's it's the ability to bring all of the different kind of capabilities together within a process in order to, to drive the value.

00;08;34;17 - 00;08;49;17

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. And maybe we'll come back to that, a little bit later. But you're talking about like multiple parts of the business that are involved, different stakeholder groups and that complexity of how it gets delivered within an organization as well as how it gets procured.

00;08;49;19 - 00;09;15;27

Niul Burton

Yes. And recognizing that your internal customers, they have a a set of objectives to achieve. And procurement is a sometimes, you know, a hurdle that they need to get over in order to be able to get their job done. And so, you know, they're not necessarily, you know, it's not a top of their list to follow the procurement process.

00;09;15;29 - 00;09;25;29

Niul Burton

Right. They they they'll do what works best for them. And if it's adding value then they're much more likely to embrace it. If they don't see it as adding value, then they'll try and work around it.

00;09;26;01 - 00;09;49;20

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, 100%. We did a, 2025 services procurement survey. Rogue spend was number one in terms of people's kind of pain points. And ultimately, you know, the person who needs to procure the service and get the work done. That's their objective. That's the thing that's pressing on them is the business concern of, I need to get this work done with the service provider doing doing it for me.

00;09;49;22 - 00;10;08;09

Jonny Dunning

If the procurement process is not effective, they either have to put up with it being very slow and painful for them and for their supplier and for their timelines in getting the work done, or they just have to go rogue and and unfortunately, that's what happens a lot of the time. So yeah, I completely agree with you on that.

00;10;08;12 - 00;10;44;22

Jonny Dunning

Just going back to what you were saying about the level of complexity that just exists within the very nature of procurement. I think that's a really interesting point you make about the link between the outside of the organization and the inside of the organization, and I think it just this is where, again, for me, it comes back to data as the ultimate, ultimate kind of objective and goal in, in effective management of spend procurement by doing the work they do with consulting organizations and other service providers, they're getting this unique view of the company from inside the company, looking out at the service providers and looking out at the world.

00;10;44;24 - 00;11;05;21

Jonny Dunning

And from the service providers doing the work for them and looking in at their company. So I think with having the understanding of of how effective the company is at doing the work that they need to do as part of their services, that's really interesting. And and if you know, if that's something where data is being meaningful, data is being collected both quantitative and qualitative, kind of feedback.

00;11;05;24 - 00;11;18;20

Jonny Dunning

That's enormously, strategic information that can be leveraged within the organization and only really procurement to have that viewpoint there at that kind of, junction.

00;11;18;23 - 00;11;43;11

Niul Burton

Yep. Yep, I would agree. Just to kind of heart back, we were doing some work with a major oil or gas company on refinery maintenance, and a big part of their spend was scaffolding during, during turnarounds where they were doing big maintenance overhaul projects and as part of our process, we were engaging with the suppliers and asking them what was their opinion of how we were.

00;11;43;16 - 00;12;02;10

Niul Burton

We were running the the scaffolding program. And, you know, what should we be doing differently? And the response from the, the CEO of the scaffolding company was, we've never been asked that before, but since you've asked that question, we have lots of feedback. We think you waste a lot of money. We hear you have us do this.

00;12;02;10 - 00;12;26;17

Niul Burton

You have us do that. We don't need to. Right? But that feedback link had never existed between the supplier and the operation. The operating team procurement was able to kind of create that bridge, take those learnings and bring new value to the to the to the company team that was actually running the projects. So yeah, so that bridge makes a difference.

00;12;26;20 - 00;12;52;13

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. And I think that is a frustration for many procurement people. So I feel like sometimes it sits in two camps, you'll have the people who for whom the fact the, the basically on the services side, it's very difficult to for a lot of procurement teams to get their arms around stuff, especially if it's being operate in a kind of in a semi manual, process, or there's lots of stuff going around the process because it's just not scalable.

00;12;52;13 - 00;13;15;20

Jonny Dunning

There's no way they can manage the volume of task orders, statements of work, whatever the kind of contractual vehicle might be. It's just it's just not possible for them to do that. So it's very frustrating for them to for example, get involved in QBRs where the supplies in for a bit of a telling off because of an extension or, you know, price change or this that scope change, something like that.

00;13;15;22 - 00;13;28;16

Jonny Dunning

Whereas actually if, if it had been if procurement had been aware of this when it happened, it might have been issues on the client side, it might have been unavoidable issues. And it's just thought that communication level, the data isn't really there for that.

00;13;28;18 - 00;13;29;09

Niul Burton

Yeah.

00;13;29;12 - 00;13;52;19

Jonny Dunning

So so by the time that procurement get pulled into a process where maybe something's not going well, sometimes it's a bit too late and that information just isn't available unless you want to trawl through a document where the the reality of the service delivery may have changed significantly from what was in that original document. And if that hasn't been captured, then that just makes it very difficult for procurement to even have any kind of viewpoint on it.

00;13;52;21 - 00;14;17;20

Niul Burton

Yeah, I agree, absolutely. I agree. And then and then I find too often the business partners say, well, let's just fire the supplier and you're not addressing the root cause of the problem. The supplier wasn't the problem in the first place, and getting a new supplier in isn't going to solve the problem. So, you know, you need to be able to have that engagement with the internal customer to, to, to address what really is going on as well.

00;14;17;22 - 00;14;51;22

Jonny Dunning

So when you look at the specific challenges that exist within services. So you mentioned about the different stakeholder groups. You mentioned about the complexity. There's obviously a huge range of services that organizations procure. If you were to try and if we try and boil it down to the kind of fundamentals, what do you see as the key unsolved challenges in the procurement of services versus versus the way that the world procures goods and materials?

00;14;51;24 - 00;15;10;14

Niul Burton

So we talked about this a little bit. I think some of it is having the right domain expertise on the side of procurement, that they could engage with the business partner and be perceived as, as a value add a adding partner to the, to the discussion. Too often I think procurement is viewed as kind of transactional.

00;15;10;14 - 00;15;59;28

Niul Burton

Pushing the paper, checking the boxes. But the, the end customer or the internal customer doesn't feel like they're getting anything out of the exercise. So I think having some domain knowledge and being able to bring that, that, that information, that value to the business partner is a huge part of it. And then I think probably having the flexibility in the process, and the, the, the technology that's enabling the process so that it can be configured or structured in a way that will support the myriad of different kinds of services that, that, that are being acquired, whether it's, you know, it or legal or engineering or construction, you

00;15;59;28 - 00;16;27;01

Niul Burton

know, we call them all services, but they're very unique and different in terms of, you know, how you specify it, how you price it, how you manage it, how it's delivered. You know, what, what outcomes you're seeking. Are they tangible? Are they intangible? There's there's so many variables there that I think the flexibility of the technology or technologies is also critical as well.

00;16;27;04 - 00;16;49;18

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, I completely agree on that. When you talk about the domain expertise. So, so I, this is really interesting to me because I kind of look at it and I is that from a category point of view, or do you see that as from the, the, the kind of procurement point of view in terms of the value they add?

00;16;49;18 - 00;17;10;21

Jonny Dunning

So I always look at the process is you've got a buyer, you've got you've got a, you know an organizational buyer, you've got a supplier, you've got procurement sitting in the middle. And they should help facilitate the scoping of the requirement and the choosing of the supplier on one side of the equation. And on the other side of the equation, they're there to help, you know, contract effectively with that chosen supplier.

00;17;10;28 - 00;17;42;16

Jonny Dunning

And actually this is one of the more arguable ones, to have some sort of involvement or responsibility with the delivery of that service. I.e., did we get what we paid for. Do you do you see that kind of domain expertise? More as like a category led. I understand the procurement of I.T services type approach or more of a procurement domain expertise in the sense that if you're writing a scope of work, it needs to include, you know, milestones, deliverables, assumptions, dependencies, etcetera, etcetera that might be required.

