Monthly Archives: March 2025

ProcureForce: Bringing the Power to Manage Direct To You!

ProcureForce, an offering of Advanced Purchasing Dynamics, is a platform that was designed from the ground up to address the unique direct sourcing needs of automotive, aerospace, and other complex manufacturing industries where a product often requires ten thousand (or more) parts and managing the sourcing process in a spreadsheet workbook (because even the ERP can’t handle the Procurement requirements) is a nightmare.

Advanced Purchasing Dynamics grew out of the experience of the founder trying to manage the procurement of a Bill of Materials at a Big 3 US Automotive Company in the 80s, along with subsequent stints as Head of Procurement at other big industrial manufacturers, and his struggles trying to help them succeed when they didn’t have the right systems, and processes, to make them more efficient and successful. He found that a constant commonality was the lack of good systems, that supported good processes, for Procurement and wanted to help big manufacturers identify good systems and put good processes in place to be more efficient and effective at Procurement.

But he, and the team he built, discovered something that those of us who have been in the Source-to-Pay space for 25 years know all too well. He discovered that most of the platforms out there aren’t very well suited to direct, and many of those that do direct okay aren’t that configurable. So they decided to start working on their own, test it extensively with a few beta-customers over multiple years, work out the bugs, fill in the gaps, and do so in the hopes of bringing a product to market that actually works well for its target industries.

And one thing we will say is that it does work quite well, and the customization ability allows it to be fine-tuned to the needs of its clients. It’s the first new solution built on American soil in quite some time that we believe can truly handle the most complex automotive, aerospace, and complex industrial equipment source-to-pay requirements that exist today.

Their platform is sold as three comprehensive “solutions” that can be used standalone or collectively, where each “solution” covers an end-to-end process. (This is different than how most Source-to-Pay vendors that sell modules for specific tasks or functions, but not end-to-end processes.)

They are:

ProcureAlign: their core Source-to-Contract platform that allows for the creation and management of source-to-contract workflows tailored to organizational processes, which also includes embedded part and tool management, price indexing, price prediction, and other enhanced capabilities that go beyond traditional source-to-contract capabilities

SupplierAlign: a configurable supplier portal that allows Procurement to provide an interface to suppliers where they can self-manage updates, get centralized notifications, respond to requests online, and manage all of their buyer interactions through one location; the portal makes it easy to customize documentation and compliance requirements that the suppliers need to meet

AlignAI: their centralized data platform that structures and organizes procurement data to fuel AI-powered insights and transform data into standard formats required by PowerBI, Tableau, and QlikView for self-serve data analytics and decision making

We will mostly be focussed on ProcureAlign and SupplierAlign in this write-up.

The primary parts of the ProcureAlign Platform are:

  • Parts: manages the parts and programs (the Procurement view of the bill of materials)
  • Suppliers: the supplier master
  • RFQs: the organizational RFQs
  • Financial Evaluations: deep supplier quote analytics
  • Reporting: built in reporting
  • Administration: platform configuration and administration

Parts

Parts are the core of direct sourcing and procurement, as they create the programs (bills of material) that need to be sourced, and until they are in the platform, they can’t be sourced. The ProcureForce platform provides three ways to get parts into the platform:

  • Flexible Integration: purchasing signals to quote can be initiated in an Engineering Product Data Management system or the ERP
  • File Upload: ERP files can be pushed to SFTP on a schedule and loaded automatically or standard CSV format can be used to upload part data on demand
  • Manual Creation: a part can manually be created by the user

Part records are extremely detailed, and include description and classification fields, unit of measure, commodity classification(s), various statuses, associated plants, replacements, manufacturer part info, design stage, cost plans, and associated cost requests. They are so detailed that it’s not actually a “part” that is stored, but a “part-design level-cost request type” as this allows them to maintain a full history of the part design and costing in the system.

Suppliers

The platform can be configured for deep supplier profiles and onboarding can be configured to the organization’s liking, as with most modern supplier information management platforms. Onboarding starts with a supplier request, which requires basic details, and a program manager review, which then results in a notification to a supplier to visit the supplier profile and fill out the requested information. The onboarding can be configured to present required forms online or as downloads, require key fields in fixed formats, mandate acceptance of NDAs and provision of contacts, and designation of users who will have system access.

