Monthly Archives: October 2023

Simfoni: Bringing the Orchestra to e-Sourcing

As noted in our last article on how Simfoni is Ascending the Scales in Spend Analysis, we last covered EC Sourcing (which is the foundation of Simfoni’s optimization-backed Source to Contract capability that resulted from their acquisition of EC Sourcing in 2022) on Sourcing Innovation in 2016 (getting ready to take the mid-market by storm), and more recently co-covered them on Spend Matters in a 3-part Vendor Analysis in 2022 (Part I, Part II, and Part III), but, as previously noted, you will need a Spend Matters Content Hub subscription to access that coverage.

Those who have been keeping up will know that Simfoni eSourcing has:

  • Flexible Multi-Round RFX Capability with composable questionnaires powered by conditional logic, unlimited user-defined columns, and multiple scoring options
  • Standard Auctions with enhanced lot management
  • Powerful in-tool pivotable matrix reporting so you don’t have to jump out to the analytics module to slice, dice, and compare RFX responses
  • Supplier Information Management with automatic supplier selection in events based on the products or tags
  • Supplier Portal with self-registration, onboarding, and corrective action support
  • Item Management which allows RFXs to be quickly constructed from scratch on existing items, or as copies of prior RFXs where items can easily be added or removed
  • Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization with flexible scenario creation
  • Basic Sourcing Project Workflows that can be customized for every project
  • Contract Management with user-definable metadata, complete change history, approval workflows, and push from sourcing

Since their last major coverage over two years ago, Simfoni has integrated the EC Sourcing functionality into their platform and added the following capabilities:

  • Intake Management
  • Enhanced Project Management (Dashboard)
  • Integrated Opportunity Assessments and Wave Plans
  • Optimization Simplification

Intake Management

The buzzwords-du-jour are intake and orchestrate, and Simfoni has heard the message loud and clear. While their solution may not be on par with the big names like Zip for intake, it serves its purpose and intake alone is not a solution — you need powerful platforms for sourcing and procurement to back it up. Their solution allows anyone to make a Procurement request, and then view the status of that request at any time. It’s simple, but if you refer back to our post on Investigating Intake – Diving Into the Details, which was Part 37 of our Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive series, we only had six core requirements for intake for the requester:

  • Request portal: minimal, but check
  • Process visibility: minimal, but check
  • Asynchronous messaging: included in the Simfoni eSourcing foundation and available once the project kicks off
  • S2P platform integration: check
  • Budget tracking: available in the Sourcing Project and the Simfoni Analytics platform
  • Alerting: part of Simfoni eSourcing, and active once a project starts (as long as the requester is properly setup on the platform)

… and we only had six core requirements for the procurement buyer:

  • Request to process: Simfoni eSourcing has a good workflow, and it’s a single click to kick of a workflow
  • Workflow process definition: similar to above, it’s solid
  • Integrated approval workflows: not so much in sourcing, but in contracting and procurement (which will not be covered in this article)
  • Project management integration: sourcing projects are very well managed
  • Policy tracking: policies can be integrated across the Simfoni platform and quick links maintained in a policy widget on the main Terminal dashboard
  • Alerting: this is quite good for the buyer

Enhanced Project / Pipeline Management

The new dashboard for sourcing pipeline management hits the nail on the head. A buyer quickly sees all their open projects and their current stage, the baseline spend, budgeted savings, forecasted savings, and actual savings to date — and the CPO can log in and see the current status of everything at any time. No more “can you get me an update by Friday”. This information is always readily available.

Plus, with a single click, you can get the Kanban view and see which projects are in the:

  • Definition stage
  • Sourcing strategy definition stage: which allows for a task-based breakdown
  • Tender / RFQ / Auction stage
  • Negotiation and awarding stage
  • Implementation stage
  • Project close-out stage

Integrated Opportunity Assessments and Wave Plans

As we noted in yesterday’s article, Simfoni has created a great centralized opportunity assessment dashboard, with deep drill down capability, where a buyer can identify which sourcing project can be launched next and then kick off a project using the enhanced project creation capability and cross-platform integration. In addition, you can see each project in an integrated calendar view and know exactly how much is planned across the sourcing department at any time.

