There I was sitting on the plane on the way to my first ProcureCon – IT Sourcing and wondering what to expect, who will I meet, what will I learn, what are the industry trends and what are my current customers missing out on? As those thoughts continued to run through my head I arrived and set up our booth and prepared for anything that came our way. I spent a lot of time listening to presentations and talking with many people from many different companies and found a common thought. There are thousands of IT vendors with thousands of differences and thousands of contracts and purchasing rules. There is NO WAY for a procurement team to really know everything there is to know when it comes to these rules and contracts. The old saying started to ring true “jack of all trades, master of none”
We often tell the people we work with that we are not there to point out their mistakes or flaws because you just don’t know what you don’t know and there is no way to know everything. This is part of the reason SLC has chosen to focus on ONE vendor when helping our customers – so we can be the absolute best there is when it comes to knowing the ins and outs of Oracle contracts and licensing.
What am I getting at? You may ask… I will tell you! One of the presentations we saw was from the Chairman of the conference on the topic of 3Si. 3Si stands for Supplier Specific Sourcing Intelligence. Having spoken to several companies and several vendors, he had found that when you want the most value and the best strategic outcomes when dealing with mega vendors you need to go to the experts. I compare this concept to food, because I do love to eat and have been called a “foodie” on more than one occasion. Let’s say I was going to have very important people over for dinner and I wanted to prepare the absolute best meal I could. I could go to a regular grocery store and get every item on my list without issue but would they be the “best”? If I wanted to serve steak, I might choose to go to a butcher shop and ask for the best cut, aged to perfection and of course I would pay a premium for that selection, but in the end I would have received the best for my company and to me that is the best value. 3Si is very much that same way. When you are dealing with Oracle, go to an Oracle expert that knows the business, the contracts, the strategies and all of the inside knowledge that it takes to be the best. There might be a premium for that quality, plus some inside knowledge and the more they are sought after the more of a premium you might expect to pay. So you might ask if it is worth it.. and the answer is, yes! In his research, he found that the average difference between going with a solution specific vendor was about 30 percent better. He isn’t far off if you look at the average across the board. We at SLC boast that we maintain even higher averages and consider ROI every time we talk with a prospective client. If they were going to spend $3M if they made no changes to the way they do things, we could save them that money that was already budgeted and take a small fraction of that in the way of a fixed fee, then we feel that is a win/win for everyone. That savings remains removed year after year and a $3M savings could equal up to $9M over three years. Now THAT is a fantastic ROI.
Written by: Evan Boyd, Senior Director of Delivery at SLC Corporation
