A number of vendors have a number of representatives whose sole job is to pound on your door and tell you about all the advantages of a supplier network – advantages that, as a few of you have unfortunately realized, never materialize unless you have the right network with the right suppliers participating. And even then, the high fees associated with some of these networks, which are often hidden and don’t show themselves until after you’ve sunk a significant investment into the project, should make anyone question how valuable they really are.
The negativity out of the way, implemented properly, a supplier network can provide you with a host of benefits with respect to multiple aspects of supplier management – relationship, performance, and information (to name a few) – that are simply unattainable by any other technology on the e-Sourcing and e-Procurement marketplace today … but only if it’s done right. The reality is that when it comes to supplier networks, we are often holding the sharpest double-edged sword of them all. If it’s done right, it can slice though inefficiencies and costs like a hot knife through warm butter; but if it’s done wrong, you stand to lose a lot more than just your investment – your productivity, key suppliers, and even brand reputation can vanish faster than the last drops of dew on a hot spring day!
That’s why the questions posed below are so important. If you don’t understand why you need to ask them, and the reasons the desired responses are so critical, you could end up selecting a supplier network or catalogue management solution that is entirely wrong for you and your organization. Since this could actually move you significantly backwards on the innovation curve, I think it’s critical that you cut through the buzz and hone in on the real benefits as quickly as possible when making your assessments.
1. Does the supplier network / catalogue solution support integration with your suppliers’ current web-catalogue solution? And what’s involved?
Most suppliers today already have electronic catalogues, despite the myth that some vendors might be propagating. After all, do you really think they manage their price lists using paper-based general ledgers? They manage it using databases*, and most of them make their standard pricing available over the web. The less sophisticated will use flat files, which can be downloaded through batch processes over FTP by clients on a regular, if not daily, basis. The more sophisticated will have a full website with client login and dedicated pricing. Thus, when a vendor says most suppliers don’t have a catalogue, what the vendor means is that most suppliers don’t have a catalogue in their (proprietary) format.
However, data transformation is not nearly as difficult as most people will make it out to be – after all, even Excel supports multiple file formats, and your average analyst is quite adept at successfully importing any text-based flat file format. Plus, most of the bigger vendors will support a standard such as EDI (if they’re old school) or XML (if they have accepted that the times they are a-changing’), so how hard should it really be to load a catalogue into a supplier network?
The correct answer is – it shouldn’t. It should be a 5 minute exercise. If your potential technology vendor says it takes on average a day to a week to enable a supplier and add a catalogue, they don’t have a modern supplier network. A modern supplier network uses the network that’s already in place – the world wide web and the internet on which it is based – and connects to supplier catalogues in their native format. This makes integration as simple as entering the URL to the supplier catalog, specifying the connection protocol, selecting the default file or data record format, and entering the information required (such as user name and password) to meet the security requirements. This should literally be a 5-minute task if the connection protocol, file format, and security protocols are all based on accepted standards. If there are slight modifications of the standard, it should simply be matter of selecting the closest configuration and specifying the necessary changes – a task that should only take a few hours if the application makes use of modern agent technology and business process management.
* As much as I may hate to admit it, Microsoft Access is a database. A rudimentary one, but a database nonetheless.
2. Does the supplier network / catalogue solution support the integration of multiple catalogues into one coherent view?
Not only should it be trivial to add a supplier’s pre-existing catalogue to the network, or enable them to create a catalogue in any format they choose, but it should also be trivial to browse all of the catalogues simultaneously in one coherent view. After all, would Amazon be as popular as it was today if you had to go to one page to search for books, another to search for DVDs, and another to search for CDs? And then make each purchase separately? How popular would e-Bay be if you had to go to eBayCDs to buy and sell CDs, eBayClocks to buy and sell clocks, and eBayBeenieBabies to buy and sell beenie babies? And more importantly, what if you could only search one seller at a time?
The power of a catalogue application rests in its ability to reduce complexity – not in its ability to create it! If you need to buy handhelds, chances are you can buy them from your electronics vendors, your office supplies vendors, and your cell phone carriers. Do you really want to search all three catalogues separately for the best deal? No! You want to be able to do one search across all catalogues and have all of the results compared side-by-side in one consistent view. Consumer comparison web-sites have been doing this for close to a decade – so why shouldn’t your “enterprise” product do it – and do it better? After all, you’re paying for the enterprise supplier network* – so you benefit from it!
