Monthly Archives: August 2013

iValua: Proving Their Mettle with Source to Settle, Part IV

In Parts I through III, we noted that when we last covered iValua in 2010, they were one of the few providers tackling end-to-end sourcing and procurement in a single suite of integrated modules built on one common platform. We noted in Tackling End-to-End Sourcing and Procurement, Part I that this French company had capabilities that, at least to some degree, addressed each of the core phases of the basic sourcing-and-procurement cycle except decision optimization and tax reclamation. Since then, they have added advanced tax tracking capability, and a boatload of other features that include SIM/SPM, Risk Management, Project Management, Enhanced Analytics, and Extensive UI customization. Today, we will continue our coverage of the platform, which includes modules for Supplier Management, Sourcing, Contract Management, Catalog Management Procurement, Invoice Management, Expense Management, and Reporting that were covered in Parts I through III; and Administration that will be covered today as we wrap up the series.

Administration

Administration is very extensive in the iValua platform. Administrative users can manage users, tables, workflows, reporting indicators, units of measure, currency, alerts, menu options, content, templates (for RFX and Auctions), import, scheduled processes, notifications, (re)assignments, and information sources (as the platform can pull in RSS and XML feeds from various web sources for display on the dashboard).

The ability to define arbitrary data tables and import the data for analysis into the system is quite powerful. It makes the built-in analytics capability much more useful as the data can be augmented and enriched to also include data from the payment platform, third party supplier assessments, and optimization events conducted external to the iValua system. A classic limitation of many Sourcing and Procurement systems was the inability to import arbitrary data not accounted for in the existing schema. The iValua platform took a best practice from leading spend analysis platforms and made sure a user could import whatever data she needed anywhere in the supported source-to-settle process. The ETL screen is comparable to an advanced version of Microsoft Excel import (familiar to every Microsoft Office User) that allows the user to define the first line index and last import row, column and line separators, text qualifiers, encodings, and field template (that defines the fields and their names). The user can also define how long the data should be kept (and throw-away one-time analysis data or archive payment data indefinitely), who can see it, and what modules, plans, or anomalies the data should be associated with.

Design Mode

Design Mode is a new capability in the iValua platform that allows a user to dynamically redesign the layout of their menus, screens, and dashboard widgets. Each user can customize the look and feel of the application in a way that makes them most productive using simple drag-and-drop and checklist-based / mouse-click component and option selection. It is quite slick. It also allows iValua to customize a configuration for a new client extremely rapidly based upon the particular needs of the different users of the application.

In summary, the iValua is a very extensive Source-To-Settle platform and an extremely viable option for a mid-size or large organization that is looking to update their sourcing and procurement capabilities in an integrated end-to-end source to settle platform. It is especially suited to a multi-national that has to operate in a significant number of countries and languages as iValua, which already supports 15 different languages, is used daily by more than 150K users and 500K suppliers in over 70 countries.

iValua: Proving Their Mettle with Source to Settle, Part III

In Parts I and II, we noted that when we last covered iValua in 2010, they were one of the few providers tackling end-to-end sourcing and procurement in a single suite of integrated modules built on one common platform. We noted in Tackling End-to-End Sourcing and Procurement, Part I that this French company had capabilities that, at least to some degree, addressed each of the core phases of the basic sourcing-and-procurement cycle except decision optimization and tax reclamation. Since then, they have added advanced tax tracking capability, and a boatload of other features that include SIM/SPM, Risk Management, Project Management, Enhanced Analytics, and Extensive UI customization. Today, we will continue our coverage of the platform, which includes modules for Supplier Management, Sourcing, Contract Management, and Catalog Management that were covered in Parts I and II; Procurement, Invoice Management, Expense Management, and Reporting that will be covered today; and Administration that will be covered tomorrow in the series finale.

Procurement

Procurement, in the iValua suite, is the process of creating requisitions (and having them approved), managing the resulting orders, managing budgets, managing receipts, and managing services deliverables. Requisition management, order management, and budget management are standard fare for Procurement platforms and work as you would expect, but the ability to create and mange receipts and manage service deliverables is a more unique offering for a Procurement platform. This allows for m-way matching in the platform, which is key to ensuring that not only are negotiated savings realized, but that overpayments, and more importantly, fraudulent payments, are not made.

Invoice Management

Invoice Management revolves around invoice creation, management, and reconciliation to receipts. It all works as you would expect, and there is nothing fancy here. Just a well-designed platform designed to make the process as smooth as possible.