00;17;42;16 - 00;17;54;12

Jonny Dunning

Is it more that kind of this is the kind of structure and content and approach you should take to procuring the services, or do you feel it's that actual expertise in the in the subject matter?

00;17;54;14 - 00;18;21;26

Niul Burton

I think the answer is yes. I think that the kind of table stakes is that procurement process, expertise. So I think anybody who's trying to, enable services procurement with an internal customer needs to know that those steps that they need to go through and the components that make up the process, but I think the, the, the category expertise is, is what really makes a difference.

00;18;21;29 - 00;18;46;04

Niul Burton

So if I think about it from my from my point of view, you know, I would say that I understand the consulting domain better than anything else. Right? But the way that I would structure, a, an RFP, a statement of work, the metrics that I would want to include, the way that the services would be priced and so on, I think is unique to consulting, you know, legal is going to be different.

00;18;46;04 - 00;19;13;07

Niul Burton

Marketing is going to be different. Engineering is going to be different. So I could work with the internal customer and help them through the, setting up of consulting services, whether that's for an ongoing relationship or an individual statement of work. I would not have the domain knowledge to help the legal team go through the same exercise in selecting a merger and acquisition law firm.

00;19;13;09 - 00;19;37;07

Niul Burton

So I think it's a category, as you're saying, it's category domain expertise that enables you to have that almost peer conversation with the internal customer in terms of how you're going to get the most out of this service, and how are we going to run the process in order to make sure that we get all the value that we could out of what we're, what we're going to acquire and what we're going to be spending money on.

00;19;37;09 - 00;19;59;09

Jonny Dunning

So it's about the the category specific structure, pricing metrics, the things that are driving those side of it. I mean, we say all the time with regards to, you know, what is a milestone, is it a project deliverable? Is it a KPI in an ongoing service delivery? Is it a sprint in an agile process? Is it a block of consulting time?

00;19;59;12 - 00;20;21;04

Jonny Dunning

You know, there's so many different things that can be a deliverable. And to a certain extent, a system kind of shouldn't care. This should be something that the customer can define as part of that requirement. But yeah, I can definitely I can definitely see how that specific expertise ties into how you buy SaaS contracts versus how you buy legal services.

00;20;21;06 - 00;20;43;17

Jonny Dunning

Right. But but it leads into another interesting area around domain expertise, which is one of the things people find really difficult is writing effective scoping requirements. And quite often the buying the buying stakeholder within the organization might not be a cyber security expert when they're buying cyber security services, the procurement person might well, is probably not going to be a cyber security expert.

00;20;43;20 - 00;21;04;03

Jonny Dunning

The supplier certainly will be. But it's interesting to see where you use that can sometimes lead to, just a process where very supplier led, particularly if it's a direct award type scenario. You've got suppliers kind of marking their own homework, and that's an area where we've seen AI really come into play. AI can give a lot of knowledge.

00;21;04;05 - 00;21;26;24

Niul Burton

Yeah, I agree absolutely. I think AI is going to have a huge role in this because the, the, it's hard to have all of the, all of the expertise that you would want in the category, in the category lead. And you're right. If I'm, if I'm as a consultant, I'm writing the contract. Right. I'm going to structure it so that the deliverables are in my favor.

00;21;26;27 - 00;21;59;11

Niul Burton

And if you don't have the right expertise on the other side of the table, I'm going to get away with that specification. Right. So I think that's where AI, I think is going to absolutely have the ability to take advantage of all of the other agreements that have been written, all of the other work scopes that have been written, the other specifications, the other SOWs and almost come up with a, you know, based on what you've told me, this is this is the starting point for what your what your contract should look like or what your you know, what documentation should look like.

00;21;59;13 - 00;22;10;18

Niul Burton

And I think that's going to enable us in a way that individual humans can't because they just can't have that same depth of expertise at the, at their fingertips.

00;22;10;20 - 00;22;47;23

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, I agree, I think it's, it's a sensible use case. It's a worthwhile use case. It's like some use cases of, of technology and AI, you know, kind of lead you down the road of the, the system or the AI trying to give you information whether it's right or wrong. Whereas if you're if you are having, you know, you're asking questions and getting information based on more factual, based topics, where, where information is available, then I think it's a more appropriate kind of use case for just gathering in from that depth of information, rather than expecting an individual to be able to, you know, pinpoint that for every project they're going to

00;22;47;23 - 00;22;50;11

Jonny Dunning

carry out, which is just unrealistic.

00;22;50;13 - 00;23;14;11

Niul Burton

Right? Right. And I think that ties back to your point in terms of data being the the secret sauce here in the data in this case would be the content that sits in the AI tool that it's able to search from and extract from, and present in a way that suits that particular use case, in a way that it can't do if it doesn't have that source data to, to reference.

00;23;14;14 - 00;23;48;03

Jonny Dunning

It's interesting because it's it's source data. But effectively, if you use most of the large language models through like a corporate API, they'll have a pretty up to date version of everything on the internet. And so they can find, you know, hundreds, thousands, millions of statements of work. They might be able to find 100,000 statements of work online that are similar to what you're trying to create, and therefore, they could make some pretty good assumptions around the type of information that, you know, they should have and be able to have a pretty good go, getting you 70% of the way there on a requirement specification, which can then be tweaked.

00;23;48;05 - 00;23;50;01

Jonny Dunning

So you know, that that.

00;23;50;06 - 00;24;13;25

Niul Burton

Just, just, just just to add to that, I think if we can have the, the tool using the available out the source data and the individual companies source data in kind of a unique package. So if you're working for, you know, I don't know, a big automotive company that have written tens of thousands of contracts. Right.

00;24;13;25 - 00;24;21;09

Niul Burton

And you're using that as well as what's in the public domain. Then I think you get even closer to what that company is going to be looking for.

00;24;21;12 - 00;24;44;04

Jonny Dunning

And this is where you layer on the value, because anyone could just go and use ChatGPT. But, you know, if you're just using the ChatGPT public playground effectively a) that data could be used in training the model, which is not going to suit a lot of companies with this type of information, and b it doesn't take into account that internal data, which if you're using a system that is then utilizing AI, you can do that.

00;24;44;07 - 00;25;08;05

Jonny Dunning

The other thing around it is it's the prompt engineering. It's how you tell the AI to structure the information that it returns to you, which segments you tell it to build, how you how it needs to build those segments, what things it needs to take into consideration. So for me, if I look at it from a technology provider point of view, there's no point in a technology provider trying to build a competing AI to Claude or ChatGPT

00;25;08;08 - 00;25;27;09

Jonny Dunning

Good luck with that. It's not going to happen. What you can do is you can try and layer on the value in terms of and there's a lot of work involved and a lot of expertise involved in trying, you know, pushing the model to give you the most effective output so that the person at the other end is literally just having to do something very simple to get the best answer possible.

00;25;27;14 - 00;26;00;06

Jonny Dunning

Whereas if you were to actually try and just do that manually, you wouldn't you wouldn't get anywhere near the same type of result because it's a very specific outcome you're looking for in how the information is presented. And I think, yeah, the internal, internal data is very important part of that. As is the creation of, for example, templates that specific organizations might say, well, you know, scope of work documents or our task orders, we always include this type of information or when it's, you know, a, Department of Defense requirement.

00;26;00;06 - 00;26;18;29

Jonny Dunning

These are the things we need to consider or if it's safety critical or if it's retail or whatever it might be, you might have we see organizations with different templates for a construction project versus a media project, for example. And you might actually have a different template of how you want that scope of work structured. But there's all sorts of cool stuff you can do with it.

00;26;18;29 - 00;26;37;20

Jonny Dunning

But the main thing is the large language model is just handling the huge amount of vast amount of data that it has access to. And and it's incredible how that can be utilized to take people from a blank page to, like I say, 60 or 70, whatever percentage of the way there, where then that can start to be tweaked.

