Daily Archives: February 9, 2010

Legal Sourcing 101

A recent article in ISM on crashing the legal department had some great advice on what you need to do when helping your General Counsel source legal services.

  • You must take the lead in proposing alternate fee arrangements.
  • You must take the lead in finding out what “XYZ” task really costs.
  • You must figure out how waste can be driven out of the system.
  • You must insure that the firms you select can get your rates with the product and service providers they could also make use of.
  • You must help to quicken the death of the billable hour.

For more advice on how you can help decrease legal costs, see:

… here on Sourcing Innovation and

… over on e-Sourcing Forum.

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iValua: Tackling End-to-End Sourcing And Procurement, Part I

By now, you’ve probably heard the foreshocks of the latest vendor to enter the supply management space in North America, iValua. iValua is a ten-year old French software solutions company that has slowly built up a broad e-Sourcing and e-Procurement solution that covers most of the bases that I outlined in my post where I reminded you that it’s sourcing and procurement, in which I also reminded you that you don’t have your supply management bases covered unless you have a solution, or set of integrated solutions, that cover the basics.

In that classic post, I indicated that the basic cycle was the following:

  • Spend Analysis
    Analyze spend related data and find the best sourcing opportunities,
  • RFX
    solicit an RFI, RFP, and/or RFQ and/or
  • e-Auction
    initiate an e-Auction then
  • Decision Optimization
    make the best award using available data and
  • Contract Management
    start the contract management lifecycle.
  • Requisition
    A requisition is created when a good or service is required and
  • Approval
    if it is against the existing contract, it is approved
  • Purchase Order
    and a purchase order is created off of the contract.
  • Goods Receipt
    When the supplier delivers, a goods receipt is created and
  • Invoice
    the invoice is recorded and
  • Reconciliation
    the invoice is reconciled against the goods receipt and purchase order.
  • Payment
    Payment is made after reconcilation
  • Tax Reclamation
    and if VAT is reclaimable, filings are made
  • Spend Analysis
    and after time has passed, the payments are analyzed to insure spend is on target.

With respect to this cycle, iValua has modules that cover the basics for just about every phase except for decision optimization and tax reclamation. In addition, the suite also has modules that address:

  • Sourcing Process Management
    which allows sourcing processes to be customized and managed as sourcing projects
  • Procurement Process Management
    which allow you to define your own requisition, approval, and purchase order creation and delivery processes
  • Supplier Performance Management
    which allows you to create surveys and track performance metrics
  • Budget and Expense Management
    which allows you to create budgets by organizational unit and sub-unit and capture expense reports
  • Customization
    which is an extensive administration module that allows branding, coloring, wording, dashboards, roles, permissions, security, and default processes to be configured

All-in-all, it is one of the broadest supply management suites in the market. In my next post, I’ll provide more details on some of the various modules.

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