Monthly Archives: April 2009

A FieldGlass Update

Those of you who followed the travels of the Sourcing Maniacs on their 2008 Vendor Tour may recall that one of their stops was FieldGlass (in Chicago), a provider of an on-demand contingent workforce management solution.

A well-designed contingent workforce management solution will streamline the contingent labor requisition process, simplify the identification of qualified resources, automate the distribution of requests, standardize resource rates, automate the collection of quotes, track contracts, and insure that staffing companies and contractors always bill at the approved rate, and only for approved hours on approved projects. The solution will reduce recruitment costs, processing costs, and payment costs as well as prevent overcharges and overpayments, which can often total 20% or more at companies with a large contingent workforce and no solution to manage the process.

FieldGlass has taken the SaaS approach to application development, and instead of one big release every year or two, they’ve moved to a quarterly release cycle where they package smaller, but useful updates every quarter. Their latest release adds or improves on four areas functionality:

  • fine-grained service control
    More granular cost allocation, rate card flexibility and tracking down to GL accounts.
  • time-sheet review process
    The ability to have suppliers and local program managers review time-sheets as part of the approval process so that errors are caught, and corrected, earlier (or, in the worst case, supply managers cannot claim lack of knowledge of deceptive billing as they have to sign off).
  • improved ad-hoc approval support
    Sometimes there’s an emergency where you need someone right away and can’t follow the usual process.
  • decision wizard
    That can be used to guide you through the the process.

It was the last capability that caught my attention. With so many options to choose from in a large company: current approved staffing vendor, new recruiter, direct hire … statement of work, position advertisement, RFX … hourly rate, salary, fixed price contract … it can be hard for someone outside of HR and new to their position to make the right decision. The ability to create company specific decision trees for staffing and hiring allows a manager to walk through a series of Y/N or multiple-choice questions and quickly figure out the route they should be taking, the partner (if any) they should be using, the type of position they should be filling, and how they should be classifying it. This, in turn, allows a manager to focus on finding the right resource, instead of wasting time fiddling with processes, which is what workforce management should be all about.

What’s Worse? The Personal Automobile or 15 Container Ships?

A recent article in The Guardian noted that the health risks of shipping pollution have been ‘underestimated’, to put it very lightly. A recent study by the Danish government’s environmental agency found that ONE giant container ship can emit the same amount of cancer and asthma-causing chemicals as 50 Million cars. That’s right … just 15 of the world’s biggest cargo ships emit more pollution than the roughly 750 Million cars currently in operation around the globe … AND THERE ARE 90,000 of them! Current estimates is that global shipping is responsible for 3.5% to 4.0% of ALL climate change emissions.

So the next time you start calculating the costs of global sourcing you might want to step back and think about whether a temporary savings of a few percentage points is really worth global sourcing when YOU could be ultimately responsible for not only draining trillions of dollars from the world’s economy to pay for the health care required to treat the tens of thousands of victims who suffer from pollution-induced lung and heart disease but causing thousands of deaths a year. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time for home-cost country sourcing.

P2P On a Budget … Is There Any Other Way?

About the same time I was authoring my rebuttal on why there’s nothing more important than a good “test drive” — even in e-Procurement, yet another e-mail from the SSON hit my inbox. This one started off promoting P2P on a Budget … and all I could think was “is there any other way?“. After all, as per my previous post, the only requirements for a P2P system is that it permit e-Procurement, possibly through a (n integrated) third-party (e-Procurement) platform that permits electronic ordering, and that it permit payment approval, possibly through a(n integrated) third-party (e-Payment) platform. That’s not a lot of functionality, and definitely not a lot of value, so you shouldn’t be paying that much for a P2P solution in the first place.

That being said, since most people still don’t know the difference between P2P, EIPP, and e-Procurement (see my last post for an explanation), I thought I’d check it out in case some of the “experts” they gathered didn’t know the difference either and offered up valuable e-Procurement advice in place of relatively valueless P2P advice.

When the editors said that sometimes you have to spend a little to save a lot and that investment during all but the most terminal of cash crises can result in savings that can make the difference between success and a very final failure, they’re right. Right now, small investments in spend analysis, sourcing expertise and supporting systems, expert consultants (like yours truly), and e-Procurement systems to minimize your transaction costs, prevent maverick buying, and enforce negotiated prices can save you a small fortune (or, if you’re particularly inefficient, which at least 85% of companies are given that only 15% have a CPO in the C-suite, a large fortune).

However, the article on how to get the best from your procure-to-pay process was pretty useless as the contributors were all over the map. The contributor from Eli Lilly talked about the importance of speedy invoice management, which doesn’t really save you anything. The contributor from Lockheed Martin discusses the importance of JIT delivery, which is off-topic. And the contributor from Schneider Electric took a broad brush to demand management, spend management, and cash management without any apparent understanding of where P2P fits in a discussion that tackled (human) resource allocation, contract management, differentiated spend management, demand management, centralized invoice management, and process standardization. Finally, the contributor from Emerson Argentina talked about stock reduction, volume leverage, and extended payment terms. And it got worse from there.

In my view, it was a wasted effort on SSON’s part and a total waste of any reader’s time because getting value from P2P is easy. Here’s the magic formula.