00;26;37;20 - 00;26;48;29

Jonny Dunning

Procurement can add their expertise to help with that. Suppliers can add input to it as well. Whereas previously that person who was buying that service is sitting there with a blank page thinking, I've no idea where to start.

00;26;49;01 - 00;27;11;18

Niul Burton

What should I write down? Yeah, I agree, I know, I know, I think so I agree with everything you're saying there. I think one of the challenges is going to be that that the, the using organization is going to have to recognize that it's taking us at this point, 70% of the way there. They're still going to have to put some time in to to finessing it and getting it to the finished product.

00;27;11;20 - 00;27;33;28

Niul Burton

That 70% will grow to 80% will grow to 90% will go to 95% over time. But my concern is that corporations are still looking at AI as a silver bullet. Yeah. And they're like, well, why isn't it giving me 100% of the answer right off? And if I go on ChatGPT and ask about, you know, what should my vacation itinerary look like?

00;27;33;28 - 00;27;52;19

Niul Burton

It comes back with a complete answer. So I have that same expectation, from the tools that I'm using at work. And that's not the case yet, there's still going to have to put some time into fine tuning the information and fine tuning the model to enhance the level of automation.

00;27;52;21 - 00;28;21;10

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, there's room for that uniqueness to sit on top of it. And that when we were talking about the difference between, you know, the challenges and services procurement versus the challenges in goods and materials procurement ultimately comes down to the nature of services, in my opinion. I would argue that the, the, the kind of, to a certain extent, intangible nature of services, the changeable nature of services, the diverse and unique nature of services, every company, every project.

00;28;21;13 - 00;28;40;18

Jonny Dunning

It's not like you're, you know, buying. I've got some blocks of surf wax, ironically sat on my desk. Not like you're buying blocks of surf wax and, you know, weights and measures and numbers. You're buying a consulting service or, you know, whatever it might be. And it digital transformation service is going to be different depending on the specific project.

00;28;40;18 - 00;29;04;12

Jonny Dunning

So that for me is one of the big differences. And I feel like the procurement technology stack has been primarily geared towards solving those supply chain and automation issues that are that can be solved, that need to be solved around the procurement of goods, materials where you get that supply chain complexity, that ties into kind of ERP type challenges and has grown out of that.

00;29;04;15 - 00;29;26;21

Jonny Dunning

Whereas with services you don't really get the supply chain complexity, but the stuff you're buying is really difficult to define. It's all different. It's incredibly difficult to compare pricing and, you know, measure performance and all those sort of things. So, so, so there, there for with with things like scope creation and with that, expectation of how much is automation and how much the company should still needs to put in some effort.

00;29;26;24 - 00;29;44;23

Jonny Dunning

I think it's just the very nature of that. You know, organizations should be thinking for our specific business. This is how we need to do it. These are the outcomes we need and these are the reasons we're doing this unique piece of work. It's always going to be hard to just completely box everything off. I think in that area.

00;29;44;26 - 00;30;12;20

Niul Burton

I agree, and I think, I think you're making the point earlier on in terms of rather than trying to do everything at once, it's like pick a, a service area, a domain and figure out how to do that and have some wins in an area and demonstrate the potential to then grow it, as opposed to trying to do too much at once and then frustrating everybody by not making the progress that you want to make and not seeing the value, and then stopping the program because you think that it's not working for you.

00;30;12;22 - 00;30;19;24

Jonny Dunning

So yeah, I the the other side of it with services procurement is people just not getting started because the problem's too big.

00;30;19;26 - 00;30;22;06

Niul Burton

If that's what you want. I'm taking bite sizes.

00;30;22;08 - 00;30;51;21

Jonny Dunning

Taking it exactly, exactly. And so the reason you've just mentioned absolutely is a critical reason for that. And it ties into what you've said to me before about the change management issues. So, so in fact, do you want to just cover that in a little bit more detail in terms of, if you think about this, going into an organization, trying to, put a really good program management around the procurement of services across different categories that change management approach.

00;30;51;24 - 00;30;57;12

Jonny Dunning

You know, you've said to me before, it needs to have some specific considerations depending on what you're dealing with.

00;30;57;14 - 00;31;23;20

Niul Burton

Yeah, I think I mean I think what we're trying to do, excuse me, is we're trying to change the way that people go about doing their work and and so we do need a, a, a structured approach to change management in order to be able to actually make it stick. And, and the change management has got to be probably more on the internal customer side than it does on the procurement side.

00;31;23;20 - 00;31;41;05

Niul Burton

I think procurement is going to understand this is, you know, is going to enable them to do their job more effectively. There's value there for them. They're going to be on board. I think more quickly. I think the the, the internal customer, though, has a way of doing things. You know, procurement is not what they get up and worry about on Monday morning.

00;31;41;06 - 00;32;19;02

Niul Burton

They they've got another job to do. And this is just a means to an end. And so having them understand the process, understand the potential value, understand how they need to work differently in order to, have this tool, give them the benefits that are potentially there. Right. I think it requires some, you know, specific communication, specific training, specific rollout, specific reporting, you know, clear governance, so that we can have a successful program because then viewed as successful and fundamentally changes the way that people do their job.

00;32;19;05 - 00;32;44;09

Niul Burton

And, and we avoid the, you know, the going rogue approach because they don't think the process is supporting what the, what their needs are. But I think it needs so it needs those kind of fundamental tenets, and it needs the right level of sponsorship too. So and if we're going to work with marketing that the chief marketing officer says, I'm on board, we're going to make this work.

00;32;44;12 - 00;32;57;25

Niul Burton

You know, we're going to give it whatever, six months, nine months, a year. We're going to commit to it. We're going to see the value, and we'll tweak it as we go. But I'm I don't want to hear people say it's not working. I'm not going to do it.

00;32;57;27 - 00;33;27;28

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, these are really, really good points. So so earlier on in the conversation, we were talking about, the approach of procurement trying to be more strategic. And therefore, you know, we're they're open to that. They need to get the data. They need to capture things effectively in systems and platforms and processes. The other side of that is where there's this kind of protectionist, approach where procurement say, I don't want to bring in technology or, or get more visibility on what I'm doing because I'm quite happy doing my transactional thing.

00;33;27;28 - 00;33;44;17

Jonny Dunning

And I don't want that to change that, that, that you get those kind of two different approaches where one of them is very forward looking and the other one is kind of a bit isolate, isolationist or, you know, just protective. It's not effective in moving forward. And I think what you're talking about that's change management as well.

00;33;44;17 - 00;33;46;06

Niul Burton

Ultimately, I would agree here.

00;33;46;12 - 00;34;12;03

Jonny Dunning

And when you're talking about it going into the business, you've got that that the procurement or the business stakeholders that are trying to make this happen have got that job to convince people. And I think the the idea of being able to do things bit by bit, and the ability to have flexibility in how you do it is absolutely crucial because by doing it bit by bit, you're getting away from this issue that that was basically hampered.

00;34;12;06 - 00;34;32;07

Jonny Dunning

Organizations stop them from doing it from addressing services procurement, which is if I do it, it has to be everything has to be the whole elephant that I'm eating at once. And, and it's and it's massive and it's loads of spend, you know, could be many billions of spend in a large organization annually. And it's critical. And every stakeholder has got to be involved.

00;34;32;07 - 00;35;01;12

Jonny Dunning

And it's really complicated. And it just doesn't happen. And that's right. That's an issue. That's why that's why to a large extent it's been hampered in the previous years. In my experience, you have to be able to break that down, not just to make it something that an organization can actually make a start on. But but, but also so that it can then be expanded out across different areas because as you say, if you're trying to convince multiple different departments and multiple different areas, they're going to have different requirements.

00;35;01;14 - 00;35;35;18

Jonny Dunning

And we've seen it from our customers where something has been really, favorable is the ability for tech to be flexible, depending on what type of their buying area you're dealing with. You know, if you're dealing with, you know, ongoing maintenance services in an engineering or, you know, kind of infrastructure type organization, that might be very difficult in terms of the stakeholders involved in the process, the actual process itself, how requirements need to be written, how sign offs need to happen, governance, things like that versus safety critical work, for example.

