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good morning good afternoon good evening and thanks so much for joining today's webinar my name is ali music and i'm the director of member services here at sig i have the pleasure of facilitating today's webinar entitled five ways to master vendor negotiation featuring sleep number this weapon will also be presented by scout today's webinar is meant to be interactive so please submit your questions throughout the presentation by typing them into the q a box we'll do our best to answer all of the questions at the conclusion of the presentation before i proceed i have a few housekeeping and calendar items i would like to review with you attend one of our signature events or share them with your colleagues next year we'll have four signature events one per quarter in different parts of the country please visit our website for complete listing of also upcoming webinars and register today peer-to-peer is an opportunity to ask top of mind questions for instant responses these questions go out twice a week and you do not have to be a sig member in order to respond the sig resource center's over has over 5000 tools templates white papers presentations and research documents we want to make your job easier let us know if you have any questions getting the resource center and we'll help you with your login the state career network offers an opportunity to post both internships and jobs so if you're looking for a job or looking to post a job please reach out student talent outreach was designed to find tomorrow's supply chain professionals today while students are still learning about the industry in school we are so excited to announce that we've established strategic partnerships with both barrow hfs research and art of procurement please reach out to a sig p member if you'd like more information on any of these partnerships sega has also recently partnered with munu technologies for the upcoming impact sourcing summit in uganda please visit munutech.com for more information say global executive summits are semi-annual events with more than 350 decision makers in attendance the agenda and event details for upcoming spring summit in amelia island florida are available on our website and registration is open sig university offers training and development opportunities to people of all levels of their sourcing careers we're currently enrolling for the next semester which will begin on january 21st we will be offering a 15 early enrollment discounts to students to emit payment by december 21st i am pleased to announce the two presenters that we have for today's webinar we have cj anderson johnson from sleep number she is the indirect sourcing team leader at sleep number from working with senior leadership to expertly negotiating with vendors cj's at the forefront of sourcing initiatives during concur consulting tenure she's trained teams on supplier management and complex negotiations and currently acts as a content contributor and sourcing technology innovator on this webinar we also have michaela from scout rfp michaela has experience working with those high growth startups in large enterprises including companies like annaplan bill.com and united technology she currently leads the demand generation teams at scout rfp fostering deep engagement with customers and helping enterprise sourcing and procurement teams make an impact but currently michaela currently serves as the executive director on the global council for the advancement of women and technologies thank you both so much for participating this webinar take it away all right greetings everyone i would also like to thank you for joining us today for the sas negotiation webinar as mentioned my name is cj anderson johnson i currently lead the indirect sourcing team here at sleep number albeit a small one my sleep number setting is a 35 which is a very soft mattress and my sleep iq score which measures how well i sleep at night could use some improvement lately so we'll just leave it at that and call it maybe me being really busy in december i've been in sourcing for a really long time um leadership and consulting roles and somehow along the way i've become specialized in technology sourcing which is what my role was when i was a consultant prior to joining sleep number and have continued to train and become what i would consider a an expert to some degree in software and fast negotiations not because i'm magic more because i've spent a lot of time training reading and negotiating uh hundreds of contracts so i want a level set to some degree well we'll talk about the changing landscape of sourcing from when i first began and where we're at today it is really different and what uh that drives uh changes and needs for expertise skill sets and experience if you're going to be a sourcing resource these days negotiations and have a magic question of when it is a good just want to touch on that briefly because it's something that i focus on with every negotiation that i i do and keep in the back of mind and sometimes share with my uh can cross-functional team that i'm negotiating with whose contract should you use i think this could be a two day seminar in and of itself i will keep this pretty high level and get through it as quickly as i can with the key message being is not one contract and there is a whole lot of documentation you need to go through when you're doing one of these deals then fast negotiations itself a few sas basics and some five key negotiation elements hopefully you'll take a few nuggets out of that and then again just recap on the change in paradigm and where we're at so in doing so it's a good time for a poll question i'd like to know what your level of expertise with sas or subscription service software vendor negotiations are you should see a poll question come up on the right hand side of your screen i use this information to kind of gear my use or