The Sourcing Innovation Source-to-Pay+ Mega Map!

Now slightly less useless than every other logo map that clogs your feeds!

1. Every vendor verified to still be operating as of 4 days ago!
Compare that to the maps that often have vendors / solutions that haven’t been in business / operating as a standalone entity in months on the day of release! (Or “best-of” lists that sometimes have vendors that haven’t existed in 4 years! the doctor has seen both — this year!)

2. Every vendor logo is clickable!
the doctor doesn’t know about you, but he finds it incredibly useless when all you get is a strange symbol with no explanation or a font so small that you would need an electron microscope to read it. So, to fix that, every logo is clickable so you can go to the site and at least figure out who the vendor is.

3. Every vendor is mapped to the closest standard category/categories!
Furthermore, every category has the standard definitions used by Sourcing Innovation and Spend Matters!
the doctor can’t make sense of random categories like “specialists” or “collaborative” or “innovative“, despises when maps follow this new age analyst/consultancy award trend and give you labels you just can’t use, and gets red in the face when two very distinct categories (like e-Sourcing and Marketplaces or Expenses and AP are merged into one). Now, the doctor will also readily admit that this means that not all vendors in a category are necessarily comparable on an apples-to-apples basis, but that was never the case anyway as most solutions in a category break down into subcategories and, for example, in Supplier Management (SXM) alone, you have a CORNED QUIP mash of solutions that could be focused on just a small subset of the (at least) ten different (primary) capabilities. (See the link on the sidebar that takes you to a post that indexes 90+ Supplier Management vendors across 10 key capabilities.)

Secure Download the PDF!  (or, use HTTP) [HTML]
(5.3M; Note that the Free Adobe Reader might choke on it; Preview on Mac or a Pro PDF application on Windows will work just fine)

You Need a Plan to Mitigate Supply Chain Risks. But You Also Need a Platform.

A recent article over on Supply & Demand Chain Executive on Navigating a Supply Chain Management Toolkit noted that with a plan in place, organizations can quickly respond to any changes and help mitigate any supply chain risks.

Which is true, but how much of the risk they can mitigate is the question.

The article, which is very good and definitely worth reading (so check out the link), noted that problems arose as a result of COVID and disruptions since because many organizations use just-in-time inventory management (which we’ve already noted should have ended by now along with seasonality). The article also noted that the problems were often exacerbated by the fact that order processes were often not documented effectively and, in general, most organizations don’t spend the time and resources to really manage their supply chain. All of this is correct, as is the observation that these challenges can be alleviated with wholly embracing the tried-and-true methods for effective supply chain management because effective processes, measurements and accountability are … key to a supply chain that works for an organization.

But, on their own, not the key. Today, you also need a platform that enables the organization to:

  • quickly detect a risk event has occurred
  • quickly analyze the impact
  • quickly initiate any pre-defined mitigation plan
  • quickly implement new decisions and processes where the mitigation plan isn’t sufficient and doesn’t exist
  • monitor the impact of the risk event and the response in near real time

Otherwise, your process could be too slow, your measurements inaccessible and/or unrecorded, and your accountability (under audit) non existent.

For example, the article indicates you should start by getting a better grip on inventory management (which is correct, no product, no business for most companies), and that involves a self-assessment, forecast accuracy review, and inventory segmentation. All correct. But that doesn’t help you when all of a sudden there’s a fire in the factory, a strike at the port, or a strait/border closing. What do you do then?

It also tells you that you should focus on better supplier relations, which is also extremely important, and focus on vetting suppliers before you onboard them and then measuring them and computing the total cost of ownership of keeping them, which is also very important as suppliers should improve over time and costs should not inch up faster than inflation. It also mentions the importance of proper strategic sourcing (matrices) to get the right products from the right suppliers. Another definite. But fails to tell you what you do when all of a sudden a key supplier can’t deliver or becomes unavailable.