Expense Management

Expense Management is the process of requesting cash advances, managing requests, creating expense reports, reviewing expense reports, rejecting lines or entire reports, and approving lines or entire reports. The expense management process is fully defined, and consists of creation, validation, accountant validation, threshold checking, finance or external department approval, (final) accounting approval, and settlement. As with invoice management, the process, and the application, works as you would expect.

Reporting

Reporting is the process of creating analysis reports, browsing them, creating queries, managing them, and then, as a result of the analyses, creating strategic action plans. The analysis capability is quite good. Users can create their own cross-tabs and pivot tables in the browser by dragging-and-dropping dimensions into chosen row and column positions. The analysis can be on any type of data stored in the system — surveys, questionnaires, RFX bid events, e-auctions, budgets, invoices, etc. But the most unique capability is the ability to create strategic action plans, which can serve as the foundation for future sourcing events. Like improvement plans, they can be quite detailed and are generally setup to support savings initiatives.

Each strategic action plan / savings project has a breakdown that allows a user to quickly access the definition data, the team and associated tasks, the financial overview, and detailed analysis through a sequence of tabs. The definition data will indicate the current status, related sourcing projects, and notes added by the team. The financial overview will capture the budgeted savings when the project was approved, the planned savings at project initiation, the current savings forecast, and the amount of savings captured to date. The actual savings (and forecast) will come from the data gathered during Procurement and be calculated using a user-defined formula (which could be as simple as $1 per unit, based upon negotiated rates).

Come back tomorrow when we’ll cover Administration and wrap-up the series!

iValua: Proving Their Mettle with Source to Settle, Part II

Yesterday, in Part I, we noted that when we last covered iValua in 2010, they were one of the few providers tackling end-to-end sourcing and procurement in a single suite of integrated modules built on one common platform. We noted in Tackling End-to-End Sourcing and Procurement, Part I that this French company had capabilities that, at least to some degree, addressed each of the core phases of the basic sourcing-and-procurement cycle except decision optimization and tax reclamation. Since then, they have added advanced tax tracking capability, and a boatload of other features that include SIM/SPM, Risk Management, Project Management, Enhanced Analytics, and Extensive UI customization. Today, we will continue our coverage of the platform, which includes a module for Supplier Management, that we covered in Part I; Sourcing, Contract Management, and Catalog Management, that we’ll cover today; and Procurement, Invoice Management, Expense Management, Reporting, and Administration that will be covered in the remainder of the series.

Sourcing

Sourcing consists of sourcing project creation, schedule and workflow creation, RFX, and e-Auctions. As noted above, there is no decision optimization, but that is literally all that is missing in their sourcing module.

Project creation in iValua is very powerful as you can not only define the project, but set up the end-to-end workflow, define a schedule, assign team members, and track every step. A project has an identity which captures basic project information, associated documents, a sequence of tasks or actions that will fulfill the project, an assigned team, a schedule, and a forum where team members can collaborate and discuss issues. The tasks and actions supported are quite extensive – and include all of the standard source-to-settle steps such as requirements gathering, supplier selection, RFX preparation, response tracking, proposal evaluation, response analysis, award, and contract. From each task, the users can jump off to the appropriate module in the iValua suite to complete the task. The workflow engine is quite fine-grained.

Contract Management

Contract Management is the creation and management of contract templates, contracts, and signature transactions for e-signing. The gem here is iValua’s online drag-and-drop contract creation capability (with complete audit trail functionality) that works in the browser and fully integrates with Microsoft Word. The view, which has the section index on the left, the section texts on the right (each in their own editable box), and Word-compatible editing options on the top, makes it really easy to construct a contract. The tabs allow for quick access of the header, the team involved in the process, deadline (and auto-renewal) dates, exhibits, main clauses, items and services, negotiated terms, the associated contract scorecard, and the current status of the contract with respect to the defined lifecycle.

Catalog Management

Catalog Management is the process of importing catalogs, creating and managing catalog items, and managing services procurement. Catalog management works as you would expect, and the hidden gem in here is the extensive services procurement management capability, including timesheet capability. The services procurement module allowed for the creation of services profiles (like templates for services requisitions), price structures, and requisitions — which could be fee-based or timesheet-based. The platform has extensive support for services requisitions, and the unique requirements for services requisitions, that require proposed delivery details, schedules, proposed team members, rates, payment schedules, and insurance requirements. It’s not quite as extensive as the capabilities in the Contingent Workforce Management platforms (like FieldGlass) or Agency Lifecycle Management platforms (like DecideWare), but is more than sufficient for the majority of services-based sourcing projects that a typical Supply Management organization will need to address. It is definitely the 80% solution.