One important element to note is that suppliers are not just linked to parts, and thus the commodities (and overarching categories) that they provide, but also organizational divisions and or the geographic regions that use them, which can allow you to restrict suppliers to certain divisions and regions (through administration settings) if you so desire.

RFQs

It is very easy to create an RFQ in ProcureForce — so easy, in fact, that it can be done with zero clicks if you have ERP integration as you can push a purchase request from some ERPs directly into ProcureForce and kick off an RFQ. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of selecting a Program, selecting any attachments that are required to define specific program requirements, selecting the suppliers (which can be done down to the part level, and if the parts are linked to active suppliers, the system will default this for you), defining the incoterms, and specifying a little bit of meta data. The primary data required is the responsible buyer, name and description, causal code (reason for), dates, bid rounds (if not the default of 1), and currency settings (if not the default organization currency).

The RFQ automatically pulls in the appropriate cost breakdowns for each part for the RFQ, any associated part specifications, default (compliance) document requests, and default settings (based on templates and past projects). If desired, the user can specify alternate cost breakdown templates (if they are just looking for a quick quote for an emergency re-sourcing project, a potential packaging replacement, etc.) Also, the user can customize attachments or requests on a supplier level if they so choose (which they might if a new supplier is being invited to their first event, etc.). (This goes beyond typical indirect sourcing platforms where only messages can be targeted to an individual supplier.)

If a user is happy with the default settings pulled in from the templates and the parts when an RFQ is created from an ERP Push or the selection of a Program for sourcing, it can be launched in a single click. The entire platform is built to minimize the effort required by the user by taking advantage of all data present in the system and actions taken in the ERP. And the workflow can be customized to the preferences of the buying organization, although we must admit that it is quite standard and efficient out of the box.

Once the quotes are returned, the buyer can see the quotes side by side by part at the RFQ level, and then drill into each part so see the cost breakdowns side by side by supplier. They can add variance columns, prior quotes, variances against prior quotes, and even quotes in alternate cost models for comparisons (but will only get comparisons at the lowest level breakdown the models can be compared at).

One of the most unique features is that the platform supports multiple workflows for RFQs, which can be managed in the Administration section, and each RFQ can follow a workflow custom defined for that program (type). For example, if you’re just looking to get a price on an updated part design from your primary, you just want to (1) upload the part, (2) send the RFQ, get the quote back, (3) approve or reject it, and be done in a simple 3-step process. But if you’re looking to source a program for a new drive train, once you (1) upload the program, you want to (2) first define the sourcing plan (which may restrict certain suppliers to bidding on certain parts), (3) send the RFQ to the potential (pre-vetted) supply base, get the quotes, (4) do a financial evaluation over a three year period, (5) select an award scenario, (6) go through a multi-stage approval process, (7) make the award, (8) revise the program as appropriate (in case re-sourcing needs to be done later) and complete a set of organizational defined mandatory actions, and then (9) push it (back) to the ERP (if you have an integration) in a much more sophisticated 9-step process. The platform can support both (and any other process you want) and pull up the right process simply by linking it to the causal code or division.

Just in case it’s not obvious, they also support multiple approval workflows as well based on delegation of authority and sourcing type/causal code.

One unique aspect of the platform that may not be obvious in a demo is that you can include the country and city of manufacture for each part in the program and then use this data with public import/export data to build a detailed map of the tier 2 supply chain based upon their quotes and not third party or AI-guessing (based on generic import/export statistics).

Financial Evaluations

If the buyer needs to dive deeper into quote analysis before making a decision on an RFQ, the financial evaluation component allows them to create potential award scenarios as splits across multiple suppliers and analyze the full costing over the expected demand cycle based on full cost breakdowns (which are defined by commodity, not a high level category), expected changes in price indexes (which would trigger cost increases or decreases) over time, logistics from individual plants, and expected supplier performance. (As long as enough cost detail was included in the cost template used for the RFQ.) The buyer can create multiple scenarios, and then use the cost comparison capability to analyze them side by side. (It’s not optimization, but it allows a buyer to get pretty close as they can always identify the lowest cost awards for any part or program, but also modify that to ensure they are comfortable with the risks, delivery times, expected Scope3 emissions in the supply chain — which is critical if they are in, or have, EU customers, and so on.)

