Monthly Archives: May 2010

Webinar Wackiness IX: Webinars This Week 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 — and it will continue to do so.

The following is a not-so-short selection of 15 webinars THIS WEEK that might interest you:

Date & Time Webcast
2010-Jun-1

11:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

Top Growth Opportunities by Vertical Industry

Sponsor: Gartner

2010-Jun-2

15:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

Supplier Performance Management – Stop Talking, Start Doing!

Sponsor: Rollstream

2010-Jun-2

14:00 GMT/WET

Discover the Next Generation of Savings through Procurement Outsourcing

Sponsor: ICG Commerce

2010-Jun-2

11:30 GMT-05:00/CDT/EST

Retail Supply Chain Best Practices: Visibility and Performance Management

Sponsor: Supply Chain Digest

2010-Jun-2

11:00 GMT+10:00/AEST

Cloud Computing: Whats It all About?

Sponsor: Gartner

2010-Jun-3

8:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

China Update: How to Benefit from China’s Fast Growing & Changing Automotive Industry

Sponsor: Baker & McKenzie

2010-Jun-3

14:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

Driving Cost Savings with Enterprise Supplier Management

Sponsor: CVM Solutions

2010-Jun-3

9:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

Improve and accelerate your S&OP process

Sponsor: OM Partners

2010-Jun-3

10:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

How Can You Leverage Cloud While Balancing Risk and Cost?

Sponsor: Gartner

2010-Jun-3

11:00 GMT+08:00/AWST

Shared Services: Quality & Continuous Improvement Culture a Performance Necessity

Sponsor: SSON

2010-Jun-3

14:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

How Finance Leaders Gain A Strategic Advantage Through Automation

Sponsor: CFO

2010-Jun-3

10:30 GMT-07:00/MST/PDT

Regulation’s Future & Impact on Electronics Industry

Sponsor: Silicon Expert Technologies

2010-Jun-3

9:00 GMT-05:00/CDT/EST

Driving Enhanced Value and Operational Savings through a Tax-Advantaged Supply Chain: European Market

Sponsor: Ariba

2010-Jun-3

14:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

Driving Enhanced Value and Operational Savings through a Tax-Advantaged Supply Chain: North American Market

Sponsor: Ariba

2010-Jun-3

14:00 GMT-04:00/AST/EDT

A New Technology Simplifies Finding the Root Cause of Process Upsets

Sponsor: ARC Advisory Group

They 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 additions!

b-Pack: Packing It In for A Brave New World, Part IV

Three weeks ago, in Part I, we told you how b-pack, hot on the heels of Ivalua, had decided to cross the Atlantic and join in the conquest to bring the bohemian revolution to the world of Procurement and P2P with their extensive solution suite that actually closes the P2P loop. Then, two weeks ago in Part II, and last week in Part III, we expounded on some additional capabilities, relatively unique in the marketplace, that extended the basic value offering beyond basic P2P. Today we’re going to address one of the advanced P2P capabilities, the tightly integrated document management feature, administration, and the supplier portal. But first, a quick recap of the story to date.

Part I described the base b-pack platform that takes you from the start of a traditional sourcing cycle (RFx), through a contract, to a requisition (which may be from a catalog), against a budget, to receipt of the goods (which can include asset tracking information), and the invoice, to payment, reporting, and supplier management. It covered the requisition, approval, receipt, invoice, matching, payment, and reporting cycle in detail as well as the solution delivery options that are available.

Part II detailed some of the integrated applications that build out the core capabilities to also provide the organization with expense and travel management, asset management, dispute resolution, and procurement business intelligence reporting and Part III addressed inventory management and its integration with asset management, budget management, fleet management, and internationalization.

Invoice management, which was initially discussed in Part I, is fairly sophisticated with a built-in invoice viewer (which can handle invoices in e-mail, EDI, and PDF formats, among others), auto-match capability (at the line-item level against original purchase orders), and multi-way match capability between purchase orders, contracts, and/or good receipts. The auto-match can be manually overridden (and maintains a running total of the reconciled amount against the entire invoice amount so the user can track her progress) and an invoice cannot be approved until it is fully matched against one or more purchase orders (at the line item level) and until all disputes against it are resolved. This goes a long way to insuring that incorrect and fraudulent invoices are never paid, which happens way to often when certain commodities, like office supplies, electronics, and storage space, are being purchased regularly and in large volumes.

Like reporting, document management permeates the system and allows each document to be tracked by way of associated meta-data which includes type, creation date, version, author, language, and other information relevant to the document type. In addition, (related) documents can be organized in a tree structure and a new document can be defined as sequential merge of a set of documents organized in a tree. Contract management is then built on top of this capability and allows contracts to be built up from component documents, where each component is a distinct section or clause, with its own meta-data information that aids in searching during contract construction. Through versioning, a user can quickly build a starting contract from standard clauses and then edit them accordingly using the built in word processor. The contract can then be output to PDF or Word, and if edits are made in the Word version (by the supplier), it can be imported back into the system as a successive version.

In addition, the document management system can store e-mail templates which are sent out when an action is triggered in the system, such as the transmission of a purchase order, the formal notification of a dispute, an automatic alert that inventory replenishment is required, and so on. These templates can be stored in multiple languages, and the proper version will be selected according to the language of the recipient. Furthermore, it’s integrated with the auto-translation utility which, although not perfect, gives you a starting template in another language, which can then be quickly reviewed and corrected by a native speaker.