non-use of acronyms and how deep i go into some of the more technical things granted the time's a little short so i'll keep a little higher level but we'd like to know um are you just getting started with sas negotiations and have you done some you're comfortable but want to refine your approach you're experts and just looking for tips efficiency how to get through the negotiations faster d neutral just want to expand or feel better or see what what we have to say today and then e we aren't negotiating with vendors at all yet so it looks like um the results aren't up there yet as soon as i have those what do you think what cj what do you think they're going to what do you think is going to come out i think that we're going to go with b i think we're comfortable refine our approach um sure i'd say all over the board all right uh 35 we aren't negotiating at all and 25 percent you're comfortable okay and nineteen percent neutral only eleven percent just getting started okay so there obviously there's some um experience with folks on the phone great thank you good to know okay the changing landscape just real quick because i think it's relevant to where fast agreements fit in the overall sourcing picture what we buy has changed it used to be for indirect sourcing keep in mind i'm excluding direct materials that is not what i'm addressing here today that's a whole other topic but what we used to buy and what we had sourcing managers and supplier managers for is copier and print services supplies mro contingency labor and basic services when we talked about it it was more hardware on prem legacy system software and then some additional services nowadays that had landscape has become much more complex if you think about what marketing was years ago print media and agency services um for those of us have been around long enough the whole web platform acquisitions that didn't exist now we have web platform acquisitions we have all the data analytics providers behind those web platforms we have influencers and where do you collect those influencers that influencer data why on other people's infrastructure of course which requires as fast agreement so where is your data that's a favorite question of mine here at sleep number it's everywhere literally almost every department in this organization is using more than one service provider that has our data of varying sensitivity out on their infrastructure and we access that during a portal if you think about human capital marketing [Music] even in sourcing finance everywhere we all use providers that have our data on their infrastructure the traditional mindset of croppings changing it used to be save money save money save money all your goals were all finance based well because of this changing landscape risk has become a lot higher up on the topic and should be something that's addressed and something that is a focus from a goals perspective we need to focus more on the overall deal and selecting the right service providers selecting service providers that protect our data and be able to put processes in place very early on to ensure not just the front-end procurement but the long-term management of that is performed effectively and then digitization that's no news to any of you folks on the phone you gotta have tools to be able to do all this they didn't exist um they're not the big behemoths of the world anymore there are lots of different niche queries they're almost all cloud-based so there's a lot of different opportunity to implement wherever you're at on that maturation stage for digitization okay so when is it a good deal this is something i talk about with folks all the time and getting out of that costly cost save hammer hammer price that to me drives the wrong behavior there is a total cost of ownership and let's just call it price where both parties land and people walk away happy it fits our financials it fits what we believe is fair from a marketplace perspective and internally we have an roi that works for that service if you go below that level and that to me is what cost savings that's the only thing you're focused on you're going to incent your sourcing professional to land below that line because that's when they uh are recognized for doing a good job um the sales person may not be reaching their expected p l goal they may not be getting their desired commission hopefully you don't land in a place where they're not even making money based on how they structure their financial situation on your account bad things happen that's the rain cloud when you land below there they will work very hard to get their revenue and the profit from your account back up to where uh they're happy with it and it's not good for a long partnership perspective on the flip side of that you don't want money flying out the door on the top so you want to make sure that you're not wasting money and paying more than you need to without getting any additional value why do you care well at a very high level if you have competitors that are down in that lime green bar and you're up in that top bar over time you're going to have a pricing problem on your hands because you aren't getting any additional value you're not getting any additional services and you're just plain wasting money so from a fast perspective one of the things i coach very early on in the rfp and the functional team members and use a version of this slide is we want to land in the middle and it also makes them feel more comfortable that as sourcing professionals and with software as a service specifically we're not going to force them to just take the cheapest solution solution that works so key considerations for sas solution let's take a look at what they are and what's changed business units are driving the purchase now not i.t there is a huge shift in paradigm that has happened over the last five to ten years ten years ago if you were talking any kind of software at all