Trains, Taxis and Dislocation Events
I spent the first part of this week at the SAP Commodity Management Forum in Heidelberg – of which – more next week. There were around 80 people attending and I was pleasantly surprised to find that group included a lot of old friends and colleagues. I was also quite honestly blown away by the number of attendees who told me how they visited this site and how useful they found it. Always good to know that this site is widely read and well thought of in the industry.
Traveling from Brno where I live is always a bit of a challenge. There is an airport. However, there are few flights. One faces a choice of going to Prague or Vienna to catch a plane almost anywhere except London Stansted. I gave the whole argument a miss and took the train – three of them actually – to Heidelberg. The connections were pretty tight too but all went well and according to schedule until…. arriving in the Czech Republic finally on the way home we stopped at Breclav. It’s only 50km from Brno and my arrival at 00:50 seemed guaranteed to be on time. However……
The train to Warsaw that I was on was only half of the train apparently and the other train that would be joined to ours at Breclav was running 120 minutes late. Now, you can imagine that after 9 hours of travel being told we would sit in the small station at Breclav for another 2 hours was not exactly the news I was hoping for. I did what any sane person might – I took a cab those last 50 km!
Sitting on the train however gave me quite a bit of time to think. I generated several pages of new ideas and thoughts about the Commodity Management and CTRM software space and over the coming weeks and months, I will hopefully present some of them in the pages of this blog. Having presented on the evolution of Commodity Management at the SAP CM Forum, I may well start by revisiting the last 20-years and attempt to explain why we still have over 100 software companies serving the space. One thing for sure is that the industry is in a major dislocation event right now driven by lower profits and rising costs. A dislocation event tends to mean a slowing down of purchase decisions in the CTRM world and this results in three impacts on vendors;
1. It is an opportunity for new entrants – both in terms of start ups and also vendors in parallel software categories that see an opportunity to expand – in the last month, I have been briefed by around 6 new vendors in the space……
2. Smaller vendors who cannot respond to change become stranded serving a smaller segment of the market and ultimately may also become acquisition fodder. I fully expect more M&A activity next year…
3. Survivors are those vendors who make the transition through the change period. Many of those will be cloud-based vendors as that appears to be the future for many procurement decisions in the industry right now.
I think 2017 will be interesting. The market is picking up and I think we are through the worst. Let’s hope that with the destination in sight, we don’t have to take a cab the last few Km though…
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