Optimization Simplification

Simfoni has extensively worked on simplifying the optimization interface making it super easy to set up a number of baseline scenarios (least cost, X suppliers, incumbents only), create a new scenario as a copy of an existing scenario with just one new constraint, see the spend summaries, and see summaries in pre-defined tabular views.

It’s also super easy to create constraints, which fall into one of six categories:

  • Competition: how many bidders can receive an award
  • Bidder: min or max award volumes to specific bidders
  • Qualitative: limit awards to bidders with custom attributes
  • Quantitative: limit awards to bidders with min or max scores (for risk, etc.)
  • Discount: define tiered bidder discounts (as percentages)
  • Subset: work on a subset of data

Creating a constraint is easy — you simply define

  1. the scope (which can be on any defined entity that is available including, but not limited to item, business unit, plant location, category, etc.) Note that if you want to apply a constraint to a group of items, plants, categories, locations, etc. then you need to define these as part of the sourcing event
  2. the bidder the constraint is applied to (if necessary, not all constraints are bidder-based), and
  3. the parameters (min, max, field value, etc.).

Also, you can create multiple constraints of the same type on the selected constraint screen (if you wanted an approximate 50, 30, 20 split, for example, you’d define three instances of the constraint, with the first instance awarding between 49% and 51%, the second awarding between 29% and 31%, and the third awarding between 19% and 21%).

In other words, in addition to integrating the EC Sourcing platform into their ecosystem, which included massive UX updates for consistence and modernization, Simfoni has continued to extend the capability and it’s still a solution that should be on the consideration list for any organization looking for S2C, especially where optimization or leading analytics is required.

Simfoni – Ascending the Scales in Spend Analysis

Simfoni has matured and progressed quite a bit since we last covered them on Sourcing Innovation back in 2017 (in our article that discussed when a quartet’s not enough), and has even progressed since the doctor last co-covered them on Spend Matters in early 2022 (although the site revamp has conveniently erased his author credit from many of the series he co-authored) in their most recent 3-part vendor analysis (Part I, Part II, and Part III). (Note that a Spend Matters ContentHub subscription will be required to view this three-part series.)

Since the early days, when Simfoni was essentially a spend analytics solution built on Microsoft Power BI with some roll-your own customized spend analytics capabilities embedded with spend analytics process expertise, they have added quite a lot of capability on top, including both out-of-the-box and some DiY (do it yourself) analyses as well as:

  • Extensive out-of-the-box opportunity assessments
  • Impact assessments regarding GHG, ESG, and CSR elements
  • Self-serve classification and taxonomy management
  • Advanced dashboards and custom data analysis
  • Sourcing pipeline management
  • S2C (Source-to-Contract) capability accelerated through its EC Sourcing Group acquisition, including the following:
    • Self-Source/Full e-RFX (RFI, RFP, RFQ, etc.)
    • Supplier Management
    • Contract Management
  • Workflow Routing & Enablement
  • Catalog Management & Creation
  • BuyDesk & Global Sourcing Support
  • Invoice Management
  • Performance Management & Savings Tracking

In this update, we’re going to focus on Simfoni Spend Analytics. We’ll cover their S2C capability (which we last covered in 2016 in our post on how EC Sourcing was getting ready to take the mid-market by storm, and the doctor last co-covered on Spend Matters in 2021 on their 3-part vendor analysis: Part I, Part II, and Part III), in a later update. Note that we will not be covering their Global BuyDesk, their back-office GPO / Procurement-as-a-Service offering, or their Tail Spend Management Services as we focus on technology products only in this blog. But if you’re short on Procurement People Power or Category Competence, we do suggest checking these offerings out. After all, there are advantages to using the same provider for software and services, especially considering the breadth of their platform which provides a complete history and additional advantages once you’re ready to take over self-sourcing and make procurement personal.