The answer here is you use all of your good relationships and data to immediately identify the next best supplier. If you were splitting award, you try to shift to the other supplier (if they can handle the volume — if you were doing an 80/20 split and the 80% supplier suddenly became unavailable indefinitely, the 20% might not be able to support you, or at least not for very long, and you will have to add a new supplier to the mix. If you were doing proper sourcing, and proper supplier vetting before including them in an event, then you already have potential suppliers — the runners up from your last event. A good platform will let you immediately identify them and immediately start another sourcing event to onboard a new supplier as fast as possible.

If you have a good logistics (sourcing) platform, and your primary carrier / route becomes unavailable, you may be able to identify another carrier / route that will get you the products on time, or at least be able to accelerate an order from a secondary source of supply while you wait for the first source through a lengthier route.

The point is, while you need great processes, measurements (to indicate if something is taking too long, such as an order acknowledgement or a delivery, which can be a sign of a potential risk event materializing), and accountability (to show you made efforts to detect and mitigate risks in a reasonable time frame), you can’t measure, execute processes, or provide unquestionable audit trails of accountability without a proper platform. Never forget that. (And for help, you can see our Source-to-Pay series which helps you to identify where to start with your acquisitions and what vendors you might need to look at.)

And again, remember to read the article on Navigating a Supply Chain Management Toolkit as it will help you understand the basic processes you need to put in place.

ADAPTONE: A Dynamic Adaptable Provider Tool Of Network Enablement: Supplier Management for Utilities, Construction, O&G and other Complex Industry Management

While the doctor has never covered AdaptOne on Sourcing Innovation, he did cover them in their early days over on Spend Matters back in 2018 in a 3-Part Vendor Analysis he co-authored (and yes, his credit was lost on this one too with the Spend Matters site migration) with The Prophet (Part I, Part II, and Part III, ContentHub subscription required).

As noted in 2018, AdaptOne is is a heavily customizable SIM solution where every implementation is different, customized to the precise needs of the customer. This makes it different from its peers, which generally sell “modules” that are easily bounded and definable. Furthermore, AdaptOne’s configuration is heavily centred on supplier registration, on-boarding as well as data collection and maintenance workflows, and can support as many validations as required. This is because AdaptOne leverages a business process management (BPM) development and deployment orientation as well as having a strong business consulting capability that includes the ability to work with a customer to design the perfect registration and on-boarding workflows, no matter how complicated and sophisticated, and implement the right overall “solution” on top of it.

At the time we noted that its strengths were:

  • extreme customizability
  • deep support for compliance and diversity
  • scorecards
  • onboarding
  • back-office capabilities

And it’s weaknesses were

  • No front-end BPM
  • Limited DIY scorecard capability
  • Performance Management is primarily survey
  • No DIY API

So what’s new? In a nutshell, nothing. And. Everything. Sorry, but you’ll have to read on.

The strengths are the same, and you can now add:

  • quick configurability and implementation in their core verticals that they have a lot of experience in and know well, no matter how customized your needs are (in under 3 months they can model, and implement, multiple workflows that would make the heads spin on the Big X Consultancy implementation teams if you suggested they had less than a year)
  • deep knowledge of compliance, health and safety, and insurance requirements that they can help you check, track, and report on (esp. in North America)
  • integration to (financial) risk data providers

And it’s weaknesses are the same, not because they don’t have the answer, but because their capabilities are so complex, you need (expert) training to understand what they’ve built (or they would have to build an advanced no-code process builder and automation platform on par with Tonkean to make it usable by the average person; and a small company can only specialize in one kind of powerful platform, so they chose to specialize in deep supplier management capabilities that didn’t exist when they started)

Thus,

  • there’s no front-end BPM configuration for the average user because literally everything in the platform is configurable
  • they’ve chosen to hide the scorecard builder as scorecards are highly configurable on what they can capture, the formulas that can score them, the multi-user weightings you can build, the data you can pull in (through a custom integration) vs. survey response, etc. you can restrict sections, time at regular intervals, scale, etc. etc. etc.
  • unless you have systems that you can integrate with to pull in performance data, supplier performance has to be survey or data entry, and they don’t have an open API builder due to the ease with which a user could mess up an integration with the extent of data they can pull in and the extent to which the process can be controlled
  • as everything is configurable, it’s hard to build an API usable by an average developer that takes standard data into standard fields with standard processes without building a full no-code process builder as those are customized by client (which means you have to develop at a level of abstraction that is beyond the comfort level of most configurators)