any kind of integrations at all those um those strategies and those acquisitions were driven for the most part out of it now those acquisitions are being driven from the business units marketing comes to us when they need to go up a bit when they have a data analytics provider that they need to bring on board human capital came to us when they needed a solution it was a biggie um and it wasn't it that was driving that and you have to be aware of that and make sure that you bring it in um because they need to be part of the discussion real early on but that's a big shift that i've seen also sas fees are an expense they are not capital and they're not a depreciated asset so 9 times out 10 when i ask well who has the money and where is this going to hit in your budget both that year then the following year there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about how that hits the financials so you need to make sure that your business units are and you are working with finance up front so that you have a really good understanding about what that financial picture looks like sorry but the sales folks will tell you with that there's very little i.t involvement and you don't need to bring them in yes you do um there's still data security there's integrations they need to make sure that there are there's a fit from an architecture perspective so even though the sales folks might tell you there's very little i.t involvement i'm here to tell you there's very few contracts and very few sas providers where that's actually the case another sales pitch that you might hear is that you should go with fast and you should go with our solution because it's very flexible and if you don't like us you can just change in two years and three years and five years that also is rarely the case as we start to utilize more and more sas providers more and more service providers that have our data outside in their firewalls even though you can get it back it's not in a usable format and more and more those systems are integrating with each other and integrating with third-party software and you spend anywhere from three months to six months to 18 months implementing these sas solutions and you can't just walk away so if you're hearing that i would um make sure that you check the boxes and you really understand the complexity of the solution that you're looking at and think of it more as a long-term investment both financially and from a resource perspective okay the contract i also have spent a great deal of time explaining sometimes why it takes so long to get through contract negotiations for staff providers um unfortunately um the vendor paper their contracts that are presented to you are still very skewed from a risk perspective in their favor so you're starting way down it from a getting to terms that you're legal and your risk management and your finance folks are going to be okay with so keep that in mind if you have your own paper which we do now you want to try to use your own and again get that bar um closer to where you want to land i know that can't that isn't always feasible but thinking long-term strategy get your own document um in place get it approved template and all the associated documents so that you have something to start with and at the very least have a guide when you're reviewing the vendor paper they'll say that they're special that their terms are special and that you need to use their contract because it's very specific to their services that they provide from a master staff agreement perspective and i'll get to that in a minute over in the upper right up right hand side there eighty percent of the terms and i actually think this is higher are actually the same as what's in yours it's just whether or not they're drafted in your favor or their favor the master terms are very similar so that is not a reason to use their paper you'll end up redlining eighty percent of that mass for agreement um and don't forget you're the customer it's your money it's your risk i understand that they're putting effort and resources uh towards the sale and obviously towards providing the services but as you invest more and more money it seems like i've had to remind them hold on guys we're the customer and if this whole thing fails you can walk away you might take a hit here and there um from a revenue perspective and um from a resource perspective you invested in the sale but if things go south it is the customer that gets hurt real bad um a lot more than the provider so when you're going through your contracts and going through those negotiations don't lose sight of that okay let's start with the master staff agreement with all those terms that um legal likes to have their eyes on and should that can be anywhere from probably average 12 to 20 page documents if it is a two-page document and look at how simple our master agreement is there's going to be a whole lot of urls in that short agreement where the the pages actually point to so short is not necessarily better attached to that master sas agreement is going to be an order form there are terms and conditions in the order form ask for that early and make sure that the order form doesn't supersede what you just worked so hard to negotiate in the master agreement there is a service level agreement or a service and support guide those also are attached or referenced as a url usually in the order form or the master sas agreement you need to have it take a look at that and your business units to make sure that they're okay with the service levels in that document they um you can't change those service level levels very often we have but one of the key takeaways in those is make sure that service level credits aren't your only recourse if they're failing to meet their service level there's a little gotcha sometimes in those slas that you want to make sure you'll sign up for there's usually a data security guide that addresses all