In this episode, we have our guests Sarah Scudder from Real Sourcing Network and Madison Mobley from Fairmarkit. They discuss different categories of spend that companies typically consider as tail spend. They also discuss how companies can capitalize on growth opportunities by better managing their tail spend. Finally, they share several stories where they’ve saved millions of dollars through better insight about tail spend.
Chapter Markers
- [0:17] Intro
- [2:08] Personal journey and current focus
- [4:02] Perspective on growth
- [33:24] Closing thoughts
- [37:03] Outro
Key Takeaways
- Tail spend is non-strategic things that manufacturers buy, like pens, white-out paper clips, lightbulbs, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and printed items.
- Tail spend is not actively managed by the procurement team or the finance team, or the operations team. And it’s typically decentralized across several departments in a company tail spend consists of high volume but low transactions. The transactions are typically under a spend threshold.
- Before the pandemic, around 72% of business partners are indicating an increased need to get suppliers in place quickly, but at the same time, only 41% are consistently willing to make trade-offs for faster buy.
- Companies have to spend a lot of money and time, and resources on designing and buying packaging and labels. So those are two of the biggest growth areas in the print space. And in particular, in the manufacturing space. The third growth area in print is coming in the form of direct mail.
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About Madison and Sarah
Madison L. Mobley is an Enterprise Sales Director at Fairmarkit, the intelligent sourcing platform that revolutionizes the way organizations buy the stuff they need. Mobley’s career journey includes time at EMC Corporation, Dell EMC, & Procter & Gamble where she’s held global leadership positions in sales, category management, customer advocacy, and HR strategy. Present-day, her time is spent automating tail spend management and driving diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in Procurement Tech.
Sarah Scudder is President of RSN. Sarah is honored to win awards, but she is not defined by them. She loves helping procurement professionals transform the way they buy print and marketing services. She speaks at industry events, serves on panels, hosts webinars, and writes articles for Sourcing Industry Group (SIG) and Procurement Foundry. Sarah created ProcuRising, a magazine that uncovers the unique stories of doers in our sourcing community. Sarah created ProcuremenTalks, a monthly series that features procurement leaders.
Resources
Full Transcript
Madison Mobley 0:00
One of the things that Gartner commented on towards the end of 2019. And just before the pandemic is that I think around 72% of business partners are indicating an increased need to get suppliers in place quickly, but at the same time, only 41% are consistently willing to make a trade-off faster.
Intro 0:22
Growing a business requires a holistic approach that extends beyond sales and marketing. This approach needs alignment among people, processes, and technologies. So if you’re a business owner, operations, or finance leader looking to learn growth strategies from your peers and competitors, you’re tuned into the right podcast. Welcome to the WBS podcast, where scalable growth using business systems is our number one priority. Now, here is your host, Sam Gupta.
Sam Gupta 0:58
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of The WBS podcast. I’m Sam Gupta, your host and principal consultant at digital transformation consulting firm ElevatIQ.
They say that numbers add up. It couldn’t be more true about tail spend, which is the non-strategic spend that most companies don’t care for. The problem becomes more serious if they may not have true visibility into tail spend or if they miss classifying details when this issue typically leads to companies losing millions of dollars in potential cost savings and growth opportunities.
In today’s episode, we have our guests Sarah Scudder from the Real Sourcing Network and Madison Mobley from FairMarkit. They discuss different categories of spend that companies typically consider tail spend. They also discuss how companies can capitalize on growth opportunities by better managing their tail spend. Finally, they share several stories where they have saved millions of dollars through better insight about tail spend. Let me introduce Madison and Sarah to you.
Sam Gupta 1:59
Madison Mobley is an Enterprise Sales Director at FairMarkit, the intelligent sourcing platform that revolutionizes the way organizations buy the stuff they need. models career journey includes time at EMC Corp, Dell, EMC, and Procter and Gamble, where she has held global leadership positions and sales category management, customer advocacy, and HR strategy. Present-day, her time is spent automating tail spend management and driving diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in procurement tech.