00;35;35;20 - 00;36;06;02

Jonny Dunning

But that but that's something where the underlying architecture of the procurement of that service, i.e. the kind of statement of work journey, the basics of that are the same and that that kind of that process still operates in the same way fundamentally. So if that's captured digitally, you're already off to a good start. But then to, to, to make that change management effective, taking into consideration the specifics of that particular department within that specific particular organization, I think are absolutely critical.

00;36;06;05 - 00;36;18;08

Jonny Dunning

And also by doing it bit by bit, you've got the proof point to bring with you rather than trying to create a giant business case from day one, which, especially when it's something new, can be pretty challenging.

00;36;18;10 - 00;36;45;07

Niul Burton

Yeah, yeah, I, I agree with everything you said, and I think that in selecting that starting point, the business partner that you want to work with to kind of get going, having the right level of sponsorship. So I think it's it's the C-suite chief Marketing officer. Chief Financial Officer Chief engineering Officer, whatever the role might be, is a keen participant.

00;36;45;10 - 00;37;21;19

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. I think just in terms of taking organizations from looking at this broad, avoiding looking at this problem, looking everywhere, but at this problem, AI is playing a really big part in that, just in the sense that if you look at the complexity of services, the complexity of the problem within organizations, the large amounts of unstructured data that sat in PDF files here and Excel spreadsheets there, and all that sort of stuff that people will often have, is the kind of like the current set up, even in very sophisticated organizations.

00;37;21;21 - 00;37;40;07

Jonny Dunning

I think that's also been a little bit of a let off for organizations or an excuse to kind of just say, well, we can't there's no point in even trying to look at that. It's just far too complicated. And I feel like AI has broken that argument to a large extent, where you just look at it and go, well, a, as an organization, we should be leveraging.

00;37;40;07 - 00;38;00;18

Jonny Dunning

AI, I and I know a lot of procurement teams are looking at how they can do that. And within the services remit, where you've got big written contracts and big written requirements, that is very well suited to large language models dealing with that large amounts of language based unstructured data, and also the kind of numerical stuff that you can pull together on it as well.

00;38;00;18 - 00;38;26;05

Jonny Dunning

So I feel that there's a tipping point for the procurement of services, in that it's suddenly become something that is inherently much more solvable. At the same time as the fact that it's becoming more and more important for organizations because as a proportion of their spend, it's just growing massively. It's that I think it's something like five growing at five times the speed of the growth and procurement of goods, materials.

00;38;26;07 - 00;38;36;10

Niul Burton

Right. Yeah. And I can I could imagine that as people want to push more into an outsourcing model and leverage leverage expertise with third parties. Absolutely. Makes sense.

00;38;36;12 - 00;38;56;29

Jonny Dunning

So talking about leveraging the expertise of third parties in that, that whole outsourcing model, I had services procurement described to me the other day as a procurement problem with a talent twist. Which is quite interesting, was the, the researchers at Everest Research, one of the guys was kind of putting it forward in that way.

00;38;56;29 - 00;39;23;02

Jonny Dunning

I thought it was a really good description because the the services procurement problem currently seems to be being tackled from almost like two distinct angles. It will either get tackled from a pure procurement standpoint where it will be, you know, ahead of procurement, the chief procurement officer, maybe even a global professional services category leader or someone like that saying, wow, I've got this chaos.

00;39;23;02 - 00;39;54;07

Jonny Dunning

I need to get on top of it. I need to I need to make this work properly. Or it will be being addressed almost from a kind of workforce solutions angle where you'll have, workforce solutions providers who are providing managed service provision around contingent workers and also the, the relevant, people within the organizations that are dealing with that talent acquisition, you know, contingent workforce category manager, leads in a labor category or something like that.

00;39;54;09 - 00;40;21;26

Jonny Dunning

Sometimes it's being addressed from that angle as well, because ultimately there's some crossover and some gray areas where, you know, contracting kind of bleeds into consulting and, and vice versa. How do you from a procurement point of view, how do you how do you view the way that the procurement of services kind of slots into the other ways that an organization gets work done?

00;40;21;28 - 00;40;24;21

Niul Burton

Tell me more on your question. I'm not not quite tracking.

00;40;24;25 - 00;40;47;08

Jonny Dunning

I'm just kind of thinking, you know, do you see as this is completely separate and this is a procurement issue or do you see it as. Yes, this is a procurement issue, but ultimately it's still a work delivery channel for the organization. So if you go right up to the top level for the CEO or CFO, whoever's kind of looking at this and planning, okay, what what resources do I have to hand?

00;40;47;10 - 00;41;08;16

Jonny Dunning

How can we get things done? Here's here's what everything the organization needs to do in the next six months, 12 months, whatever it is to deliver our product or service to the market and beat our competitors, they can either. The work can either be done by their permanent employees. It can be done by contractors, temporary workers, gig workers, freelancers, whatever it might be.

00;41;08;18 - 00;41;35;23

Jonny Dunning

Or it can be outsourced to service providers. So so in actual fact, it's a I would argue it's a fundamental part of the organization's extended work capacity and capability. But it's also but it's a procurement thing. So, so I think that's something that sometimes organizations struggle with a little bit, and you end up with a little bit of a lack of kind of like centralized ownership.

00;41;35;25 - 00;41;54;12

Jonny Dunning

So, so it's really just a what's your observations on that in terms of what you've seen? And how do you see that that kind of potential conflict between the this is one of the ways we get work done, sides of it versus this is this is something that we buy.

00;41;54;15 - 00;42;24;02

Niul Burton

I think the former takes precedence over the latter. Right. So I think that, you know, the individual functions are deciding how best to perform their work and that maybe we do it in-house, we use contractors, we use outsourcing providers. And that's a to my mind, that's kind of a business strategic decision. An input to that might be if we're going to go outside, what are our options.

00;42;24;04 - 00;42;47;17

Niul Burton

Right. So if we think we wanted to, engineer a product, a new product, we could do it ourselves. We don't really have the expertise. We can bring in contractors and we could try manage them, but it's not clear we have the expertise anyway. Or we could go to a third party and have them engineer for us, and we can find somebody that that's their bread and butter day to day work.

00;42;47;19 - 00;43;12;18

Niul Burton

If we want to consider those options, then procurement help us understand what is the supply base look like and how do we approach that supply base in a coordinated fashion. So we position ourselves for success down the road. But I think procurement is there to enable that process and that execution and providing advice and guidance, but also and so be a partner to the internal function.

00;43;12;21 - 00;43;18;20

Niul Burton

But it's not procurements job to figure out whether we should go outside or not.

00;43;18;22 - 00;43;39;02

Jonny Dunning

Okay. So so that makes sense to me. So so I guess the internal buying stakeholder and those departments, they need to leverage the the appropriate avenue when they decided or or been been assisted in deciding on how that works should be best be achieved. So effectively, if it's if it's a services procurement effort. They come through to procurement.

00;43;39;05 - 00;43;50;24

Jonny Dunning

If it's a if it's a contract situation, they'll go to talent acquisition or H.R. Or one of the departments that looks after hiring contractors, for example, is that is that kind of where you're seeing the the process and how it happens?

00;43;50;26 - 00;44;02;00

Niul Burton

Me that that's my perspective. Yes. I think it's really hard and I don't think I would advocate for procurement saying you should have a supplier doing this for you because I.

00;44;02;07 - 00;44;23;16

Jonny Dunning

Guess I guess it's more the question of more the case that the person says, I need a supplier to do this for me and procurement or guiding them on, on, on, on really how they should ask for that and maybe the type of suppliers they should consider based on past data and on what what you have within your, kind of supplier ecosystem.