their obligations from a data security spec perspective got to have that you've got to make sure that you're okay there the cloud service privacy policy um it's usually a url make sure that it's attached to your contract they usually have a unilateral right to change those just make sure you're protected in your master that if something's really egregious you can get out of the contract or at least get back to the negotiations documentation does the software work make sure that there's some kind of reference to documentation that everything works all of that has to be reviewed um the third-party software and open source terms is another attachment um a lot of times there's a professional services agreement for implementation for special configuration services or for support that's outside their standard sla that can be a whole nother agreement and a whole negotiation attached to that is the statement of work with all of the detail for your implementation don't wait till the end and don't sign that master sas agreement and then do the professional services and agreement in the statement of work that should all be done together up front in an ideal world send all of your professional service agreements statement of work template master sas agreement template with your rfp and then finally a change request form don't forget that there's gotchas in that change request form occasionally as well so as you can see it's not one contract there's a whole lot of documents that need to be reviewed by a whole lot of different teams within your organization so plan for that from a negotiation strategy perspective and from a time perspective okay don't forget to mention the future with fast um ensure that renewals and order forms are governed by the agreement that you just worked so hard to negotiate every once in a while we get about where an order form is subject to term master terms in a url and say that that agreement that we work so hard to negotiate isn't in place anymore make sure you have terms that protect yourself from that price caps for renewals you don't want to get to an end of a three year term and have that go up by 50 make sure that's protected hold pricing holds for additional licenses have the right to true up or right size that is very difficult to get they're happy to sell you more but to have that go down is pretty tough but you can try it and then flexible purchase quantities for future purchases no huge minimums training for new users as you bring people on board there's turnover and all of a sudden your training is really expensive address that increases in bandwidth storage and transactions ask for that make sure it's in your order form and then manage the term a standard term is about three years you better have really good warranties and things locked up for five years if you go about go beyond that you kind of send me back in my chair but for five years if there are a ton of integrations and it's a massive implementation you can agree to that but make sure that all of those items above that are in place so that you maintain some leverage the sas implementation ask that up front are they using a partner um don't fall don't don't agree to work out the details of the implementation after the fact um all of the pain it seems like with that still as with traditional software's in that implementation don't wait do that simultaneously keep in mind that a statement of work is a contract and not a project plan i have had statements of work for sas implementations that had more obligations for sleep number than it did did for the company that's doing the the implementation that's not okay it's a contract you need to have what what are they doing when are they doing it deliverables and how are they paying for it um it's not uh uh how what is uh your company's responsibilities in order for them to do that put that in a project plan and keep it outside that contract as best you can hold on to your money hold on to staff fees and hold on to implementation fees as they meet milestones through that implementation it you give away a lot of leverage to get that up and running if you agree to pay both fast fees and implementation fees upfront remember if you can't use that software as a software as a service for nine months don't agree to pay a standard fast fee for those nine months you don't get any use out of that software the the full fat fee should kick in after that nine months address that in your rfp and then make sure you have the resources and the rates etc um in your statement of work both for things that are expected and unexpected so what to watch out for like i just mentioned your sas fee payment schedule again hold on to your money as long as you can suspension and termination rights make sure that you have a detailed process in your master agreement that allows you to pay late if you don't want to be a late payer on a regular basis but if someone's on vacation something happens and you don't get one of those payments made on time that they can't terminate immediately or suspend immediately have a process in place for suspension and termination our rules for the same period as the initial term watch out for that auto renewal should be shorter keep all the caps in place keep all your price protections in place and keep those auto renewals for a shorter period of time or don't have them at all um a pretty standard recommendation now is to not have auto renewals and that you will renew these sas agreements upon mutual agreement of the parties when you have all your protections in place um don't give away your publicity and your logo that's an asset to your company so make sure that you get something for that if you allow them to use your publicity your logo and you as a customer and be careful providing references and and do that with your permission and at your sole discretion it you can get into a real tough situation this applies to everything but i it