Reporting

The platform comes with a number of built-in reports, but doesn’t have extensive DIY analytics and/or reporting support (beyond the AlignAI platform that normalizes the data for integration with a leading BI platform so you can do DIY data analysis in the platform of your choice). These include:

  • Cost Breakdown: cost breakdown of a part by demand/utilization for a time period
  • Part Sourcing and Pricing: tracking of part sourcing and tracking can be done by receiving plant, program, commodity, supplier, and buyer
  • Program Management: for a given program, what parts have been sourced/awarded and approved and which parts have not
  • Program Waterfall: summary of how the program has been fulfilled by sourcing events over time

In addition, if you have PowerBI, PowerBI reports can be embedded in the platform, and a few are templated for you, including a Program Dashboard, Supplier Map, and Costing Breakdown.

And, of course, all data can be exported to every buyer’s favourite tool — Microsoft Excel (as most buyers in direct organizations still live in this tool, and even if everything can be done in ProcureForce with PowerBI or a spend analysis tool, some buyers will still want to use Excel).

Administration

The administration is one of the deepest sections of the platform. It supports the definition and management of the:

  • company : profile, business units, and users
  • financial evaluations : templates, models, variance calculations, etc.
  • custom fields : universal, platform wide
  • notifications : for every event that needs to trigger an action or approval
  • communication engine: triggers for internal messaging and external notice delivery, active notification management, etc.
  • parts : fields, unit of measure, commodity classification(s), statuses, associated plants, replacements, manufacturer part into, etc.
  • programs : the (Procurement view of) the Bills of Material, program history, status information, audit log
  • RFQs : default fields, other fields, default attachments, etc.

Moreover, in addition to being able to define arbitrary fields and data elements on every object in the system, the organization can also define elements limited to certain divisions or geo-regions, since different regions will have different requirements.
And, most importantly, it allows the organization to turn off anything they don’t use or disable the view on anything their users don’t need to see (and the users won’t see any fields or data elements tagged to a division or region they are not in), making the platform easy and efficient for the average user.

ProcureForce is an extremely well thought out, and very well executed, direct sourcing platform for automotive, aerospace, and similar complex manufacturing industries that is ready to take its place in the big leagues. If you’re a mid-size or larger manufacturer looking for such a platform, it is one that we would not hesitate to recommend for a short-list.

Blacklight.

Living on a lighted screen
Approaches the unreal
For those who do not feel
Who live in a reality beyond the gilded meme

Against that unlikely role
Ill-equipped to act
With insufficient tact
One must put up barriers to keep oneself intact

Living on a lighted screen, the influencer’s dream
Those who wish to be seen
Those who wish to be, they put aside the alienation
Obsessed with the fascination
The false relation, the underlying theme

They live in a fisheye lens
Caught in the camera eye
I have no heart to lie
I can’t pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend

All the world’s indeed a stage
We are merely players
Performers and portrayers
So why must they lock themselves inside the gilded cage

Living on a lighted screen, the influencer’s dream
Those who wish to be seen
Those who wish to be, they put aside the alienation
Obsessed with the fascination
The false relation, the underlying theme

Living on a lighted screen, the influencer’s dream
Those who wish to be seen
Those who wish to be, they put aside the alienation
Obsessed with the fascination
The false relation, the underlying theme

The false relation
The underlying theme

Dear Influencer, it’s not the limelight. Why the Rush?

You Say You Want Success, But Do You?

This post is inspired by THE REVELATOR‘s inquiry where he asked Do You Really Want a Successful ProcureTech Initiative?