00;44;23;19 - 00;44;43;17

Niul Burton

Yeah, that that would be my that would be my opinion. And I think that we want we want the internal customer that that department engaging with procurement right from the very beginning in that process. So procurement is there to, to support it. We don't want them going out and finding their own suppliers, because once they find their own suppliers, they'll start negotiating their own agreements.

00;44;43;20 - 00;44;50;05

Niul Burton

Then they'll come to procurement and say put a deal in place. Yeah. And potentially adding no value at all.

00;44;50;08 - 00;45;17;14

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. It's it's really interesting. So the concept of not really strategic workforce planning more the kind of concept of like total talent management is something that people have spoken about for probably 10 or 15, at least ten, probably 15 years. But it's never really moved into the realms of the real. But if you look at how organizations get work done, a massive amount of it is outsourced.

00;45;17;16 - 00;45;40;19

Jonny Dunning

And and as you were talking about saying earlier, you know, this kind of output based approach or outcome based, approach to I'm going to spend this money, but I know that the I'm going to get X achieved seems to be becoming more popular versus I will just get bums on seats and I'll pay them until I'll, I'll pay them and they'll do some work.

00;45;40;21 - 00;46;07;11

Jonny Dunning

So that's that's quite interesting to see how that model is pushing forward with that. What that means is that the importance of services procurement within an organization's overall capacity and capabilities, growing And one of the things that we see is we see organizations doing quite a lot of, horizon planning. So, yeah, they're looking at new, in if you're looking at contract, as you call it, skills.

00;46;07;11 - 00;46;26;25

Jonny Dunning

If you're looking at suppliers, I'd call it capabilities, but they're looking down the road, you know, technology organizations looking at new things coming into play, new new models, new products, new new things that they're working on. They're constantly trying to look round the corner to say, what sort of capabilities are we going to need, and who's going to be able to deliver them

00;46;26;25 - 00;46;55;28

Jonny Dunning

so that's I think that's a really important thing in terms of that, that kind of horizon planning. And we've even seen organizations utilizing things like expressions of interest. So to be able to go out to their supply chain at scale and say, by the way, we've got these things coming down the road, which of you have got capabilities in that area where where an expression of interest could then be pushed into a, an RFP if it was required of you come across that type of approach to.

00;46;56;00 - 00;47;21;18

Niul Burton

I have, but in a pretty limited way. In my experience. So it tends to be the more mature organizations selecting, the more critical services that they're able to get their their act together. And think about it in that kind of a structured, forward looking, so I'd say it's very much in my experience, it's the exception that that organizations are doing that.

00;47;21;20 - 00;47;24;09

Niul Burton

So maybe you're seeing something different.

00;47;24;11 - 00;47;53;26

Jonny Dunning

But I think it's what I'm saying in areas like aerospace, defense, high tech, where that where there's, you know, there's this huge demands around around, you know, having those rare skills at the right time and, you know, getting to the point where whether it's like, you know, your big energy company and you need the engineers that when storing these new power plants and the just aren't enough for them, you know, in five years time or three years time, there aren't going to be enough of them to fill the massive backlog.

00;47;53;26 - 00;48;26;10

Jonny Dunning

You've got to build these, you know, power stations in various different places. You know, organizations have to be trying to solve those problems in advance. So I think it's the most organizations will want to do that, but they just don't have the capability to do that because they've got no automation, they've got no data. It comes back to the kind of fundamental thing that I find really fascinating, which is where and I think because the the management of services procurement feels quite new, it's quite embryonic.

00;48;26;10 - 00;49;12;26

Jonny Dunning

It's definitely early in terms of levels of maturity for the vast majority of organizations. But when you're spending maybe 50% of the of the capital that you spend per year on buying outsourced services, which is very much the case for some organizations, it does seem absolutely crazy. The organizations don't have loads of data. They don't have things that are automated because we have that in everything we expect, in everything as a business, you know, if you're running a marketing campaign or, you know, whatever you're doing, most organizations are actually most individuals these days, whether whether directly or indirectly via using technology, are going to rely on data.

00;49;12;29 - 00;49;26;14

Jonny Dunning

Hey, what is the what is the data? Tell me, how can it drive my decisions and on I don't want to do this manually. Where's a tool? I can, you know, where's the tool that I can make this happen really quickly rather than doing it is really clunky. I don't want to do that. No one wants to do that these days.

00;49;26;16 - 00;50;00;21

Jonny Dunning

So the fact that organizations run their services procurement, which could be easily hundreds of millions, billions of dollars a year and billions on that basis, spreadsheets, emails, documents that are just the sign scan PDF stuck in a folder. It it does seem absolutely crazy to me that, for some organizations that haven't got to the point where there's people jumping up and down about that yet, I think it's absolutely starting to happen and kind of accelerating because more people are saying, well, we've actually solve this, or we're starting to solve this.

00;50;00;24 - 00;50;26;24

Jonny Dunning

And, you know, as I say, the way that the world of technology is growing and fast, change is happening. It's just like, well, the excuses are going away very quickly. People should be doing this. It's such important business decisions in terms of saying, have we got the right supply chain? Can we do what we need to do in the future, but also what supplies should we be using and are people doing a good job?

00;50;26;27 - 00;50;37;01

Jonny Dunning

It does seem like it's something that people are going to get a bit of a shock with. Possibly if they haven't really been been been addressing it effectively.

00;50;37;03 - 00;50;57;11

Niul Burton

Yep, I would agree, I would agree, and I think you're making it this in my mind, you're making a distinction between it's like managing the service category in terms of understanding what I need for the future versus executing a statement of work for delivering on today. And both parts, are essential.

00;50;57;13 - 00;51;21;15

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. You're right. I'm kind of making a distinction. And for me, the most exciting part of it is that future predictive capability of what sort of supply should we be using? What sort of capabilities do we have? What value or am I getting from these services? What value my getting from these suppliers by location, by category, etc.? That's the really beautiful stuff that really drives that massive value.

00;51;21;21 - 00;51;42;21

Jonny Dunning

And the future competitive advantage in the market. But you've got to do the basics before you can get anywhere near that. You've got to capture every single statement of work, every single milestone, every single variation and understand what it was, why it happened, was it justified? Did the supplier do what I wanted? Did the internal stakeholder, do what was needed?

00;51;42;24 - 00;52;06;01

Jonny Dunning

You know, it's it's everything really. And the fundamentals of that, that statement of work, when you drill it right down to the, to the lowest common denominator, they've pretty much universal. And they're actually fairly straightforward. Of course, you layer on the complexity, but if organizations are capturing that information effectively, that information powers everything else.

00;52;06;03 - 00;52;25;23

Niul Burton

But I and I think as a part of that is how do you capture it in an automated fashion, not in a manual fashion. So, for example, we've got, I don't know, six milestones on this project and you know, we've got to hit something by November 15th. We got to hit something by December 1st. How does our system capture whether or not

00;52;25;23 - 00;52;45;20

Niul Burton

we hit November 15th without somebody having to type in that information. Right. Do we pull it off of the, you know, project tracking information? Do we pull it off of the invoicing? Know how do we how do we capture that? Is this some kind of approval mechanism? But how do we take the manual out of capturing that information.

00;52;45;20 - 00;52;53;28

Niul Burton

So we're not reliant on individuals doing certain steps in order for us to have the information to work with.

00;52;54;01 - 00;53;26;22

Jonny Dunning

This is a really great point, because it ties into the kind of upstream versus downstream argument in the sense that is procurements responsibility, just the sourcing. Or do procurement have some sort of buy in and responsibility to actually the delivery as well. And, and it's it I've heard people argue it both ways, and I think maybe slightly more traditional procurement approach might be the it's the sourcing because I'm only measured on the savings I make at the point of purchase, for example.

00;53;26;24 - 00;53;47;04

Jonny Dunning

Right. Whereas the the kind of forward thinking procurement leaders that are talking about value, not cost savings are going to say, well, of course we need to know need to know what happens post contract. Because did we get what was promised and with services, what what was promised and what's delivered is changing all the way through the process.