seems like i see it and see it in much more detail in the staff providers probably because they're such new companies as a general rule um that they have some pretty stringent obligations on the customer for for providing references and for even doing pocs and things like that and then watch out for prevailing rates to get to get your data remember your data is not in your house it's in theirs and plan for that up front maybe get it ahead of time get it um pre-determination have a right post termination for a limited amount of time and ideally um matriarchally all right so what the role of technology in this changing platform and how do you manage the complexity of all of those documents um how do you manage complexity of um just the skill set that's required to review all that and to negotiate that it has changed it significantly so you do need processes documented you need templates documented and you need technology to improve the speed of execution we do so many um that it is just hard to keep up with so you gotta have some tools in your in your back pocket to be able to do that and even keep up with the standard volume our rules are transitioning from sourcing manager to sourcing and fighter advisors you have to have a deep expertise in the legal terms in the software that they're buying and the functional requirements you always rely on your business units and i t for that but you need to be able to put that together in statements of work and in contracts that make sense so there's a transition from just a tactical rfp manager um to becoming an advisor with data security and some of the issues that are coming up with these fast solutions so you gotta have hire for the right skill set for that and have the right training and then transitioning um the intro customer to sourcing agents for the more transactional based processes this is definitely something that we've implemented scout for and that we're going to continue to push into 2019 and 2020 so we can focus on the more complex things in the more complex fast type situations and have our business business units unit reps be able to um do more of the transactional stuff and have control of that and be able to get it done faster and invest in the resources to become embedded in the business unit so you know what their strategies are you know what they're going to be looking for for service providers and sas providers and to be able to manage that you can't just sit behind a desk and not understand the web platform and how the data analytics works before that and then try to manage an rfp for that it just has become far more complex to be able to do that on situations so this is that i know that was a quick um blast through that in each one of those lights if there's more information or you'd be interested in a deep dive into some of that please let us know thanks cj as you shared it's much easier to set yourself up for success if you simplify and as many of you know the mantra from marie kondo declutter your home declutter your life to clutter your mind her con marie method is to live only with belongings that spark joy scout's platform focuses on very similar principles simplify simplify simplify making things more efficient at scout our goal is to be the single source of sourcing truth we are continually working with customers sourcing leaders and analysts to better understand needs processes and challenges so recently we connected with our sourcing leaders and contract managers to better understand their challenges and contract management we recently learned quite a bit which is why i wanted to share this particular poll with you today with the sig community to see how you would map to the others we've been collaborating with so our second poll question is what's your level of satisfaction with contract management for your organization a very dissatisfied be satisfied see neutral be satisfied and be very satisfied so you'll see in the polling questions often the right-hand panel if you just pick one that that'd be great um and then tj where do you think the sick community will land on this uh uh i think it depends on if uh you're a financial institution or an insurance here or insurance company or a highly regulated company that implemented a behemoth uh and are are working their way through that you're going to be dissatisfied and if you have nothing you have dissatisfied so i would say whatever is going to skew it towards needing some pretty simple um better contract management yeah i know as i as i shared we've done a similar poll and most people said that what they really needed were a simple flexible way to manage contracts something that would provide visibility to their stakeholders where way to share a full view of the supplier relationship and really tackle the tough challenges of obligation management and it looks like for the most part we're either on the the biggest number is neutral um or dissatisfied and so that is very interesting um as i had shared um it comes close to what our ship our poll had shown only 30 percent of cpos are satisfied with their clm system and what's interesting is that this aligns with gartner gartner just released a research paper their annual predicts paper and basically what they're saying is as buying organizations mature in their digital transformations they will need deeper support in the areas of contract life cycle management and companies are funding these initiatives as their top priority this year and why mainly because innovation leads to growth growth leads to advantage and advantage leads to competitive differentiation companies in the past used to stay on the fortune list for 75 plus years and now they're seeing a a lifespan of about 11. and a lot of that is due to um you know really needing to transform transformation and transformation is very difficult for organizations but honestly what makes any innovation really stick is whether or not your customers