So what is AdaptOne? In short, it’s a supplier onboarding / information management / compliance / performance management platform that can be highly customized for complex project industries like utilities/energy, construction, and oil & gas that can be customized to the exact customer organization needs, which can be quite complex when the organization has to ensure that the supplier:

  • is a valid entity that can operate in the jurisdiction(s) (of relevance)
  • adheres to the necessary health & safety standards
  • has the necessary certifications
  • has the necessary insurance
  • has the appropriate capabilities
  • provides certified products
  • can provide the appropriate information for ESG reporting
  • has verifiable diversity / minority claims
  • accepts and agrees to the organization’s terms & conditions
  • … and provides this information for every location where it is needed

And that last requirement is the kicker. If you’re doing business with a supplier in multiple jurisdictions (which, FYI, can be province/state-level in some countries), you will have different requirements with respect to the acts in force that you need to adhere to, and most platforms just collect, and associate, this information at the supplier level. And that results in either the platform just tracking the lowest common denominator of information or suppliers self-selecting out of being a service provider when asked to provide an onslaught of documentation not relevant to them (when they only want to serve the buyer in one, localized, jurisdiction). This, of course, leads to less competition, higher costs, and lower service levels for the buyer.

The onboarding part of the application is not only highly configurable, but highly flexible to allow for not just customization by buyer and supplier (based on industry, geographic area, and products/services they intend to provide), but by supplier role — as the buyer can configure multiple roles on behalf of the supplier that can be used to limit which rep (or third party acting on the supplier behalf) has access to which part(s) of the profile that they can fill in (or submit updates to), can see exactly what information was provided or changed (and just that information), and can define different roles within their organization to review, approve, and (possibly) lock it down.

As with all good Procurement applications, it maintains a complete, unalterable, filterable audit log that tracks all actions by all parties, whether or not a submission, or a change, was accepted, so you can maintain the records you need to demonstrate your organization is making best effort to verify that all suppliers are compliant with all of the regulations the organization is subject to.

Furthermore, they can also integrate with your ERP or other system of record and keep all data in sync, as well as maintain a record of the last sync and immediately notify you if the data may be out of synch with the supplier (due to an unreviewed submission) or the ERP.

The supplier profiles are among the deepest of any SXM provider out there. The only profiles that go deeper out of the box are those from Supplhi, which is another specialist SXM vendor for direct/MRO procurement (and requires equally deep profiles for their A&D, Manufacturing, and CPG clients).

And management during onboarding, (mandatory) annual compliance updates, and random updates submitted during the year (when the supplier wants to support the buyer in more jurisdictions and decides to submit the necessary information proactively, or changes their insurance, or obtains a new certification, etc.) is incredibly easy as they can build as many review and approval queues as necessary, which can operate in sequence or parallel, and be visible to (just) those who need it. No searching for a supplier, or searching by supplier state, it’s all automated for onboarding, update, and information management efficiency. It will even alert you to set up required scorecards or necessary ([semi-]annual) reviews.

Search is, of course, fully functional and is across all fields and can be filtered to any subset of interest, allowing you to quickly find any supplier, or group, of interest.

Furthermore, AdaptOne recognizes that this data is needed for mandatory reporting requirements and makes it super easy to export all of the data, or any subset, to Excel for easy import to your organization’s reporting templates. They also provide standard out-of-the-box dashboards for summarizing different supplier states, process times, diversity, diversity spend (if you integrate with your spend analytics application), insurance levels, compliant suppliers, etc. and can quickly build any dashboards and reports your organization needs during configuration.

Scorecards can be configured to capture whatever is desired, with respect to any supplier subset, review team, scoring, and weighting system, on whatever basis is desired. This is vague, but that’s because they are not limited in the platform. You can have separate scorecards for Health & Safety, Performance, Product Quality, Contractor Services, etc. or combine them into a master scorecard with separate sections filled out by separate individuals. And you can even have Subcontractor Scorecards, which can rollup to a single services scorecard, if you are using a services organization that subcontracts subsets of services (such as telcos and cable providers that will subcontract installations or energy utilities that will subcontract connection/disconnection/plant construction/commissioning services). This is not something you see often (if at all).