Sarah is currently the President of RSN. Sarah is honored to win awards, but she is not defined by them. She loves helping procurement professionals transform the way they buy print and marketing services. She speaks at industry events, serves on panels, hosts webinars, and writes articles for sourcing industry growth and procurement foundry Sarah created ProcureRising magazine that uncovers the unique stories of doers in our sourcing community. She created ProcurementTalks, a monthly series that features procurement leaders.
With that, let’s get to the conversation.
Hello, Sarah. Hello, Madison. Welcome to the show.
Sarah Scudder 3:10
Hello from the San Francisco Bay Area. It is sunny and nice here, almost tanning weather.
Madison Mobley 3:20
It’s a pretty nice day over here, too, for a change.
Sam Gupta 3:23
Sarah, I don’t like to talk about the temperature because I am in Toronto, and you know how the temperature is here. And every time when we get into the conversation. You’re always talking about how nice the weather is there.
Sarah Scudder 3:39
Notice how I didn’t actually tell you what the temperature was. I just come to that it’s sunny and nice. So on Sunday and Monday, my boyfriend and I were in Monterey and Carmel, and it was incredible weather. We’re talking tank tops, and flip flops at the beat him this tough-talking about weather Sarah.
Sam Gupta 3:59
It’s freezing cold here.
Sam Gupta 4:08
Anyways, just to kick things off. Do you guys want to start with your personal story and current focus? So I’m going to start with you, Madison, if you don’t mind? Can you start with your personal story?
Madison Mobley 4:19
Yeah, absolutely, Madison Mobley here, Enterprise Sales Director at a company called FairMarkit, but before I get to what FairMarkit is and what FairMarkit does. I once upon a time thought I was going to be this world-renowned journalist. I’m a sociology major who graduated from Columbia University never foresaw a career in tech sales or procurement or any of the above.
But my New York City Bills said No, ma’am. Thanks again. And the next thing I know, Fast Forward 10 years I’ve spent my entire career in sales from EMC Corporation to Dell EMC work through kind of that merger and acquisition to Procter and Gamble, and now it’s a fair market, and we are the intelligent sourcing platform that is revolutionizing the way all organizations buy the things they need and so very much expert in the area of tailspin which is why I’m incredibly excited to be here and take part in today’s conversation. So thank you for having me.
Sam Gupta 5:24
So you’re still pretty much a journalist, in my opinion, medicine because when I see you everywhere on social media, you are always educating on stuff promoting stuff, so in my eyes, you’re still a journalist.
Madison Mobley 5:37
Well, that makes me feel good because it is still in me screaming to get out it is, but I’m doing the adult thing and working a more standard daily job at this age, my life story.
Sam Gupta 5:49
Based on the activities that you are doing on social media, I’m not too sure how much you are able to focus on your job right now.
Sarah Scudder 6:01
I want to give kudos to Madison. She was just named one of the top 10 influencers in supply chain and procurement. So really, really exciting accomplishment. Una selected ten women that are thought leaders in this space. So I’m super proud of you, Madison. You should be really happy with all the work that you’ve done.
Sam Gupta 6:24
And then I hope you guys get added to these lists. I never get any recognition.
Sarah Scudder 6:31
Well, in this case, it was celebrating women because March is the month of celebrating women. So it’s actually coming out technically on March 1, but they did an announcement this week.
Sam Gupta 6:44
So I have to ask this. Okay. Are there any lists for men as well?
Sarah Scudder 6:48
Well, there are. Bam, there are general lists, but I don’t think there’s a top 10 Mail influencer list. So you got to represent and work at Sam.
Sam Gupta 6:59
Yeah, I need to do that. Because it especially in the procurement community, I mean, it’s overcrowded by women. I mean, that’s what I see on LinkedIn.
Madison Mobley 7:11
And Sam, don’t let us get past the fact that Sara Scudder was also on that list of women shaping procurement. So I wanted to make sure I gave space for that and speak to the inspiration that she’s been for us growing in this space.