For the vast majority of you, the answer is a clear and resounding “YES” (with the possible exception of those of you who have been treated badly by your employer and want to use your last official act to stick them with an application that will make them as miserable as you are, but as far as I can tell, you are a very small minority — you didn’t get into Procurement expecting it to be easy, or to be a way to make friends).

However, you are only one cog in the ecosystem. Let’s look at the other cogs:

Vendor: as long as you keep renewing the SaaS subscription, the C-Suite at the vendor doesn’t care if they sold you a Ferrari (at a Ferrari price tag) but delivered a 2004 Mazda RX-8 …

Analyst Firm: as long as the big research subscriptions keep rolling in from the big vendors (who always feature at the top / upper right / frontal wave of their maps), the analyst firm doesn’t care if you succeed or not, and will not only happily push the hype the vendors want pushed, but happily blame you for not doing your research and not selecting the appropriate technology when you and your counterparts take their advice en-masse and then contribute to the all-time high project failure rates of 88% (two and a half decades of project failure)

Implementor: not really, because if you don’t swap out the solution at renewal time, where is their future revenue going to come from???

Big X who pushed the platform: Hell No! … they need to sell you projects to find bolt ons, do custom additions, and tweak the process for years as they need to keep their bench empty! (And some of these shops have over 100K junior consultants they have to keep busy. Moreover, they don’t make money training them on AI, they make money deploying them as your external support force. (Remember, many of these shops are effectively the new Manpower, except they have to pay their consultants on the bench, whereas job placement agencies just had to place people to keep their government grants or get their placement fee!)

And since YOU don’t take the time to do your research and figure this out (including the fact that the Big X pushed the worst fit solution from their stable on you to keep their Gold/Platinum/Sycophant status with the solution provider), that’s why YOU keep failing. Even if the salesperson honestly wanted to sell you a win (and many don’t, and the doctor can say that confidently with over 25 years in Enterprise Software and he’s sure THE REVELATOR has some stories to tell here), that’s far from a guarantee that a win will happen.

If you truly want success, YOU have to define your processes, define your problem, find the right vendor, make the vendor contractually responsible for implementation success (whether they do it or use a third party) with delayed payment (where you don’t pay for a module until it is working and passes predefined tests) and early termination clauses, identify the gaps, identify the right niche consultancy (who doesn’t have a stadium of junior consultants) to help you identify add ons and processes to fill them, and define early out clauses in case of non-delivery! You have to do all the work the vendors, analysts, and consultants claim they do for you … because they don’t (or at least don’t do it in your best interest). And while the good ones (which may take you a while to find) will help you, YOU still have to take the lead!

And the doctor knows you don’t always have the time to do it all, which is why he keeps pushing Project Assurance where you hire a niche specialist to help you, one who is not a part of the big COGs that need never-ending projects from you to stay solvent, and only cares about helping you get everything in order for success. (After all, there are so few of these experts it is literally a case of too many companies, too little time. These people or small niche consultancies don’t have to worry about running out of work, and by the time they made it through all the current companies they could handle, it would be time for their initial clients to upgrade to next generation systems anyway — and the only way they’d be available for a future project is to ensure client success with every client they take on.)

As we indicated, in our last two rants, you can no longer afford to be led by the Clueless vendors. It’s time you take your Procurement destiny into your own hands. It’s time for the Revenge of the Nerds!

You Should Embrace Legal Tech … Backed By Lawyers!

Don’t Kill ALL the Lawyers was our plea earlier this year because, sometimes, yes, sometimes, you do need a good lawyer in Procurement — just not as often as you think. No matter how much you think you can do (and you can do more than you think), you will still need them for

  • (final) contract reviews
  • significant clause interpretations
  • identification of statutes, regulations, and legal decisions you may be subject to
  • review financial and legal reports before submission
  • advisory on incident response plans and alternatives

Basically, while LLM powered Legal Tech can do a reasonably good job of

  • assembling a contract based on mandatory clauses, required terms and conditions, templates, and past similar contracts (which you can then touch up to your liking)
  • identifying clause types
  • identifying statutes, regulations, and legal decisions you might be subject to
  • identifying whether or not key sections are present in a report before submission
  • identify potential incident response plans across libraries