End-user configuration is limited to what the user generally needs to do (their basic profile, communication preferences, language and currency settings, etc.) as part of their focus on simplicity and customization by role or function (as many of these organizations are not tech companies and don’t have time to learn yet another software stack), but they can extend that for buyer organizations that are above average in terms of technical sophistication (but have found that most of their clients prefer a simple application where their users can’t mess with the processes and settings they want enforced).

However, their administration control panel, limited to their consultants or trained buyer admins, is exceedingly powerful and can configure roles and groups down to field level permissions if needed, and, once users are assigned to roles and groups, the default permissions can be overridden to the extent required. All widgets / dashboards in the application can be customized, jobs can be scheduled based on highly specific activation criteria, and all application configurations can be inspected. As needed, select admin functions are made available to the buyer, such as manual pushes/synchs to the ERP, login key generation, integration configurations (if keys, licenses, etc. need to be reset). etc.

With respect to integrations, they can integrate with your risk management data or ESG data provider, your ERP (and have integrated with the majority of standard ERPs used by their target industries), and even your I2P/AP system (and your suppliers can log into one supplier portal and immediately answer 90% of their common inquiries without ever having to call you which are typically, in order: 1. when am I getting paid 2. did you approve the invoice 3. did you get the invoice 4. did you get the document 5. did you get the quote … etc.).

The AdaptOne Matrix

All AdaptOne‘s customers also have access to the AdaptOneMATRIX supplier database that they can use for supplier discovery. With over 10 million suppliers, the database is very comprehensive and provides customers with an extensive selection of suppliers to fulfill the majority of their sourcing requirements. Search can be very detailed and results refined by company name, keyword(s), status, vendor code, target supplier groups, and certifications, among other search criteria.

The results returned will have a complete high level supplier profile that will consist of name, location, company overview, contact, website, diversity and compliance certifications, and area(s) of primary offering(s).

The platform was built over time to encapsulate the almost two decades of experience they have in supporting their mid-size (read national / small multi-national) customers in complex industries with complex supplier management requirements and make it as easy as possible for the average person involved in the process to do their job. And they have achieved that goal with distinction. the doctor would say that AdaptOne is definitely a top 3 global platform for mid-size companies in Utilities, Construction, and O&G and should definitely be on the shortlist of any of these organizations on the market for a modern supplier management solution.

4 Smart Technologies Modernizing Sourcing Strategy — Not Just Doctor Approved!

IBM recently published a great article on 4 smart technologies modernizing sourcing strategies that was great for two reasons. One, they are all technologies that will greatly improve your sourcing. We’ll explain why.

Automation

Business Process Automation (BPA, or RPA — Robotic Process Automation) can optimize sourcing workflows as well as procurement workflows. With good categorization, demand forecasting, inventory management, price intelligence, templates, strategies, situational analysis (that qualitatively and quantitatively define when a strategy should be applied), and workflow, you can automate sourcing just as much as you can automate Procurement. You can eliminate all of the tactical and focus solely on the strategic analysis and decision making.

Blockchain

If you need to record information in a manner that can be publicly accessed and verified, such as to ensure that records for traceability can be independently verified, or to publicly record ownership, blockchain is a great technology as its ultra secure. In Sourcing and Procurement, it can be used to track orders, payments, accounts, and more across global supply chains and multiple private and public parties.

Analytics

In addition to providing an organization with deep insights into their spend and (process level) performance, analytics engines and their “big data brains” provide real-time sourcing flexibility and visibility to enhance order management, inventory management, and logistics management. With proper intelligence, sourcing teams can understand and act on changes in the increasingly complex supply chain — as they happen.

AI

When deep data and analytics are paired with AI, the deep insights can improve forecasts, help identify risk, and provide suggestions for management.