Sarah Scudder 7:26
Thank you, Madison,
Sam Gupta 7:27
You guys are amazing. So Sarah, do you want to start with your personal story and current focus?
Sarah Scudder 7:31
Yeah, so like Madison, I had no plans to go into supply chain or procurement. That’s a really hard word to spell. And so I was planning to go into fashion. In high school, I did runway modeling. I’m a tall chick. I’m six feet without heels. And I always had thought that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and have my own company, so am planning to do go work for an agency that produces fashion shows and then eventually opened my own firm and do something in the fashion runway business space.
And that is not what happened at all. I wound up going into marketing. And through an acquisition, I transitioned into doing marketing procurement, always with a focus on helping organizations better buy print and marketing services. And then, about two and a half years ago, I decided to become an entrepreneur and joined a startup called Real Sourcing Network.
We’re a tech firm that helps companies better by print and marketing services. And it’s been a really incredible journey, lots of highs and lows and having a startup, and we do a lot in the tail spend space because print is typically classified as part of the tail. So really, really passionate about the topic and excited to dive into how tail spend in particular should be on the radar for manufacturers and what they can do to get the tail spend under control.
Sam Gupta 9:06
Wow. So six feet in height. I don’t think I have ever seen a lady with six feet eight. So that’s really cool for me, and I didn’t even know that.
Sarah Scudder 9:18
I wear three or four-inch stilettos. I’m often one of the tallest people.
Madison Mobley 9:27
Oh, wow, and let me just say I’m jealous because I’m all a five three, like on a good day. Oh, just not at all impressive on the height front compared to six feet. But I do my best I do it. I can.
Sam Gupta 9:40
Yeah, people joke about my height all the time. They feel that I’m probably four. So let’s move to the next question. I think you know. We are probably going to cover this whole episode just with jokes, I guess.
Okay, so we are going to be serious from now on. So Okay, the next question is perspective on growth. So, Sarah, I’m gonna start with you. What is your perspective on growth? What does growth mean to you?
Sarah Scudder 10:02
Yeah, so I’m going to answer that two ways. First is I think procurement and supply chain as an industry has made tremendous strides in the last 12 months as seen as a function that’s really adding value, being very strategic, and helping organizations, whether that’s a manufacturer, or any type of company, really advanced through supplier management, revenue generation, and getting processes and systems in place.
So I’m really proud of and excited for the growth that I’ve seen in the procurement space. And I think we’re going to continue to see that as a priority and focus throughout this year and many years to come. From the perspective of my industry, which is the print industry, we’ve seen tremendous growth in three areas. And I’m bringing these up because I think all three are very relevant to the manufacturing space.
Sarah Scudder 11:03
And because consumers have shifted their buying habits, and they’re not going into brick and mortar establishments, I can’t tell you the last time that I’ve actually gone into a, for instance, a clothing store or retailer and actually purchase something, I’m buying things online.
And that’s kind of the trend that we’re seeing. And so because of that, companies have to spend a lot of money and time, and resources on designing and buying packaging and labels. So those are two of the biggest growth areas in the print space. And in particular, in the manufacturing space. The third growth area in print is coming in the form of direct mail.
So if manufacturers are, have a higher-ticket item, or something that they’re trying to market to an end consumer, they’re leveraging direct mail, in order to do that, to be able to send things to people’s homes, because we’re not in the office anymore to help get new customers or win back repeat business.
Sam Gupta 12:06
Get me things, and I’ll be going to come back to your medicine. And from your perspective. Do you agree with these growth factors that Sarah is seeing in her industry? Are you seeing anything similar in your industry? What is your perspective on growth? And what does growth mean to you?
Madison Mobley 12:21
Yeah, absolutely. Growth to me looks like right about now, if I think about and I absolutely agree with what Sarah has shared thus far, when I think about the advances that have been made in the procurement and or supply chain tech space in the last year, five years, right?