use it if they share it and if they love it and scout's simple and effective solution automates processes which lead to accelerated decisions that ultimately drive business impact and that's our goal to be the single source of sourcing truth and with that i'm really really honored to to share that we've been recognized as the 2018 gartner pier insight customer choice for strategic sourcing and it's a real uncommon honor um it's the truest highest accolade that that any company could get and you know scout is just so so happy we hear all the time from our customers directly in a public forum that they truly appreciate our focus on their success and our goal is to make every customer crazy successful because by staying focused on your success we can truly help you succeed in in doing business if gartner's 2019 prediction research of deeper support in the areas of contract lifecycle management needed scout's new contract tool you have scout may just be the simplest and most effective way for enterprises to get there scouts contract is the first contract management tool that provides both simple and flexible contract management and makes a process of identifying tracking and managing obligations not only clear but straightforward with scout contracts teams can implement effective data data-driven contract management processes in a matter of hours scott contracts allow companies to manage obligations effortly track effortlessly contract contract status set renewal notifications request e-signatures through and how do we do it we work really closely with contract teams what we did was we sat with them to understand the complexities the challenges and we dug into their processes and identified what really mattered to them we stripped out everything that we thought was important and they didn't and and focused on what was important because our mantra as i said is to be the single source of sourcing truth and so we launched this easy-to-use contract solution um i think about a month ago and honestly it's what makes scout one of the top rated customer sourcing platforms um at gartner so let me just give you a little quick quick background on the platform itself many of you at sick are aware of scout we've been at the sig events for the last few years and our name is scout rfp so most people know us as an rfp tool but but our platform does so much more than that we do contract supplier performance management auctions managing prop projects and supplier report cards and how do we do it we deliver a platform and services that help the enterprise accelerate savings and projects as well to reduce supply base risk scout is the first to enable effective obligation management for sourcing teams and as you can tell i'm both super excited about contracts because our goal is to make the process not just simple and effective but to seamlessly integrate it to the entire supplier engagement process from vetting to signature renewal and beyond and and i understand being in marketing and especially at a small company we don't have the luxury of having an awesome procurement team so i understand the pains of some of those contracts because i go through contracting sometimes and i wish i had you guys on my side um scout contracts is the first clm to actually enable effective obligations management and it's the number one request that we receive from customers and prospects alike it's a huge unmet need in the market now teams have the ability to easily track surface and report on critical contract obligations from multiple parties right in one contract record not only does scout give you a simple flexible way to track these they're fully reportable in our scout reports they can be mapped effortlessly to your supplier engagement and supplier performance management processes and sometimes i hear when i'm at conferences the business has no visibility into contracts or renewal it's virtually impossible to share documents and as you can see on the slide 53 of people are managing more than supplier 82 are currently managing more than 5 000 contracts and only 30 percent of cpos are satisfied what what to do in a modern organization or really better put in today's hyper fast economy legacy and manual tools or a combination of them honestly don't cut it anymore what all of us need are real real-time access to information in context by relying on figuring out the right search term to find out what you're looking for is a bit frustrating and not good enough what is needed clear visual representation of contact hierarchies better tools for finding not just searching for key documents and overlaid onto the process of getting contracts signed scout contracts is simple it's flexible it's like the rest of scout it's easy to use it's accessible to the entire business it provides a clear effortless real-time view into every statement of work and contract obligation it can be used on the mobile phone it can be used on your laptop it can be used on a desktop it's always available and with that i wanted to move on to questions i know we don't have much time left and i know we've got a few questions so ali take it away hello thank you both so much we do have a few questions for those who have not submitted yet please go ahead and type them in the q a box we'll do our best to get to them and if for some reason we're unable to uh the prisoners will reach out to you after the fact so for the first question is this for the sow do you have any advice on how to write performance standards for agile projects performance standards i'm going to assume um during implementation for the statement of work if you mean deliverables i usually work with the business units and write very detailed delivers deliverables that are associated with key milestones that are specific to um different phases in the implementation and then associate with so it would be if you have different modules and different sub um sub functions being