Someone said that we always have a higher opinion about our own capability and lower opinion on others almost without loss of generality at home, amongst friends, at work etc.
I have always found this to be the biggest bottleneck to innovation & transformation and it is such a poor use of the capabilities and hence incrementalism is the rule.
In most of our business pitches, we generally encounter the argument from the users that our smaller vendors/suppliers will find it difficult to adapt.
While extremely effective (persona-based interface) UI of ‘procurEngine” takes care of the adaptability, we have never found the argument as above, a bottleneck almost in all the cases.
In one of our global pitches on a POC, we were to provide basic training to the suppliers for an auction event and one of the suppliers was not comfortable with English however we could communicate the basic instructions. He quickly realised the potential of “surrogate feature” on our e-Auction module and used the functionality to nominate someone in his team who had communication issues in English but extremely sharp person on strategic/ tactical issues of the process. He slowly built his position, most of the time as L2 and L1 vendor being too aggressive always snatched back his L1 ranking. The guy with his L2 position at the last stage, on the broadcast of last five minutes for the event (hard stop), keyed in his prices for multiple line items and submitted in the last couple of seconds with no time for L1 to respond and won the majority of the items under the subject auction.
Going back to the general perception of the Buyer fraternity in large setups that smaller vendors have constraints in adopting digital solutions is far from reality. Digital platforms in-fact make it easier for such vendors who know their job well and be there an equal opportunity to win, are highly successful.
Our experience with tens of thousands so called “small vendors” on our platform is that they need far lesser trainings. Part of the reason could be the persona-based User Interface which makes it very intuitive & other being that they are far smarter than we think. Persona-based interface makes it intuitive for the user e.g. supplier on his participation screen has the information staring in his face e.g. his ranking in a rank auction, the minimum decrement amount for his action and is able to easily input his prices and compete and get the order.
Next time someone in the team brings up the above apprehension, remember this share and overrule the objection and go ahead with the digital tools for sustainable bottom-line benefits.