They’ve been massive. And what’s been affirmed is that organization-wide spend visibility is now absolutely in reach. When you think about the investments that have been made in the analytics and automation space, where we’re now in a world, it’s possible to anticipate the needs of the business. What I love to see now and what I think about when we have growth conversations, or even the innovations in the SAAS space, is one of the things that Gartner commented on towards the end of 2019.
Madison Mobley 13:13
And just before the pandemic is that I think around 72% of business partners are indicating an increased need to get suppliers in place quickly, but at the same time, only 41% are consistently willing to make trade-offs for faster buy.
And what this conversation leads to is how do we create space as procurement professionals where organizations are able to balance speed with other strategic priorities. And so when I think about the conversation that we’re having around tail spend and the benefits of managing it and how to grow out of a sound tail spend management strategy, it could be anything from cost savings to increase spend under management to the reduction of risks, increased productivity, per FTP.
Those are some of the things I think about when we talk about the climate in this space, the spotlight procurement, and supply chain professionals are now in, and the benefits that come with better spend visibility and better tail spend management specifically.
Sam Gupta 14:13
Okay, Sarah, so I’m actually coming to you now. And obviously, tail spend is a sort of it could be a new term because our audiences are CEOs and CFOs and not really the procurement people, right, so they might not know what tail spend is. So do you want to describe what tail spend is and maybe share any stories where you have seen the savings because of the term spend?
Sarah Scudder 14:36
Yeah, so Sam, I was definitely in that bucket. I had absolutely no idea what tail spend was when I got into marketing procurement. It took me a while to get down all the lingo, and my dad is a writer, and so he’s always taught me to keep things really clear and simple.
So I like to break it down to make it really easy for people to understand. And so for me, I define tail spend as non-strategic things that manufacturers buy, like pens, white-out paper clips, lightbulbs, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and printed items.
Tail spend is not actively managed by the procurement team or the finance team, or the operations team. And it’s typically decentralized across several departments in a company tail spend consists of high volume but low transactions. The transactions are typically under a spend threshold.
Sarah Scudder 15:39
And so a lot of organizations that we work with, and I know manufacturers have this as well, there will typically be some sort of minimum if an order is over $50,000, or $100,000, there’s a process or procedure that you need to go through might include RF, ping it getting pricing from some different suppliers, or they’re just some processes that you need to follow before you can go and cut that purchase order.
But if something that you need to procure is less than that, oftentimes you can just go out and buy it. So tail spend typically falls below that threshold. And in the world of procurement and manufacturers, tail spend is typically considered indirect.
So for a manufacturer, that means it’s not something that’s actually going in the end product that they’re selling. And there’s something called the peredo principle. And in the 19th century, there was an economist named Vilfredo Peredo. And he observed that 80% of the wealth in Italy belonged to 20% of the population. And this has morphed into the Pareto principle, which is also known as the 80-20 rule. And what this means is operations, finance procurement teams can’t do everything. So they have to focus on the most strategic purchases and their most strategic suppliers.
Sarah Scudder 17:09
And then the same thing holds true for smaller companies that maybe only have a couple of people on a procurement or finance team. They’re limited because they only have minimal resources. And they need to focus on the biggest ticket items. But there’s a flaw in that principle. And I’ll let Madison hop in here as well and talk about some of these things.
But the flaw is that the principal only focuses on spending. So what is that actual amount, but it fails to take into account some other things that I think are really important for manufacturers to think about. And the first is a risk. What is the risk to the manufacturer? The second is quality concerns. The third is environmental impacts, which we have come to know as sustainability, the fourth is social factors. And the fifth is supplier diversity. So I’ll give you two manufacturing examples.
Sarah Scudder 18:10
The first is in aerospace. So if a jet manufacturer would be regarded as a high-risk, high-cost supplier, they would likely sit in that top 1%. Right. So that’s not going to be considered tail spend because that’s a high spend item.
But if an airline food manufacturer has a lower spend amount, but there’s a food safety breach that happens that because of that spend an amount that’s considered tail spend, but it also needs to be really looked at and focused on because there’s a huge risk factor.