brought up within that module each time that that module goes live that should be a date and a deliverable and within that module it should function in a certain way so the deliverable is it's up and usable and you can use that software a b c and d i usually bullet point it behind that very detailed um that that part of the statement of work should be the largest section is the deliverables and um [Music] what what the milestones associated with those deliverables need to be with dates associated with them and descriptions and what's happening what's successful yes it works and what isn't that's great thank you so much we have another question again folks keep on submitting your questions we will definitely make sure to get them either live or after the fact so for the next question how can we hold them accountable when when the deliverables are msvps within a series of sprints well again i think that that goes back to holding on to your money uh as long as as you can and it depends on uh the accountability and you want to make sure that if you do have some accountability in the project plan that you're managing those and we recommend having a contract manager and a project manager being two different resources during that implementation so the project manager manages what you would think of as a traditional pmo in an itpmo the contract manager manages the vendor in meeting the deliverables meeting the timelines and making sure you're on track so holding them accountable is a process throughout the entire thing um it's too much usually for the project manager who's focused on different things they're not they're focused on getting it up and running in general but they're not focused on this task was supposed to take 20 hours and we're now at 65 what's the issue that's the contract manager in the contract management role as part of that statement of work and also hold you know have hold backs if you can get it in and if they're late they don't get they get paid 50 and they get the next 20 if they get it done within the next five days and i'm making the time frames up or the next two weeks so that they're incented to get it done or um you're holding their their money back perfect thank you so much i would like to ally i'd like to jump in on that as well one of the things i would suggest um because honestly as a as a company that creates fast software and a person who's worked at multiple sas companies we want your customer to be successful so i think working in conversations on a regular basis with the either the success team at the at the company that you're working with that are outside the deliverable company i mean meaning it could be the same organization the company that you bought the software from may be the organization that's doing the implementation and that's great but set aside on regular conversations whether it's going well or not it's just a check-in you know it's always great to be more engaged it can never hurt and you can always cancel those meetings if everything's going swimmingly thank you thank you both um next question here as we approach 2019 what hurdles do you anticipate going into next year uh just in general i would say for us and what i hear from colleagues is just the sheer increase in volume and making sure that you have repeatable vetting processes both around the company and obviously their financial well-being and that they're a good fit which is a separate benefit product the data security vetting process and then the right resources to be able to just manage the share volume of these types of acquisitions and service providers that we're bringing on board and managing that risk and being able to do it quickly you know you don't want to have a business unit come to you and say yeah i can get that done in nine months life is moving too fast for that innovative companies are moving too fast for that so i would say one of our biggest challenges and one of the biggest challenges i hear across the board is being able to meet the ever increasing complexity and demand from a volume perspective with with um both the tools and the resources that you need thank you so much again so keep on submitting these questions to us next uh um let's see let's see what will be the next relevant one when selecting technology what attributes were most important to you for success well i would say the attributes are there's probably a few um from a culture perspective um are they with your organization at a high level whether they're a technology or any other any other company that still applies from a an infrastructure perspective if it is a staff provider that needs to integrate with your legacy systems how difficult is that integration or how easy is it that is something that is evaluated much more deeply than it was before how how willing are they to accept the responsibility and the risk when your data is in their house and their firewalls and they're managing that um it's a different risk profile than software that's in your house with inside your firewalls where you have a lot more control so a lot of the discussions and a lot of the pain points that you have started to hear is is um trying to allocate fair you know what and i'm air quoting fair um that risk and trying to understand that much much sooner in the vetting process and if we're way off um you you go to a plan b or they're not in consideration and then the functional requirements obviously that it has it has to work thank you next question what's the key to securing executive support for transforming processes and tools visibility to the pain points and all that technology and tools will address those pain points and in almost any organization how that will translate into revenue you know you want to solve risk issues you want to solve data security issues a lot of times there's not an roi with that but if there are is technology that does provide an roi that translates all the way back to