  1. Standardize your processes and make them e-Procurement friendly.
  2. Adpot a low-cost SaaS end-to-end e-Procurement platform that supports purchase orders, invoices, and electronic requisitions through “cart-based” interfaces that can be “integrated” with your current AP and e-Payment systems through standard XML interfaces and securely transmitted data files or feeds.
  3. Load your catalogs, integrate your punch-outs, define your buying rules, and, most importantly load your contracts and price tables and make sure they override catalog and punch-out prices (or obtain a compliance monitoring solution).
  4. No requisitions not through the system.

That’s it. Instant value. Buying rules ensure that no purchases can be made off-contract without authorization. Price rules ensure that suppliers don’t “accidentally” change punch-out pricing and buying rules can be defined to insure that “approved” products don’t get replaced with “unapproved” ones. Authorizations insure that no one spends above their allowance without approval. And the net result is you never pay more than the contract price, discounts and rebates are captured up front, and unnecessary spend is stopped dead in its tracks. This means you don’t have to pay a consultancy $10K to help you find and recover $100K in over charges from your office supplies vendor or $50K to help you find and recover $500K in overcharges from your hardware provider who’s best price on a system configuration that hasn’t changed in a year only declined 0.3% a month when most hardware depreciates 3% a month.

Of course, if you want to take the hard road, you can do it the hard way and read the 20 or so pages provided by the SSON which does a great job of leading you in circles and never getting to the point.

Upcoming Events from the #1 Supply Chain Resource Site

The Sourcing Innovation Resource Site, always immediately accessible from the link under the “Free Resources” section of the sidebar, continues to add new content on a weekly, and often daily, basis. Unlike many “resource”, “best of”, or “portal sites” that are abandoned almost as quickly as they are thrown together, the resource site is actively maintained (and dead links are removed on a regular, usually weekly, basis). In fact, there have been over 25 resource additions in the past week alone.

The total number of unique, active resources exceeds the 2,600 mark, and breaks down as follows:

And includes the following recent additions, among many others:

Conferences

Dates Conference Sponsor
2009-Apr-28 to
  

2009-Apr-30

 Multimodal
  

Birmingham, England, UK (Europe)

 Clarion Events
2009-May-4 to
  

2009-May-7

 Offshore Technology Conference
  

Houston, Texas, USA (North-America)

 OTC
2009-May-5 to
  

2009-May-7

 Shipper Symposium
  

Dallas, Texas, USA (North-America)

 Transplace
2009-May-27 to
  

2009-May-28

 Consumer Packaged Goods Forecasting & Planning Summit
  

Chicago, Illinois, USA (North-America)

 IE Group
2009-Jun-8 to
  

2009-Jun-11

 MDM East
  

New York, New York, USA (North-America)

 MDM East

Webcasts

Date & Time Webcast
2009-Apr-21

13:00 GMT-06:00/CST/MDT

 Measuring Your Green Initiatives
  

Sponsor: APICS
2009-Apr-22

11:00 GMT-05:00/CDT/EST

 Weathering the Storm: Managing in Economic Crisis
  

Sponsor: CSCMP
2009-Apr-29

8:00 GMT-07:00/MST/PDT

 Combining Warehousing with Transportation Management: Monitor the Pulse of Your Supply Chain
  

Sponsor: QAD
2009-May-1

11:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

 Transforming the High-Tech Supply Chain
  

Sponsor: SCC
2009-May-8

11:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

 Supply Chain Talent – Where Next?
  

Sponsor: SCC

which are all readily searchable from the comprehensive Site-Search page. So don’t forget to review the resource site on a weekly basis. You just might find what you didn’t even know you were looking for!

And continue to keep a sharp eye out for new content which will be coming on-line in the near future!

Did We Need Yet Another Study To Tell Us That Slave-Driving Isn’t Productive?

A recent study from the University of Melbourne, covered by Computer World, found that workers are more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure. Duh! Anyone with two working brain cells in IT should be able to tell you that.

Specifically, it found that People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t. The explanation given is that people need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Duh! Anyone who’s taught can tell you that. Every 17 to 20 minutes, you lose 1/3 of your audience if you don’t shake things up a bit, change the topic, wake them up, etc.

And even more insightful, the press release notes that it is important such browsing is done in moderation, as internet addiction can have the reverse effect. Duh! If you spend 8 hours a day following the twits that comprise the twittersphere, then you’re obviously not going to get anything done.

At least the computerworld article had the good sense to state the obvious points that should have been made.

  • It gets personal things off your mind.
    It’s hard to work distracted. If you can pop-on the internet, and get an annoyance like paying a bill, pre-ordering take-out, or getting out a message you can’t forget to deliver over with, you free yourself of distractions and this enables you to concentrate (providing you turn off those twitter feeds).
  • It converts unnecessary real-time interactions into asynchronous ones
    Nothing destroys deep concentration more than a five minute “pop-in” by a colleague who just feels the need to “talk”. If it’s unimportant, they can write you an e-mail, and you can read it later when you’re not in the middle of something important.
  • It makes work enjoyable.
    No one is productive in workplace hell where bosses spend all their time reciting garbage along the lines of “personal time steals from the company” and doing everything they can to squash happiness. Happy workers are productive workers. Productive workers create value. And that’s what sells in today’s economy.

So keep your workplace fun and free of too many unnecessary restrictions. As long as employee behavior is responsible, you’ll get your money’s worth.