If the airline manufacturer sells the products to American Airlines, Southwest, and there’s a food poisoning issue, and passengers get sick or die. That’s a massive brand breach, and there’s going to be major repercussions company-wide. So it’s really important that manufacturers know about their tail spend and also look at assessing these other five factors that I just mentioned.
Sam Gupta 19:24
Okay, so before we go to medicine, I have to ask you this, Sarah, so obviously, in medicine, you can chime in as well. I’m pretty sure you would agree that there is probably one of the most articulate people. So since you mentioned, Sarah, that your father is a writer, is the articulation coming from there, or where is it coming from? You have to tell me that.
Sarah Scudder 19:43
I’m a little slow, like it takes me a while to understand things and process, and so because that’s just how I’ve always been when I need to retain information. I appreciate it when other people write things and speak.
And then make them very simple and easy for me to understand. So I like getting my information that way. So I try to return the favor and make things really clear and simple for other people medicine do agree with me or not.
Sam Gupta 20:11
She’s super articulate, right.
###Madison Mobley 20:15
I agree every day of the week and twice on Sunday. I agree. Yes, I agree.
Sam Gupta 20:22
And I love it. Alright, so now I need to come to you. Do you agree with Sarah with respect to the tail spend? Do you have anything else to add there?
Madison Mobley 20:30
Yeah, I agree. And one of the things Sarah alluded to, which was looking very critically at your spend as an organization to define what is and isn’t classified as tail spend or tactical versus strategic, because then the thing I would double click on an ad is that tail spend depending on the organization can have a ton of definitions, none of them right or wrong, it can include everything from you know, misclassified purchases to even Maverick spend.
And for those that have heard that term or not, it’s typically spent that’s not under contract, not necessarily managed by procurement, and oftentimes non-compliant, so you get some of that too. But even within the tail, you’ll hear terms like the meat of the tail. And of course, as I recently mentioned, Maverick, but all of that is defined by organization stakeholders, and Sarah’s point is well about the risk to the organization versus quality concerns, environmental impacts, social factors, supplier diversity, things that are looking at tailspin in a very strict fashion doesn’t capture.
This is why the conversation around what does a sound tail spend management strategy looks like. And it can range from very, very simplistic and approach to significantly more advanced, and the more advanced you get in your thinking and approach to tail spend management, the more likely you are to account for those other things that making decisions solely based on price is not going to capture.
Sarah Scudder 22:14
Yeah, and Madison, one of the things that I think is so important for companies, when they’re deciding that they’re really going to look at all of their spend and look at some of this non-strategic spend in these smaller purchases, it all starts with data.
So I recommend that any manufacturer that is really going to try to get their spend more under control. And in a managed program. Step one is to get your data in order. So our friend, Susan Walsh, who is also one of the top 10 influencers in procurement and supply chain, she’s the classification guru, and she has a business around helping companies clean up their data.
And I think it’s so important. So without having good data, you can’t make decisions. And it’s hard to classify and prioritize where to spend your time and resources. So data number one, two, and three get your data in order, then once you have your data, then you can look at it and make very smart strategic decisions about what you’re going to then do and how you’re going to act on it.
Sam Gupta 23:28
Amazing, so guys, now we have to talk about the stories and medicine. I know that you have very exciting stories, right. So we are going to have a little competition. First, we are going to start with Madison. And then we are going to follow up with Sarah because Sarah always has very good stories. So Madison, do you want to start with your story first?
Madison Mobley 23:48
Yeah, I’m happy to start, although I’m quite certain Sarah is going to bring the heat and will probably be significantly more exciting to me. However, let’s get into it. So going to leave these customers, or I should say partners, nameless, but I want to walk you all through a few stories.
The first certainly in the manufacturing space on the west coast is the electric car manufacturing space, specifically. And the use case was pretty straightforward, extremely manual processes. They had identified some, let’s call it low hanging fruit we mentioned earlier that tail spend is often very, very much indicative of kind of a company’s indirect bending profile and so had identified an opportunity within their it category, and through leveraging fair market to run major RFI through the platform to realize savings but also to benchmark against other customers what was important for their core negotiations fast forward after partnering formally with the fair market, they were able to do a few things.