The first screen you see in Simfoni Analytics is the “Terminal” which is the cross-application dashboard that front-ends the analytics solution providing a jumping point into key metrics and insights from each module of the full Simfoni platform, including analytics, sourcing, supplier management, and contracts. The Terminal is configurable, with several pre-built out-of-the-box widgets to choose from, which can even include currency trends / heat maps, quick links into key parts of the platform, and even (third party) content feeds.

From the Terminal, the most common jumping point will be Analytics, which has its own landing page that provides the entry point for all of the built-in dashboards which include:

  • Insights: spend summary for the current month vs the prior month, and the same month one year ago (in terms of spend, transactions, suppliers, and other key data points)
  • Spend: classic spend summary (total suppliers, transactions, POs, categories, suppliers, business units, trends, etc.)
  • Geo Mapping: spend breakdowns by regions / countries (and visual bubble map overlays)
  • Trend Analysis: insight into spend trends by supplier, category, region, etc.
  • Category Console: spend breakdowns by category and segmentation by value bracket
  • Spend Distribution: taxonometric breakdowns
  • Commonality Analysis: supplier by count of entity analysis and associated spend
  • Supplier Normalization: suppliers by duplicate count / familying opportunity and impacted spend
  • Supplier Spend Profiles: spend analysis dashboard restricted to a single supplier, possibly augmented with risk, impact, or other customized insight
  • Tail Spend: a spend dashboard limited to, and customized on, tail spend including breakdowns by invoice groupings, vendor groupings, and transaction groupings for insights into spend type (contract/non contract, direct/indirect), variance, and transaction cost

and may also include:

  • Supplier Risk: a risk dashboard based upon integrated third-party risk data feeds (from Darkbeam, out-of-the-box with subscription, or bring your own subscriptions like BVD or Ecovadis)
  • Spend Impact: the impact of your organizational spend from an environmental or social perspective, provided you have the appropriate data feeds for the necessary calculations;
  • M&A Analysis: a specialized dashboard that allows you to compare spend between two entities and do an opportunity analysis
  • Custom Insights: a dashboard custom built for very specific needs unique to your organization

In addition to these analytical dashboards that provide deep insights out of the box, the platform also has some optimizer dashboards that include:

  • Opportunity Assessment where they use the results of all their analysis above to indicate top opportunities across supplier consolidation, one-time vendor elimination, supplier normalization, production commonality, catalogue buying (vs off-catalog purchases), PPV (purchase price variance), payment terms, and other actions (based upon a custom analysis they build for you upon implementation)
  • Supplier Consolidation opportunities by bottom level category as well as projected savings (and savings range) from consolidation to the lowest cost product
  • Purchase Price Variance by product along with savings potential by item
  • P-Card centric tail spend dashboards with spend, transaction, category, supplier, user, facility, etc. breakdowns for deep insight so that what happens on the P-Card doesn’t stay on the P-Card
  • Payment Terms analysis and impact from payment term alterations

And, since the early days, they have added a lot of self-serve data management capabilities including:

  • Category Management where you can define your categories (in a taxonomy)
  • Material Description Management where you can define standard material descriptions
  • GL Description Management where you define GL codes
  • Supplier Management where you manage supplier groupings (families)
  • Transaction Management where you can drill down to the transaction level and get full details and perform transaction-level mappings
  • Taxonomy Suggestions where new classification or change requests are tracked
  • Manual Classification where you can classify by supplier, description, material, and/or GL Description and where you can see the % of currently classified transactions, suppliers, and spend

Simfoni’s Spend Analytics capabilities are quite extensive, informative, and best of all, easy-to-use. If you’re looking for a best-of-breed spend analytics solution from a mini-suite vendor that also has strong procurement services, Simfoni is a vendor you should definitely check out.