revenue those get attention sooner than i'm trying to solve risk and pain points data security and meeting regulations excluded those always get attention as well we have a new question um very hot topic here what difficulties do you see with the new tariffs coming in place next year that's a big one um let's see that's gonna you're gonna get out of my wheelhouse a little bit but if you're trying to move um suppliers in uh change suppliers into countries where you can avoid the increases in those taxes and tariffs excuse me and adding complexity into the supply chain instead of not uh there's a whole lot of effort and a whole lot of discussion in how to how to what to do to avoid the increase the increasing cost with with those tariffs and from what i get what i hear so far is creating some very urgent changes down the supply chain that need to be addressed unless this change which they might yeah we got five more minutes and a few more questions um folks please keep submitting them we'll make sure to get to them either now or afterwards so next question effective change isn't turnkey so what advice can you offer can make significant progress that's interesting that's an interesting question and no change isn't turnkey and i would i would suggest um if you're implementing trying to figure out okay how do i there it sounds like there's a lot of opportunity to change process to change to implement technology and let's just stick to sourcing for sourcing in particular i wouldn't look at it as a big blast of change i would um try to figure out where you what smaller steps you can take to make the most impact um to address the most immediate changes like the complexity in what we're buying and the risk um i i would bubble those things up to the top and other things that are much more difficult to implement tougher to get the roi um put those to the bottom and then plan well for that change and do it methodically and thoughtfully like you would with anything else open communication i think michaela would would agree with me get in front of all your business units and show them what you're doing and how it will benefit them from a scout perspective i'll say we use the intake process now with them and the pipeline and our stakeholders have much more visibility into the milestones that we're working on and that was part of our selling point in our convincing them to change and convincing our legal department to change is the visibility and how much it'll make um their lives easier so that's a good approach as well if you're running into some wrong blocks um i'd like to jump jump in on this to ally really quickly i've been reading a couple books lately on transformation and really trying to get underneath what you know what is holding different areas of the business back and and honestly what it gets down to is that we as humans don't don't really want to change and it's not because we're negative it is not because um change is difficult it's that we worry that the change will not bring us um a better solution and we we we want to defend our company and do the right thing for them and it kind of ties into what cj was saying about making sure you have the contracts locked in making sure that the success is on the side for your organization and not the company that's selling you the software and some of the things i've seen some scout customers do which has been really interesting is that they hold um different types of educational sessions for stakeholders so vsp has gone uh through a whole process of really educating how how to use sourcing and procurement but i have seen zappos do vendor days i've seen lending tree do vendor days even our customer in australia unity water did a whole uh training session for the entire company so this is hundreds of stakeholders that are really trying to understand what you're doing and and it will help you as i'm sure you know right and it's like how do you get them on board but um it's a really great process to get people just understanding what what you're trying to do and as cj said little by little taking those little pieces and moving everyone along and then the change becomes natural if it's transparent perfect well i'm going to wrap this up with one more quick question um and then we will have to close out this webinar so the quick question here with so much constant activity for the sourcing team how do you identify potential bottlenecks in the pipeline we're down to one minute so the timer's on well i that's that's um tough to do depends on whether you're tracking your projects via an excel spreadsheet if you've got a um if you've got a solution that you use there's a whole lot of steps and i think that there's a an expanded cross-functional team specifically for sas that have to be involved in the acquisition process so really having um maybe post-mortems after each one and figuring out it and then talking about where there were delays where there's improvements for efficiency what you can do better next time and being very thoughtful and purposeful in how how you've looked at the past and then implementing that for for the future because the bottlenecks nowadays the bottlenecks can be all over the place that's good that's good well this will conclude today's webinar thank you both so much uh for sharing your insight with us we look forward to connecting with you soon we are now pushing out the slide so to download that just click on the pdf and you can follow the information to download the presentation if there's anything else either presenters or state can assist you with please reach out to us and i hope everyone has a great rest of today thank you so much thank you tj i wanted to thank you so much for your presentation today and sharing how uh great scout's been for sleep number and i also want to thank everyone for attending today's webinar i hope you enjoyed the session and have a wonderful day you bet thank you so much bye