00;53;47;06 - 00;54;07;19

Jonny Dunning

So so I think that's why I would argue that if you look at like a source to pay platform or procure to pay platform, or the way that organizations are try to do services procurement at the moment, they might be capturing some elements of sourcing, but they're almost none of them are capturing downstream. But they'll have project management processes within their organization.

00;54;07;21 - 00;54;26;25

Jonny Dunning

But if you think about what happens in that procure to pay platform on that source to pay platform where you know you've got your purchase requisition purchase order approved, you know that's given to the supplier. And then effectively you just get an invoice, come in and PO items a kind of approved and paid that that's missing all of the granular detail.

00;54;26;28 - 00;54;47;03

Jonny Dunning

So firstly PO level information will generally be very brief. And if there is a scope if the if a decent scope was written with milestones, that would just be on a document somewhere in a file, and it won't be a living document that's changing as the project changes in most cases. So. So you can't do anything with that at scale.

00;54;47;05 - 00;55;06;16

Jonny Dunning

And then in terms of the downstream, it's just it just goes off and it's in the business and, and no one really knows. So that is a critical part of it. Whereas a traditional procurement, approach might just be for goods or materials that, that what the way that that works works quite simply because stuff isn't really changing.

00;55;06;16 - 00;55;32;02

Jonny Dunning

It's very easily measurable, definable. And you get catalog items that you can just tick off. And it's all kind of the same. And yes, I ordered 50 and I received 50. Thanks very much. Here’s your payment. The nuances within services procurement mean that you absolutely have to have an approval process. You absolutely have to know that the supplier has said, I finished milestone one, which is nicely defined and has been agreed by both parties.

00;55;32;04 - 00;55;50;21

Jonny Dunning

And the buying stakeholder says, yes, you have. Thank you very much. And by the way, you did a great job or actually you've done 50% of that milestone. So we need to look at another milestone. Well, we're happy to pay you for 50% of it, but you've got to do the next part of it for me to then approve that portion of it or whatever it might be, changes occurring, things like that.

00;55;50;23 - 00;56;18;01

Jonny Dunning

But that's where the technology needs to be addressing the problem, not just from the point of view of procurement, the need to be addressing the business problem, which is making it easier, faster, safer for the person buying the service and actually the supplier to interact and do good work together. And deliver a mutually beneficial outcome. So really, that ties into the whole self-service element of how technology needs to deliver this into the business.

00;56;18;04 - 00;56;39;14

Jonny Dunning

It shouldn't be procurement doing everything for people, it should be the buyer and the supplier. Being able to interact in a platform where it makes life easier for them makes life better, faster, more visibility of the supply chain, more visibility for the suppliers of the opportunities within the organization. But that creates a nice, smooth process, which is what we all want technology to do for us.

00;56;39;17 - 00;57;04;01

Jonny Dunning

Great user experience. You know, AI enhancing it and all that sort of thing. But then procurement of stuff in the middle actually orchestrating things, but can see the data there getting flagged up. If a project is off track, you know, if a project is not hitting its milestones and the approval of a milestone is down to the supplier saying, I've completed that milestone and the buyer approving it, that's very easy to see if that's gone off track.

00;57;04;03 - 00;57;21;23

Jonny Dunning

And, you know, the risk indicators can be identified. And this AI process is around levels of risk and things like that. And notifications can easily be made within the system. So it's it's actually quite simple in the underlying kind of steps of it. But you can layer on clever stuff and complexity around it.

00;57;21;23 - 00;57;48;10

Niul Burton

But and I think there's also huge value in getting consistency around the process, which I think the technology enables and probably requires. And having that consistency then means everybody speaking the same language. Now, what do we mean by a milestone? What do we mean by an outcome? What do we mean by a KPI? How many KPIs are we going to have?

00;57;48;10 - 00;58;01;26

Niul Burton

How often are we going to measure them? You know, getting that consistency, I think enables all of the conversations to take place internally and with the supply base, because everybody's speaking the same, same language means the same thing.

00;58;01;29 - 00;58;37;16

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, I absolutely agree. It's that kind of standardization. But would you, would you see that that kind of standardization? Would you, would you see that also an important area of that being the, the flexibility to have, you know, specific considerations for the way that you buy IT services versus marketing services in as much as you might have a standardized contract template or standardized process or milestone procedure for one type of service that you're buying, you can also have a standardized process for another.

00;58;37;16 - 00;58;41;21

Jonny Dunning

Or you just thinking just a top line standardization.

00;58;41;23 - 00;58;57;09

Niul Burton

I think I would be inclined if I could, to we have a top line standard process and then have, evolutions underneath that to suit specific needs. But but still consistent with that first process that we've described.

00;58;57;12 - 00;59;19;04

Jonny Dunning

And, and in terms of defining that process within organizations that, that that initial kind of top level standardization, do you think that's something that most organizations would have a pretty good handle on already? And if so, who would have a handle on that?

00;59;19;07 - 00;59;29;00

Niul Burton

My my suspicion would be the procurement thinks they have a handle on it. But if you ask the internal customers, they have no idea what it is. That would be my guess.

00;59;29;04 - 00;59;43;21

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, yeah, I think that sounds fairly, fairly sensible. And probably quite likely. I mean, the thing is, it's people don't want to process to get in the way, right? That's not.

00;59;43;21 - 00;59;45;08

Niul Burton

What's important to the internal customer.

00;59;45;15 - 01;00;14;22

Jonny Dunning

Exactly. And I think this is where technology can very much be procurements ally in the sense that if the if the technology can help get procurement out of the way in the sense that, you know, a person doing something manually, trying to help people with writing scopes of work or signing off statement of work or whatever it might be, if technology can kind of automate that for a self-service scenario, then it gets that headache out of the user's way.

01;00;14;22 - 01;00;34;18

Jonny Dunning

And hopefully the aim of the technology is to make everything nice and streamlined and easier. That's how easier, faster, safer, more compliant. So it's partly doing procurements job for for them, but it's also putting them in the position where they can kind of step back a little bit, rather than kind of trying to jump in and fix a broken process.

01;00;34;21 - 01;00;46;13

Jonny Dunning

They can have a process happening. And organizations, it's interesting to see how they, kind of, turn the volume up or down on how much control they have over things so they can reduce it.

01;00;46;15 - 01;01;07;05

Niul Burton

Right? I think there's some thresholds there, too. Probably if you're spending less than this amount of money, there's no kind of risk associated with it. You know, well, this is something we've bought before. Go ahead. You know, you use the tool, use a system. Procurement doesn't need to be involved in the tool. It's all self-serve. You you cross some thresholds.

01;01;07;05 - 01;01;17;28

Niul Burton

It's, you know, it's over $10 million. It's a risky category. It's something we've not done before. Procurement would like to have a little bit more participation in this process.

01;01;18;01 - 01;01;35;08

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. It's going back to the the data side of it. Even if you even if you have a very lightweight process of what procurement are doing in terms of how they're not a lightweight process, a lightweight kind of light touch procurement approach, you're still capturing an absolute ton of data.

01;01;35;11 - 01;01;36;01

Niul Burton

Yeah.

01;01;36;03 - 01;02;02;27

Jonny Dunning

And and that's what's not happening at the moment. So even in that situation, procurement teams could almost like bide their time a little bit and let people even if you let people do what they're currently doing, but put a few guardrails around it and just let it be streamlined, but actually capture that information. That's where they can start building the case or building their arguments or working out strategically how to move forward without upsetting the applecart and stopping people doing their jobs.

01;02;03;00 - 01;02;32;20

Niul Burton

Well, you brought a point I was making earlier on around business case, and procurement has to have the means by which they can build a business case to, to to persuade the internal customers that adopting the technology is in their, in their interest. And that business case might be a financial business case, but it might also be a risk business case, or an operational business case, where they can say, look, you know, this these are going to be the benefits if we do this differently.

