Daily Archives: June 1, 2009

New and 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.

The following is a short selection of upcoming webinars:

Upcoming Webcasts

Date & Time Webcast
2009-Jun-9

11:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

Balancing Supply Management Risk with Reward

Sponsor: Supply and Demand Chain Executive

2009-Jun-10

14:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

Sourcing Professional Services

Sponsor: PurchasingNet

2009-Jun-11

11:00 GMT-07:00/MST/PDT

Building a Business Case for a Contract Management Solution at Your Company

Sponsor: Selectica

2009-Jun-18

16:00 GMT/WET

Ask The Expert – Are You Selling Yourself?

Sponsor: IACCM

2009-Jun-18

14:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

Delivering Retail Distribution Excellence

Sponsor: Logistics Management

The following are some of the big events coming up this fall:

Conferences This Fall

Dates Conference Sponsor
2009-Oct-5 to

2009-Oct-6

EMEA Sourcing Industry Conference

London, England, UK (Europe)

TPI
2009-Oct-14 to

2009-Oct-16

3rd Sustainable Supply Chain Summit

San Francisco, California, USA (North-America)

EyeForTransport
2009-Nov-1 to

2009-Nov-3

The Logistics & Supply Chain Forum

Scottsdale, Arizona, USA (North-America)

Richmond Events
2009-Nov-2 to

2009-Nov-5

ProcureCon 2009

Brussels, Brussels, Belgium (Europe)

WBR
2009-Nov-4 to

2009-Nov-6

Reposition 2009 – Core Strength: The Power of Improved Supply Chain Fundamentals

Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada (North-America)

CITT

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!

Is it Time to Get Hip with Hiperos?

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Hiperos is a relatively new entrant in the space focussed on what they call “Extended Enterprise Management”, which is their term for what you get when you amalgamate (what I call) Enterprise Contract Management, Compliance, Performance, and Sustainability into a single 360° solution platform.

The goals of the platform are to provide you with:

  • Supplier Information Central
    • collect all supplier information in one application
    • allow it to be entered and reviewed by suppliers, third parties, and internal staff, according to roles and permissions
    • allow for the creation of quick and easy monitoring reports that can be displayed in a dashboard
  • Cross-Enterprise Supply Chain Risk Assessment
    • allow risk to be evaluated against any supplier or service provider
    • allow risk to be evaluated by category / product line
    • allow risk management programs to be created based on whatever supplier / risk segmentation criteria you select
  • Supplier Performance Management
    • allow for the easy definition of surveys and scorecards
    • allow suppliers to be evaluated based on the type of product being delivered or service being performed
    • allow for internal and external feedback, subject to approvals
  • Regulatory Compliance Management
    • support any and all compliance regulations your organization is subject to (RoHS, HIPAA, ITAR, etc.)
    • allow requirements to be easily communicated to suppliers
    • monitor responses and flag non-compliance for exception based monitoring and resolution
  • Sustainability Initiative Support
    • allow sustainability guidelines to be captured
    • allow them to be communicated across the supply chain
    • monitor adherence to implemented programs

For those of you in a rush, I’ll tell you right now that the application (which is now on R3) does precisely what Hiperos says it can do, that it’s relatively easy to configure and use (and a couple of clients have self configured it without any help at all), and that it can be configured to report on precisely what you want it to report on, and display this information in real time on every login. Furthermore, if you use it’s capabilities to augment data collected internally with data in your other entprise systems and external data sources and integrate 3rd party risk and financial data, such as what you would get from Equifax, Lexis Nexis, or D&B (using their new “D&B Inside” offering), you can truly get a 360° view. Furthermore, if you define your risk assessment and monitoring metrics accordingly (and / or select the right templates for your vertical and organizational risk management needs), my assessment is that you can be just as confident in the risk assessments as you would be if you outsourced it to a specialist consulting firm (especially if you bring one of them in to help you define your risk assessment program and insure you set up the feeds, applications, and reports appropriately).

The application allows you to define what fields you want to track, what metrics you want to use, the calculations that define those metrics, and the reports the metrics appear in. It also allows you to define as many roles as you need (buyer, manager, approver, CPO, third party auditor, supplier, etc.) and define access permissions and capabilities based on those roles. In addition to the standard supplier, contact, contract, and (enterprise) program entities, it also allows you to define “relationships” and define the data you want to capture, track, and measure against those relationships. For example, a relationship will be with a supplier, managed by a local account manager and supplier account manager, against a program type and have it’s own status and risk measurements. Collectively, these measurements and statii can be rolled up to give an overall status and risk picture, which, of course, can be drilled into at any time. You can also define as many levels of details as you need in your surveys and scorecards, which, of course, frees you from the limited capabilities of a 3-dimensional spreadsheet workbook. And it comes with template libraries for standard compliance (HIPAA, RoHS, REACH), risk management, and sustainability (carbon tracking) initiatives that can be used to jumpstart configuration for your enterprise.

The one weakness is that while the application has been configured to be extensible and accept an unlimited number of external data sources, at this point in time, only RSS Feeds and a couple of 3rd party financial feeds are configured out-of-the-box. This means that you will have to do some integration with appropriate 3rd party data sources to get a 360° view, which is vital because, if you don’t have someone on the ground, or a good relationship with a 3rd party auditor you can trust, you can’t trust self-submitted supplier surveys alone. (And, these days, some of the best leading indicators are those you get from financial risk data consolidators like D&B — who acquired Open Ratings — and Equifax — who acquired Austin Tetra — and from import/export visibility companies like Zepol, Import Genius, and Panjiva.)

The application is one that is definitely worth looking at, because the only other providers offering integrated solutions of the same breadth are Aravo, CVM Solutions, and, if you’re in the health-care industry, Vendormate.