We’ll cover the remaining parts of the platform in the remainder of this series. Come back tomorrow!

iValua: Proving Their Mettle with Source to Settle, Part I

When we last covered iValua in 2010, they were one of the few providers tackling end-to-end sourcing and procurement in a single suite of integrated modules built on one common platform. We noted in Tackling End-to-End Sourcing and Procurement, Part I that this French company had capabilities that, at least to some degree, addressed each of the core phases of the basic sourcing-and-procurement cycle except decision optimization and tax reclamation. The platform still doesn’t address decision optimization, but in the past three years, in addition to adding considerable intelligence for tracking and managing taxes, ASN (Advanced Shipping Notice) support, and customizable pivot-tables for bid and auction analysis, they’ve made extensive additions to many of their modules, added powerful workflow capabilities, extremely powerful UI customization capabilities in Design Mode (considering the platform is accessed through a standard web browser), drag-and-drop document authoring capability (also through the web browser) and round-trip integration with Microsoft Word, a comprehensive supplier view (that integrates all of the data related to the supplier across all of the modules), and the ability to easily define and load custom data tables for surveys, questionnaires, tracking, and reporting through built-in native ETL tools, among other enhancements.

Version 8.0 of the iValua platform, being released at the start of Q4, is one of the most extensive integrated native Source-to-Settle platforms that SI has ever seen, especially considering their recent additions for the management of services. It comes as no surprise that they now have over 100 customers globally with a 99% renewal rate, that the majority of their customers have migrated to their SaaS platform, and that their current growth rate year-over-year is over 20%. Along with bPack and Wallmedien, they are making a serious play to take over the high-end of the Best-of-Breed market that was almost eliminated (with the exception of BravoSolution, that does have industry leading decision optimization) with the acquisitions of Ariba and Emptoris. (It truly looks like the European providers are starting to pull ahead of the pack where Spherical Supply Solutions — Part I, Part II, and Part III — are concerned.)

iValua divides their platform into Supplier Management, Sourcing, Contract Management, Catalog Management, Procurement, Invoice Management, Expense Management, Reporting, and Administration. So we will cover the highlights of the platform with respect to each of these categories. Note that, in addition to the application dashboard, each of these modules has their own dashboard that is extensively configurable so that a user can quickly see the status of supplier efforts, sourcing projects, contracts under construction, procurement processes, catalog integration, invoice processing, expense and budget management, and performance reports.

Supplier Management

Supplier Management in the iValua platform consists of Supplier Registration, Supplier Performance Management, Supplier (Related) Document Management, approved Supplier Lists, and Supplier Risk Profiles (called Supplier Risk Indicators). The on-boarding process is similar to the process employed by other SRM vendors, document management is the process of tracking certifications, proof of insurance, and compliance documentation, and approved supplier list management is quite straight-forward so we won’t go into any additional details on this functionality. What is interesting, and powerful, is the ability to identify and track anomalies from expected performance, create improvement plans, and access a supplier risk profile based on environmental, CSR, and other user-defined indicators, as this is functionality typically only found in SRM platforms, and not sourcing, procurement, or source-to-settle platforms.

The supplier management tab integrates all of the data associated with a supplier across the entire platform. The user can quickly access the basic info (name, address, credentials, risk score, etc.), the lifecycle workflows associated with that supplier (with respect to sourcing projects), the supplier’s credentials, associated users, pre-defined reports and analytics with respect to the supplier’s performance, current activity, commodities and services being provided, financial and risk KPIs, and overall performance and risk rating. It’s a one-stop SIM/SPM shop.

In iValua, an improvement plan, which can be created off of an anomaly (which is a user-defined record that describes an issue that needs to be addressed, such as an exceptional late delivery, quality problem, etc.) and associated with a commodity and/or organization, is an action plan designed to address an (underlying) issue (that caused the anomaly). It consists of a sequence of defined tasks that are expected to resolve the issue. Each task has a type, an associated user who is responsible for the task, a manager who will ensure the task is completed, start and end dates, and other attributes consistent with the definition of a project in a standard project management application. It’s interactive, and as steps are completed, the plan, and status thereof, are updated.

The supplier risk profile capability is quite advanced. A user can define any type of risk that they wish to track (supplier, product, sustainability, financial, product, etc.), how the risk indicator rolls up (finance, CSR, etc.), and where it comes from. iValua integrates with leading risk profile providers out-of-the-box, like D&B, and this integration goes beyond simple financial profile providers and also includes an integration with a leading provider of sustainability data, namely EcoVadis. (You can even access the native EcoVadis profile direct.)

We’ll cover the remaining parts of the platform in the remainder of this series. Come back tomorrow!