01;02;32;23 - 01;02;53;14

Niul Burton

We're going to eliminate some of our, legal risk, reputational risk. We're going to eliminate, the, the risk of escalations or the risk of, you know, whatever it might be. You know, we know that we can if we if we get to participate in the supplier selection or we can add this business to work we're already doing with the supplier.

01;02;53;14 - 01;03;06;05

Niul Burton

So there's less overhead that gets assigned to it. Right? Know. You know, these are all the components of the business case as to why we need to do things differently and prove that out in the in the implementation as well.

01;03;06;07 - 01;03;34;07

Jonny Dunning

So if you look back at the work that you did with, I remember the name of it, abbreviate. Yeah. That the correct correct name. So you're, you're procurement technology platform. SaaS platform back in the kind of late 90s, early 2000s. What was what do you think is different now about putting a business case across for procurement to bring in new technology?

01;03;34;12 - 01;03;44;10

Jonny Dunning

How was that changed in that time. Because that's quite a decent amount of time. I'd be interested to know what you think has changed over that time, or whether you know the same challenges are still there.

01;03;44;12 - 01;04;11;14

Niul Burton

So sadly, I think the same challenges are still there. I think, I think in some respects we've not progressed as much as we would, as much as we would like. I think having said that, I think risk as a part of procurement responsibility is now front and center. I would say ten years ago, procurement’s view of risk was I hope that happens on the other guys watch.

01;04;11;14 - 01;04;12;11

Niul Burton

Not my watch

01;04;14;01 - 01;04;34;04

Niul Burton

And I think they realize they need to take a little bit more of a proactive, role in risk. Yeah. I think, in your perspective, I think back in, in those days, the question was why? Why divert from a suite solution, right? Ariba says either they haven't done it already, they're going to be doing it.

01;04;34;04 - 01;04;58;12

Niul Burton

Why would I buy a best of breed? I think there's a recognition now that even with the suite solutions that there's so much complexity to the procurement process processes, that you need best of breed in there along with the, along with the Ariba’s or the Coupa’s or SAP or whoever it might be. So I think that I think that's changed as well.

01;04;58;12 - 01;05;24;07

Niul Burton

I think it was a recognition that these point solutions can drive value in a way that you're never going to get from the, from the suite providers. So I think so kind of an acceptance that the business case can be based on, you know, doing something with a unique provider. And I think that maybe because SaaS is now an accepted way of doing business, you don't have to integrate lots of systems and put them behind the firewall.

01;05;24;10 - 01;05;40;18

Niul Burton

You can use them online. And that's that's perfectly acceptable for almost all organizations, I guess. Not everybody, but almost everybody at this point in time. What else has changed?

01;05;40;21 - 01;06;01;23

Niul Burton

I think the recognition that technology now needs to be part of the solution. Whereas I think before we were trying to persuade people that technology could make a difference, it's now I must have technologies kind of what what does that look like and how do I get the most out of it?

01;06;01;25 - 01;06;18;06

Niul Burton

Yeah, I think those are probably the main things. I, you know, part of my feeling around the domain expertise came from the experience that we had in abbreviate, where we found that we could sell to our customers more quickly if we said, but you want to run an auction on, corrugated packaging? We have a template for that.

01;06;18;08 - 01;06;37;00

Niul Burton

Yeah, we can tell you what the RFP should look like. We can tell you how we structure the auction. We have a view on who the suppliers are, you know, potentially going to be you know, we know we know how to source corrugated. Well, we know how to source rental cars. All we know how to source downhole casing.

01;06;37;02 - 01;06;53;00

Niul Burton

Right. Because we've done it before. We've got a template. Your team doesn't have to put it together. We can bring that in. You tweak it, we issue it away it goes. So being able to bring that domain expertise I think is still is still valid in terms of driving near-term value.

01;06;53;02 - 01;07;22;11

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. That's a really interesting point. I think, you know, going back to what you were saying about, the kind of best of breed versus suite, you know, I think, you know, most procurement technology commentators would put forward that point of view. You know, the suites still absolutely have their value. And, you know, firstly, trying to move a company away from a very established process with a very established technology that underpins everything they do in procurement.

01;07;22;13 - 01;07;46;27

Jonny Dunning

That's a big change. And it's it's a is potentially a messy change. It's seen as very high risk for organizations to fundamentally move away from that, where I think the best of breed platforms come in is they fill in the gaps. So they're not saying replace that. They're saying you're just not effectively doing this. Yeah. But with that centralized technology and you can't expect one piece of technology to do everything.

01;07;47;03 - 01;08;07;21

Jonny Dunning

You know, there's definitely a value in, as we always talk about internally sticking to your knitting, do something really well. Be specialist. And even, you know, if you look at if I look at services procurement, you know, as a specialist area, that's a very big area. But if you fundamentally try to conquer that statement of work life cycle, then that is quite niche.

01;08;07;21 - 01;08;32;22

Jonny Dunning

Obviously. Then it has its niches on top of that, which is where you need the flexibility to deal with different categories, different types of organization and things like that. But the the best of breed versus suite argument. I do think there is an onus of responsibility on the tech providers to be able to explain where they fit in and why, and that's yeah, that's quite a challenging thing to do.

01;08;32;25 - 01;08;58;26

Jonny Dunning

Speaking the point of being a tech provider, in the space. But I think if you can conquer that, that that is a really important thing to be able to, put across to, to prospects. But ultimately it kind of it comes down to the problem that you're solving. You know, you, you can't just go to people and say, hey, you need an, services procurement system, or you need an X and a Y, whatever it might be.

01;08;58;29 - 01;09;26;26

Jonny Dunning

The thing that we've learned is you really need to be getting into a problem solving discussion, not selling. It's about understanding for this particular organization very much with something like services, which kind of have, you know, unique, industry specific and or everyone's set up within their organization is different as to how they deal with this, problem. So I think being able to actually just go through a process of understanding where the pain points are for that organization.

01;09;26;29 - 01;09;56;18

Jonny Dunning

We have like a wheel of pain with the ten most likely pain points. Whether it's a lack of standardized governance and contracts, you know, everything's a direct award. There's no competitive process, misclassification risk, rogue spending and missed savings. All all these things, they're all relevant for services procurement for most organizations. But every organization is going to look at that kind of list of problems and say, well, actually, those three are the most important for me right now, and they're going to be different.

01;09;56;18 - 01;10;16;03

Jonny Dunning

And they also might be different for different stakeholders within an organization. So we've we've really learned that actually trying to understand the problem within that specific organization is the absolute. That's that's what organizations should be doing. Rather than trying to sell a solution. They need to get in there, understand the problem, and then then think about the solution side of it.

01;10;16;03 - 01;10;47;20

Jonny Dunning

And you need to obviously have the, configurability within your solution to be able to cater for different scenarios and understand how you can fit a different problem. But when you were talking about, that kind of business case, in your view, on this, because one of the things that I would say we've learned is initially from our point of view, we felt like we were solving a procurement problem, but actually we've learned that that's not the right approach and that's not actually what's most important.

01;10;47;23 - 01;11;23;01

Jonny Dunning

And, you know, as much as procurement practitioners would love that to be the most important thing for their organizations, it often is not. It's not right. And so what we found is actually solving the problem for the business is the most important thing. Yep. So what problem you solving for that business buyer. And that organization. And within services it's trying to make it easier faster safer for that buyer to to connect with the right supplier and get that service delivered with the best possible results at the best possible value.

01;11;23;04 - 01;11;50;05

Jonny Dunning

And so that's what what is a technology organization we try to address, rather than just making procurement life easier and making procurement more efficient. And people care about the business problem much, much more. And the other side of it is from a kind of like a C-suite level. I think that's a very important part of it as well, in the sense that the services, the drivers, again, are not making procurement life easier and making procurement more automated and efficient.