Madison Mobley 24:57
So the first is 10x ROI and identified savings 9x ROI and awarded savings. And these results were achieved in a matter of six to eight months, right, which is significant when you’re thinking about a world where we’re managing a down economy, we’re managing a pandemic, etc.
And all of this was done and supplemental to an existing in-place ERP and P2P system. And they’ve since expanded to other categories, which speaks to one approach one could take when getting their tail in order.
So one of the things that certainly helped was the assist of technological innovation, right. So one of the things that FairMarkit uniquely provides is the ability to execute touchless sourcing events that don’t replace the value of procurement people’s and natural intelligence around the work that they do.
Madison Mobley 25:55
But augmenting their source to pay activities, allowing them to extend their reach, and gain visibility into spend they weren’t previously able to manage. So the technology piece certainly helped in not only automating prior sourcing activity but also granting this particular partner visibility into not only their strategic spend, which they were doing and managing pretty well but also their tail and their quote-unquote non-strategic and tactical spin.
And to Sarah’s earlier point, when you have data, and you have visibility to data, and all stakeholders can access that data, you’re able to make meaningful and powerful decisions that drive high cost and efficiency savings.
Sam Gupta 26:45
Okay, now, do you want to go to your second one?
Madison Mobley 26:48
Yeah, the second one I’ll go through pretty quickly, but also in the manufacturing space. Also, on the west coast, the current state at the time that we explored partnering with them few things, one, their indirect spend was being manually sourced.
And oftentimes, business decisions defer to incumbent suppliers, and oftentimes not ever receiving competitive pricing for the things that they were looking to buy lead times were incredibly high limited visibility into their indirect supplier ecosystem.
Fast forward partnering with the FairMarkit, again, in this case, and unlocking the power of automation, and touchless sourcing, in many respects, few things happened $3 million to date source through the FairMarkit right now around 30%, and identified savings, which is creeping up and around a million dollars of savings since joining them as partners, and it’s not even been a year, right. So you begin to see what’s possible when you pair natural intelligence, the work that humans are doing day in and day out with technology, and the innovations that are happening in this space.
Sam Gupta 28:06
Okay, Sarah, do you want to start with your stories now?
Sarah Scudder 28:08
Yeah, so we have a manufacturing client that we’ve been working with for a couple of years. So the example I’m going to give is, is related to print and marketing spend. So I think it’s important to mention that manufacturers spend a lot of money on printed material, they may not know it, and it may not be classified as a print, but they do spend a lot on that category.
That would be things like packaging, labels, forms, tags, and all the marketing print. And then you’ve got safety print for fulfillment centers and for warehouses. So we started talking to this manufacturer, and they told us that they spent less than half a million dollars a year on print and that it wasn’t a high enough priority for them.
They had more strategic spend categories that they needed to focus on. It just wasn’t enough money for them to pay attention to. So we made one simple ask of this team that we were talking to. We said would you be willing to spend an hour working with your accounting team to tail spend data for your last 12 months and just find out how much you spent on print? All we asked.
Sarah Scudder 29:34
So they agreed and fast forward. A month later, we had a follow-up meeting, and they came to learn that they were spending $5 million dollars a year on print, not less than half a million. And they were shocked, and this happens a lot with manufacturers. They don’t realize how much money they’re spending on printed material.
It’s kind of like the whole thing out of sight, out of mind. Or we do what we’ve always done, right. So we are different stakeholders, and teams have been buying from different suppliers for years. So we just keep doing it. So one of the reasons why they were so out. It was such a shocking discrepancy that their data was not really coded well.
So their finance team was putting any marketing-related spend, and a lot of their print fell within the marketing spend in their marketing bucket. And that marketing bucket wasn’t broken out by subcategories. So this is a manufacturer that spends a lot on marketing.