Administration allows the user to define global display properties, procurement specific workflows, batch processes, usage rights by user, help file additions, and log access rights. Global display properties include price display rules, date rules, fonts, and themes. Procurement workflow properties include request limits, default payment modes, templates, and terms. Batch processes include data cache maintenance, undelivered e-mail management, user session management, database optimization, and invoice file management. The buyer can add specific information to the online help files for supplier use and for internal use. Finally, the administrator can also run data integrity checks, performance checks, link and reference checks, and database optimization.

Whereas some vendors build separate supplier portals for suppliers, which can greatly limit the functionality available to the supplier as most of the smaller shops can only devote so many developer cycles to portal maintenance, b-pack chose to build the supplier portal within the core application. The supplier portal is essentially the same application, but with access limited only to what the supplier is allowed to see and do. When a supplier representative logs in, she sees the same task manager that a buyer sees, which shows her to-do list, in-progress tasks, most recent system access, and available applications and allows her to access her reports, search for relevant information, and define the application settings she has control over. If she accesses the purchase order module, she sees the full workflow associated with the purchase order, but she is restricted to altering information related to acceptance and delivery, attaching notes, and initiating or responding to disputes — buyer side information is locked.

In addition, the supplier (vendor) master is tightly integrated with the core platform and allows the buyer to add and deactivate suppliers as required. For each supplier, the buyer can define basic identifying information, contacts, catalogues, currency, a description of the supplier’s product and/or service offerings, and portal access. The administrator can not only grant access to one or more supplier representatives, but choose what authorizations each representative is granted (in terms of invoice management, dispute management, catalog management, packing slip generation, invoicing, etc.).

In summary, the b-pack platform, which has been under development for ten years and which is very well thought out with respect to its goal of optimizing your back office procurement, provides a comprehensive P2P e-Procurement solution that also includes some very useful capabilities above and beyond the basic procurement cycle requirements that can provide significant additional value to many buying organizations, including the invoice management, document management, and supplier management capabilities described in this post.

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Don’t Forget to Take Advantage of LKE When Upgrading Supply Chain Assets

A recent article over in Inside Supply Management is shining a new light on asset reinvestment by pointing out that many companies can save as much as 44% of sale proceeds if they use like-kind exchange (LKE) or “1031” exchange to defer capital gains tax on sold assets when the sale is being used to generate cash to buy new, similar, assets to replace deprecated supply chain assets.

If you plan reinvest the the funds from the same of an asset in a similar or like-kind asset within the IRS established timelines to identify and purchase the replacement asset and conduct the transaction through a qualified third-party intermediary, then you defer the capital gains tax. This can save your organization a considerable amount of money over time if you’re selling over a million dollars of depreciated assets each year as you bring new, like, assets into the mix. As per the example in the article, if you sold $2 Million worth of assets each year and replaced them with like assets, after five years, that’s $10 Million worth of assets sold. If you ended up paying the equivalent of 40% in taxes, that’s 4 Million dollars you lost from cash-flow if all of the assets were replaced.

Seems like a no-brainer to me, especially since it will only cost a few thousand a transaction to have a qualified and knowledgeable legal or accounting firm act as the qualified intermediary, which is a fraction of what you’ll save when you’re selling Million dollar assets.

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Is Sustainability the Current Megatrend?

According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review on The Sustainability Imperative,

over the past 10 years, environmental issues have steadily encroached on businesses’ capacity to create value for customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders. Globalized workforces and supply chains have created environmental pressures and attendant business liabilities. The rise of new world powers, notably China and India, has intensified competition for natural resources (especially oil) and added a geopolitical dimension to sustainability. “Externalities” such as carbon dioxide emissions and water use are fast becoming material – meaning that investors consider them central to a firm’s performance and stakeholders expect companies to share information about them.

Furthermore, these forces are magnified by escalating public and governmental concern about climate change, industrial pollution, food safety, and natural resource depletion, among other issues. Consumers in many countries are seeking out sustainable products and services or leaning on companies to improve the sustainability of traditional ones. Governments are interceding with unprecedented levels of new regulation – from the recent SEC ruling that climate risk is material to investors to the EPA’s mandate that greenhouse gases be regulated as a pollutant.

As a result, managers can no longer afford to ignore sustainability as a central factor in their companies’ long-term competitiveness.

Considering that a megatrend is a great force in societal development that will very likely affect the future in all areas in the next 10-15 years (Gitte Larsen on why megatrends matter), and that sustainability affects each and every one of us, it’s pretty easy to see that if sustainability isn’t the current megatrend, it soon will be. Less than 2.5% of the water on the planet is fresh, and two thirds of this is frozen. In recent years, energy crises have arisen in a number of US states, Central Asia, South Africa, Pakistan, and China and current oil reserves will empty within 50 years. Carbon dioxide levels have increased 36% in the past 180 years and is now about 25% higher than historical highs over the last 400,000 years! And this is just the beginning.

Environmental responsibility has pervaded the consumer mindset across the developed countries and is quickly taking root in the mind of the customer in the emerging market … where consumers are tired of smog filled cities, dirty water, and regular rolling black-outs. Consumers want a product that’s green, made with recyclable material in an environmentally friendly process, and produced in a socially responsible manner. Furthermore, they want a product that is high quality and cost effective — proving that sustainability cuts through the business and consumer worlds.

In short, sustainability is the current megatrend and an imperative. So what does this mean to your organization? That’s the subject of a future post.

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