01;11;50;07 - 01;12;12;05

Jonny Dunning

It's how do we get work done. All right. But are we effective in the market? And I mean, I would argue that that would tie in to how the organization can compete in a, in a, a volatile market, from a consulting angle. Does that kind of resonate with you?

01;12;12;08 - 01;12;36;29

Niul Burton

Yes, yes it does. It does. I think I said procurement is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And, you know, procurement is successful when it's helping its partners deliver on their business objectives. That's when the CPO is going to be is going to be considered to be doing a good job. And yeah, the CFO cares about cost, but most of the other business partners, as long as it's within their budget, right?

01;12;37;03 - 01;12;58;13

Niul Burton

They're not not that worried about what the cost is. They're worried about how how how is it going to be working with that supplier? Is it going to be easy? Is it going to be straightforward? Is it to your point? Is it going to be efficient. Right. Is it going to be safe? And cost is not really a factor unless it's outside, unless it exceeds the budget, in which case they are going to start looking to deal with it.

01;12;58;16 - 01;13;21;16

Niul Burton

So so making sure that your business partner is happy is really key. I work with a CPO, and, he shared with me that he has objectives around cost, but he also objectives around operational support said the CFO might ask him about cost, but the only time he heard from the CEO was when they had an operational problem with a supplier.

01;13;21;18 - 01;13;46;29

Niul Burton

Right. He got a call from the CEO on Sunday morning. It wasn't about how much money did you save me? It was why don't why is this not available? Why is this not here? You know, what is this supplier doing? You need to go get on the phone to fix it right now. Right. So making sure that your business partners, your your internal customers are getting what they need, the value, the insights, the support is really what makes a CPO successful.

01;13;47;02 - 01;14;15;00

Jonny Dunning

I think that is a perfect way to round up our conversation, because it kind of brings us right back to the beginning. When you were talking about the desire to move away from a transactional approach to a strategic approach, and that is exactly what you've just described, is procurement looking to understand how the business works and to play their essential part in making that more effective and making the business work, as it should do.

01;14;15;02 - 01;14;30;12

Jonny Dunning

So I think that that that kind of sums up very nicely to make sense that, you know, if you bring all these clever ideas and technology and process and data together, procurement have that strategic role to play. And I think that's quite exciting.

01;14;30;15 - 01;14;42;27

Niul Burton

I think it's very exciting. I think it's I think it's very, very exciting. And I think, you know, people ask me, you know, should I go take a career in procurement? I go absolutely, it can be as exciting as you want it to be. It really is strategic as you want to be.

01;14;43;00 - 01;15;03;14

Jonny Dunning

I think that's a very clever way to put it, actually, because I would argue that there are a lot of people that would it is growing number of people within procurement that would share your forward thinking viewpoint on wanting to be strategic and wanting to really add value and, you know, be that integral, an important driver within business.

01;15;03;17 - 01;15;24;02

Jonny Dunning

But equally, there are still some people within procurement who are quite happy to sit there quietly and don't want things to change and don't want to be bothered and maybe, maybe are scared of things like technology or AI coming along because it might mean they have to do things differently. Would you say that? How do you see that split, and how do you see that kind of changing over time?

01;15;24;04 - 01;15;49;18

Niul Burton

I think it's a very valid split, and it hasn't changed as much as I would have liked over time. I think, you know, I still go into organizations and they're still very traditional, transactional. You know, they haven't been successful in recruiting the right people in maybe because they don't have the right vision, maybe because they don’t recognize that, you know, the compensation needs to be there to support these strategic people.

01;15;49;20 - 01;16;10;09

Niul Burton

So if you're a marketer, you want to be in the marketing function, not in procurement, supporting marketing. If you're, an engineer, you want to be in engineering, not in procurement, supporting engineering. We need to change that mindset. We need to start rotating people from the functions into procurement, to, to help develop that capability.

01;16;10;12 - 01;16;25;24

Jonny Dunning

I have seen that starting to happen. I have I mean, obviously, being a practitioner, with your experience, I'm sure you've seen plenty of that in some organizations, some kind of forward thinking organizations. But I'm hearing more about that sort of stuff as well. Is that something that you've seen much of selectively?

01;16;25;27 - 01;16;38;13

Niul Burton

Selectively? Again, it's kind of the more mature organizations that are more committed to the procurement development. But I think part of doing that and then you've got the traditional ones that are still focused on driving down price.

01;16;38;15 - 01;17;04;20

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. And it kind of it ties into, the the forward thinking approach of procurement, and the type of people you want in procurement and moving towards more of those, strategic activities. That means, to a certain extent, sometimes hiring people with different capabilities, more data analytics capability, but or upskilling people in procurement as well to deal with those, those things.

01;17;04;22 - 01;17;39;10

Jonny Dunning

And I think what you were saying about recruiting the right people, in my view, having heard some senior procurement people speak at conferences less and less so. But I have heard this surprisingly recently where people are just very against change. They don't think think technology needs to be adopted. They really think everything's fine as it is. And you just think, so you're going to bring you're going to hire really super smart people to run your procurement function, and you're going to bring them in and they're going to work on a manual basis doing like manual transactional activities on spreadsheets.

01;17;39;10 - 01;17;59;03

Jonny Dunning

And nothing's organized. Do you think you're going to retain those people? Do you think you're going to hire those people because they're going to come in with an expectation that you're going to have everything absolutely nailed, all the data, everything in place, all of the systems or or you're going to be working on that so that they can use their skills and experience to leverage that and be strategic.

01;17;59;06 - 01;18;11;13

Jonny Dunning

Because if you don't do that, the people that come into your organization are going to have very high levels of disappointment, and I think you're going to struggle to keep them or the or the procurement function just won't attract them in the first place. I think that I feel like that's a challenge.

01;18;11;15 - 01;18;34;06

Niul Burton

Yeah, this seems to be not enough strategic talent to go around all roles. And so they're going to go to the organizations to your point, where they have an opportunity to really expand and develop and have the impact that they that they want to have. And that's going to lead to a divergence. And I think, you know, the analysts look at this right, with the, you know, which companies are progressing and so on.

01;18;34;09 - 01;18;44;08

Niul Burton

And you get this divergence between the laggards and the and the leaders. The perpetuates itself. Because if you're good, you want to go to a leader.

01;18;44;11 - 01;18;52;26

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. With the speed everything is changing these days. You know companies if they can't afford to rest on the laurels they've got to be moving forward. And it's you know, so.

01;18;52;26 - 01;18;54;11

Niul Burton

So yeah.

01;18;54;14 - 01;18;58;07

Jonny Dunning

Blink and you'll miss it these days.

01;18;58;09 - 01;19;07;13

Jonny Dunning

Excellent. What I say, thank you so much for joining me today. I really, really enjoyed that conversation. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you?

01;19;07;15 - 01;19;15;24

Niul Burton

Also, thanks for asking. So I'm on LinkedIn and my email is simply Niul at Niul burton.com.

01;19;15;26 - 01;19;20;17

Jonny Dunning

Brilliant stuff. And I guess people can check out Niul burton.com as well. If they want to.

01;19;20;19 - 01;19;22;01

Niul Burton

They can indeed. Yes.

01;19;22;03 - 01;19;35;15

Jonny Dunning

Brilliant stuff was superb. Really enjoyed that. Thank you so much for joining me. And yeah, brilliant to hear your insights. And also the kind of real life applications and some of the examples that you were bringing up there was, very enjoyable and interesting.

01;19;35;18 - 01;19;42;04

Niul Burton

Well thank you. I love what you're doing with services procurement. I think it's absolutely the right things to be doing. So I appreciate the opportunity to share my thoughts.

01;19;42;06 - 01;19;43;17

Jonny Dunning

Thank you very much.

01;19;43;19 - 01;19;44;15

Niul Burton

Thanks, Jonny