And this brings us to the next great aspect of the article. Not once did it mention Gen-AI. Not once. As the doctor has been stating over and over, the classic analytics, optimization and machine learning you have been ignoring for almost two decades will do wonders for your supply chain. (Blockchain is not always necessary, but will help in the right situation.)

SaaS Procurement for S2P+ Goes Beyond Basic Buying Etiquette for IT Procurement

Medium recently posted an article from ArmourZero, a cyber-security platform provider*, on IT Procurement Etiquette for User and Vendor, which I guess goes to show the lack of knowledge on how to buy among some organizations. It doesn’t go nearly far enough on what S2P buyers need to know, but it does provide basics we can build on.

The advice it provides for a user are:

  1. Do Your Homework (Create a Proper SoW): take the time to provide a proper Scope of Work (and don’t just take a vendor’s sample SoW, edit it slightly, and send it out, especially to the vendor you took it from)
  2. Professional: be neutral and don’t favour any specific vendor
  3. Transparent: be clear about the process, and if all bids exceed the budget and a reduced bid is required, be clear about the reason for going back and any modifications to the SoW to allow vendors to be within a budget range
  4. Fair: stick to the rules; not even incumbents get to submit late; if you have a minimum number of bids in by the deadline, you work with those; you weight on the same scales; etc.
  5. No Personal Interest: don’t accept gifts; don’t vote on the bid where you have a relationship; etc.

However, in our space, you have to start with:

  • Do Your Tech Market Research: make sure you understand the different types of solutions in the market, what the baselines are, and what the standard terminology is (sourcing != procurement)
  • Do Your Deep Dive Tech Market Research: once you figure out the major area, figure out the right sub area — a Strategic Sourcing Solution is not a Strategic Sourcing Solution is not a Strategic Sourcing Solution; a CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) is not a CLM is not a CLM; and an SXM is definitely not an SXM which is definitely not an SXM; in the case of Strategic Sourcing, do you mean RFX? e-Auction? or optimization-backed sourcing? in the case of CLM, do you mean Negotiation, Analysis, or Governance? in the third case, which element(s) of the CORNED QUIP mash are you looking for: compliance? orchestration? relationship? network? enablement? discovery? quality? uncertainty? information? performance? No vendor does more than half of these, and those vendors will only do a couple of areas really deep and more-or-less fake the rest!
  • Write a Process and Results Oriented RFP (& SoW): it’s not features or functions (beyond the foundational functions all applications in the class need to support) it’s the processes you need to support, the systems you need to integrate with, and the results you need to get — let the vendors describe how they will solve them, not just check meaningless yes/no boxes … they might have a more efficient way to support your process, a faster way to get results, etc.; the same goes for any implementations, integrations, services, etc. — make sure it focusses on what you need to accomplish, not meaningless check-the-box exercises
  • Do Your Due Diligence Vendor Research: once you have figured out the solutions you need and the primary capabilities you are looking for, make sure the vendors you invite not only offer the type of solution, but have (most of) the foundations of the capabilities you are looking for; use analyst firms, maps, tech matches, and expert analyst consultants to build your short-list of mandarin to tangerine to orange vendors vs random google searches that, if you are lucky, will give you apples to oranges, and if you are not, will give you rutabagas to oranges to tofu vendor matches

Then apply the rest of the advice in the linked article by ArmourZero.

You’ll have better success in your RFP, negotiations, and your implementation if you do all of your homework first, even though it is a lot more extensive than you want it to be. (But remember, there are expert analyst consultants who can help you. No one says you can’t hire an expert tutor! And the reality is that you should spend five figures before making a six to seven figure investment (as there will be implementation, integration, and support costs on top of that six-plus license fee), and maybe even do a six-figure deep dive process and technical maturity assessment, market scan, and custom RFP/SoW generation project with an expert analyst consultant before signing a recurring [high] seven figure suite deal.

* A CyberSecurity firm is the last vendor you’d expect to be authoring such a post (given the massive increase in CyberAttacks since 2019), but I guess it shows just how bad buying can be if they felt the need to write on this vs. a SaaS Management Vendor