* If it’s supplier funded, then you’re paying even more! And don’t let any snake oil salesman convince you otherwise. After all, if I have to fork over 1% of all transaction costs in “network fees”, then I’m going to have to raise my best price by 1% to cover that. Let’s say you buy $10M worth of goods from me through the network. That says it’s costing me $100,000 to serve you. That says I have to charge you $100,000 more to cover that cost of doing business. That says the cost of doing business through the network with me alone costs you $100,000! If you have a network, you probably have at least your top 20 suppliers in it. Let’s say you do a total of $250M of business through the network. Since every supplier pays the same fee, this network is costing you $2.5M a year … for what is nothing more than a catalogue! To put this in perspective, you could have a small team of call center workers in India maintain the different vendor catalogues for you manually for about 1/10th of that. That’s why the following question is probably the most important question of all!
3. Is it expensive for suppliers to use the supplier network / catalogue management solution?
The answer you want to hear is “No – it doesn’t cost suppliers anything to use our network. There are no fees for vendors, and since we can integrate with all of the following standard protocols and data formats, you can link to the catalogue that your average supplier, who has upgraded their technology in the last five to seven years, already has in place with virtually no effort on your part or theirs. And if they don’t have a catalogue, they can use these tools to build one either locally on their machine, for upload in a standard file format, or over the web through an easy to use GUI.” This is because just about any other answer costs your supplier money, which, one way or another, will cost you.
If it’s costly for the supplier, either in terms of dollars or resources, one of two things are going to happen. The supplier is going to refuse to join the network, which is going to prevent you from realizing the benefits that you hoped to realize by selecting the network, or the supplier is going to factor in the cost of doing business with you through the network. (And if you have a contract in place that fixes prices for the mid-term, then the costs of using the network go up even more, since the supplier will have to increase their prices even more when the current contract expires to make up for the losses they are going to take in the near-term!)
The reality is that, unlike BI and other e-Procurement technologies where you only need to capture the 20% of suppliers who constitute 80% of the business in order to see a return, supplier network technologies are only beneficial if you have at least 80% of your suppliers enabled because most of your time is spent dealing with suppliers who are not enabled! If a supplier is enabled in your technology, then most of the transactions are automated and time is only spent dealing with exceptions. If a supplier is not enabled, then every transaction requires a time-consuming interaction. So adoption better be a no-brainer for your supplier community if you want your network to be a success.
4. How did you amass all of the suppliers currently in your network?
There’s at least one vendor whose primary selling point appears to be the number of suppliers in its network. The question is, how did they get all those suppliers to sign up, are the conditions for joining and the costs of membership the same today as they were when these suppliers first joined, and are the conditions for joining and costs of membership applicable to the business environment today?
If the network was almost free in the past, and conditions for membership rather lax, as that can be enticing to a large number of suppliers looking for a new market (as the cost of trying the network out is low and the risks nominal), that can explain a significant membership gain in a short time-frame. However, if after a certain membership size was met, the network all of a sudden introduced a five figure annual membership fee and a transaction cost of 0.5% or more, chances are good that not only did the rate of membership increase start declining rapidly, but that you’re going to have a hard time convincing all but your largest volume suppliers, who are not already in the network, to join.
5. Does it allow for override pricing based on business rules?
It might be the case that it’s easy for your supplier to maintain one catalogue with standard pricing, but hard to maintain instances with customized pricing for each client they interact with. (Especially if they are using older technology or are lacking in modern technical competence.) Therefore, it should be trivial for a user to go in and define contract pricing for, or price modifications on, each item or service that is covered under a contract. Furthermore, the user should be able to do it at the item, category, or catalogue level. Maybe you just have a simple 10% off everything deal. Then the user should be able to create just one rule and have it take effect each time pricing data is retrieved.
6. Can the solution be integrated into your current e-Procurement platform?
As I indicated in a previous post, the value of e-Procurement lies in its ability to integrate requisitions with invoices with contracts and make sure that each buy against a contract is paid at the contracted rate and that each buy that is not against a contract (but should be) is flagged and brought to the attention of the appropriate manager. Thus, it’s critical that your supply network solution provide a simple mechanism for getting requisitions out of the network and into your e-Procurement platform.