Many providers, particularly those that only service the indirect sourcing space, believe that sourcing starts with an e-RFX or auction for a commodity, results in a contract, and ends with order delivery. But things aren’t so simple in the direct space.

In the direct space, the lifecycle starts way back at new product design as you are sourcing not a pre-defined commodity part, but a custom-made part. You have to insure that the design is appropriate with respect to the capabilities of your potential supply base; you have to insure that the raw materials are available, in the requisite quantities, at the appropriate times, in the manufacturing regions; and you have to make sure that the projected cost does not exceed the maximum cost that would make the end product viable for sale in your target market. You also need to collaborate with your supply base in the design, as needed, to optimize the design for production.

Once you have the design, you need to go through a negotiation and collaboration intensive sourcing process to select one, maybe two, suppliers who will manufacture the part for you. This involves the sharing of confidential information, which needs to be done in a secure manner, as well as collaboration on forecasts and target delivery dates.

Once you have an award, you have to manage the procurement, which usually has to coincide with the procurement of other custom parts, which have to hit a single location at the same time for integration into the final end-product, which then has to be packaged and shipped to the end customer. This involves coordination between manufacturers, 3PLs, assemblers, and end retailers. Plus, you still have to insure prices are contract prices, charges are valid charges, and that the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed, as you would in indirect procurement.

As you can see, whereas indirect sourcing can often be accomplished with just e-RFX, e-Auction, and Contract Management — with Spend Analysis and Decision Optimization for higher-value projects — direct sourcing requires extensive integrated project management capabilities, product lifecycle management, collaboration capabilities, Bill-of-Material management, and the ability to easily integrate with third party platforms.

First of all, our platform is entirely new, built from the ground up to handle the direct sourcing process, which our senior management and developers are intimately familiar with. This allows us to do things that retrofitted indirect sourcing platforms can’t do.

Second, we have our own universal data model that underlies our application and it can integrate with data in over 1500 different formats.

Third, we have PLM built in at the core, and this allows us to enable direct sourcing professionals to track a project from beginning to end and always access the most recent data, regardless of which module they are in.

Fourth, we have fine-grained security that allows us to assign access permissions down at the data element level that indicates who can see the data, where (by IP), when, and how they can access it (read-only, view-only, etc.).

Fifth, we’ve integrated a compliance tracking module that allows companies to track regulatory requirements such as REACH, ITAR, etc. from product inception to product end-of-life, and insure that such requirements are met at every stage of the sourcing process.

Sixth, we’ve re-invented “spend analysis” for direct sourcing. Although I can’t say anything yet … we’re still finalizing the initial product offering and working on getting our first beta projects under way, I can say that our founders and developers have been involved with spend analysis since the days of FreeMarkets, and know why traditional “spend analysis”, developed in the indirect world, just doesn’t cut it in the direct world.