In Part I, I discussed how I was quite impressed with Rosslyn Analytics‘ spend analysis platform and their overall approach to the problem as compared to many of the spend analysis providers in the space and how I saw vision, clarity, and execution in their offering. In this post, I am going to discuss their current platform capabilities and overview a few of the enhancements coming over the next few months.
Spend Basics: As I mentioned in my last post, they integrated with over 30 standard ERP/MRP systems out of the box, and can quickly add additional systems with about 1 day of effort as they have developed a rules-based integration platform that allows them to quickly bring additional systems on-line. Their rules-based system allows data to be cleansed, normalized, and enriched in one step during the extraction, which lets you get straight to the analytics. And they can automatically identify dimensions (categories). Like most platforms, their analytics are report (and dashboard) driven, but they have an ever growing library of reports, you can view data on (and drill down into) any dimension hierarchy you choose, and they are building in the ability to add user-defined parameters and indexes to certain classes of reports in the next release.
Accounts Payable Support: Not only do they suck in invoice data, but they have rule-sets that allow them to automatically detect overpayments and automatically generate reports that alert you to duplicate invoices, duplicate charges across invoices, duplicate payments, overpayments, payments to the wrong supplier, and other discrepancies. Some customers have recovered the cost of an annual license in a month with this feature alone. In addition, they also have similar tax reporting capabilities. Their tax reports will detect overpayments, underpayments, and, more importantly, missed payments that could cause import/export problems for you down the road.
Contracts Support: Integrated with their AP reporting / overpayment detection capabilities, their contracts module allows you to upload your contracts or integrate with an external contract repository. Either way, once you define the appropriate meta-data and triggers, the platform takes care of the rest.
Savings Analysis: Working with global partners, they have developed a savings module, complete with McKinsey-esque bubble charts, that identifies your top savings opportunities based upon your supply base, spend, and market indices. While the current version does not allow you to define your own customized savings plan, the next version will allow you to define your own indexes and support parameters that will allow you to tailor the opportunity reports to your company. And while this still won’t give you the control that user-defined measures will, for your average sourcing professional who’s still making seat-off-the-pants decisions based on total spend and instinct, it’s a great step in the right direction, as it’s the first step to truly bringing spend intelligence to the masses in your average organization.
Sustainability Support: While not yet available, Rosslyn is working hard to integrate a large number of external data feeds that go beyond standard price and risk indices and include carbon and sustainability data. Building on this data, and their ability to do trend analysis (which is currently built in for supplier and category data), they’re in the process of creating a sustainability tracking and reporting solution that will be on-line early next quarter.
All-in-all, it’s a great platform for any organization starting on their supply management journey or stuck in a rut because of the limited capabilities and reach of traditional on-premise platforms built with a single user in mind. And when you’re ready, you can use it to supercharge the performance of your power-analysts as they will have a normalized, cleansed, and enriched data source to start with in the application of their stand-alone analyst tools.