Sarah Scudder 30:46
They’ve got a big media to spend, they’ve got an agency spend. They’re doing sales and events. So that’s a big spend, they’ve got freight and logistics, they’ve got marketing technology. So all of that was kind of bundled together.
In this massive bucket of marketing, well, within that massive bucket was print. And that was where that $5 million was pulled out. Once the organization decided to work with us and put more strategic technology-driven solutions in place to automate competitive bidding for all the print that they procured, we’ve been able to save them about 21% a year. So a 21% savings off of $5 million spend year over year savings is pretty significant.
Sarah Scudder 31:37
And I have to say that their CFO is pretty darn happy with their results because that has a direct impact on the finance and the operations team because it’s giving the company more money to focus on other strategic initiatives. It’s the example I like to use when I meet with somebody, and I’ll show them the same item. I’ll have it in my right hand and my left hand, and I’ll say, Do you see any difference between these two items?
And the manufacturer will say no, we don’t see any difference? And I’ll say, okay, well, these are exactly the same. One of them is 20% less, which one would you like? Well, they want the one that’s 20% less, right. So that’s an example of how manufacturers can really focus on tail spend by getting their print bend under control.
Sam Gupta 32:34
Yeah, and CFOs definitely like to save money. So they would definitely appreciate the story. So thank you so much for sharing that setup. So we need to balance things out medicine share two stories. So now I need one more from you have been more.
Sarah Scudder 32:46
My other example is very similar because what I just mentioned is what we see happening all the time with our clients in the manufacturing space. Same situation, different numbers manufacturer wasn’t really realizing how much money they were spending on print.
And they thought it was a certain amount. After doing some digging, they realized it was much greater, thus putting in a more strategic solution with us to better manage tail spend. So it happens time and time again with manufacturers.
Sam Gupta 33:25
Amazing. That’s it for today. Do you guys have any last-minute closing thoughts?
Sarah Scudder 33:31
So I’m gonna start with you, Sarah. Yeah. So for manufacturers, I think it’s really important for them to look at leveraging technology and ways to automate a lot of the manual work that’s being done with tail spend, so they can free up time and resources for their teams to focus on innovation, and help to propel their companies forward.
Sam Gupta 33:53
Okay, Madison, do you have any last-minute closing thoughts when you can?
Madison Mobley 33:56
Yeah, the one thing I’ll say is that leaving 20%, right, even if we’re being conservative of your budget, unmanaged tail sped is a massive strain on capital and human resources. And so I invite everyone listening to this conversation to just do it, get your tail in order.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that fair market is uniquely positioned to help and guide in this area, but also open to being challenged if there’s someone out there who can also contribute right to the conversation because it’s that important and so happy to be having this conversation today.
Sam Gupta 34:35
Okay, and my personal takeaway from the conversation is going to be irrespective of how ugly the tail may be, the tail could be bigger than what you think, so pay attention to your tail. So on that note, guys, I want to thank you for your time. I really enjoyed this discussion.
Sam Gupta 34:54
Thank you, Sam. I cannot thank our guests enough for coming on the show for sharing their knowledge and journey. I always pick up learnings from our guests, and hopefully, you learned something new today.
If you want to learn more about Madison, head over to MadisonMobley.com. If you want to learn more about Sarah, head over to rsnetwork.com. Links and more information will also be available in the show notes.
If anything in this podcast resonated with you and your business, you might want to check out the related episodes, including the interview with Francois Jeffrey from Noviland, who discusses what manufacturers need to know about working with international suppliers. Also, the interview with Susan Walsh, who discusses how to normalize your product, customer, and vendor data to avoid planning and forecasting issues with your inventory.
Also, don’t forget to subscribe and spread the word among folks with similar backgrounds. If you have any questions or comments about the show, please review or rate us on your favorite podcasting platform or DM me on any social channels. I’ll try my best to respond personally and make sure you get help. Thank you, and I hope to see you on the next episode of the WBS podcast.
Outro 36:08
Thank you for listening to another episode of The WBS podcast. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform, so you never miss an episode. For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, check out our community at wbs.rocks. We’ll see you next time.
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