As the tech is NOT intelligent, it cannot

  • identify whether a contract meets your goals, only if it contains clauses that you have identified
  • tell you how a clause is likely to be interpreted by a court, as there is always some ambiguity in a clause, and opposing council might be intent on shoving as much ambiguity in there as possible to increase the chance a ruling goes in their client’s favour if something goes wrong
  • identify how likely you are to be subject to a new statute, regulation, or legal decision where it is a matter of interpretation
  • determine if the report is financially accurate or makes sufficient disclosures to satisfy the letter and the spirit of the regulatory requirement
  • determine the potential legal ramifications of a response

that requires an intelligent HUMAN lawyer!

But as we previously indicated, you can do a lot with some intelligence and tech. And you can do even more if you use Legal Tech backed by real lawyers with Human Intelligence (HI!).

For example, if you power your contract creation with a clause library vetted by real lawyers with annotations as to categories, geographies, and regulations the clause is for / satisfies, the contract creation tool can do a better job, leave you less to edit, and allow a faster review.

If you compare a contract to a clause library with comments and annotations on plain English meanings, best practices, and red flags that was developed and annotated by lawyers with Human Intelligence (HI!), you will have instant insight into what you need to negotiate, watch out for, and counter with. You will only need to involve legal for standard clauses if it is really vague or you need a heavy hand.

If your Legal team identifies which statutes, regulations, or recent decisions could affect your organization, how, and when, and tags the geographies, categories, parties, etc. that could be subject, you will instantly have that information when considering an award and then when drafting/reviewing a contract.

So yes, you should embrace Legal Tech to keep your Procurement timelines down (as well as external counsel fees), but only if it is backed and augmented by lawyers with Human Intelligence (HI!).

Need a New Factory? Find My Factory Will Help You Find Your Factory!

Find My Factory was founded in 2022 to help Global companies who wanted to bring
manufacturing back from China to Europe with a solution to find local manufacturers to meet their needs. Having raised approximately 1M USD in pre seed funding, they have established a customer base in Europe, and recently broadened the scope to provide suppliers from the entire world. Find My Factory has their HQ in Stockholm, Sweden.

It helps its customers find potential new suppliers and manufacturing locations via near real-time search on both its constantly growing supplier database and its ability to constantly web-scan for new suppliers that might be relevant for your business. It currently has over 10 Million suppliers in its database which is growing on every supplier search.

The platform is very straightforward to use in a four-step process:

0.Upload

Upload the database of products (from a flat Excel/CSV file) for which you are searching for new suppliers and start by selecting the first product of interest, kicking off a new search project.

1. Enrich

Augment the key product data with additional requirements you have for your suppliers, like location, category, keywords of interest, and other key attributes supported by the platform. When you are happy with the specifications, you can move to the sourcing phase.

2. Source

The platform will scour its database, scour over 240 starting data sources on the web (which is a number that is growing daily), create a starting list of suppliers, pull in their website and related data, parse the data, and create a list of potentially matching suppliers, starting at around the 40% potential match range, ordered with the highest potential match listed first.

As part of the research phase, a buyer can select up to 3 topics which will be researched using focussed, custom, agents to enrich the profiles brought back. Right now they support 9 primary topics, with more coming in future releases:

  • Financial Information: create a complete financial profile (revenue, profitability, financial health, etc.)
  • Production Facilities: where; key machines, capabilities and products
  • Certificates: what certifications the company has
  • Competitor Analysis: who are the main competitors based on the product
  • Credit Score: bring back the company’s credit rating and associated backing
  • Concern Structure: determine the corporate structure and ownership/investment
  • Sales Contacts: identify the head sales contacts and their current contact information
  • Reference Clients: customers, public testimonials, and their websites/corporate info
  • Company Active: is the company currently operating, and last indications thereof

Each of these agents brings back data in a standardized, structured format that is easily compared, searched, and ranked.

From this starting list of suppliers, a buyer can check out the initial profiles and create a short list for further research.

3. Engage

In the engage engine, the full starting profiles are brought in under the project and the buyer can kick off additional research questions if needed, further refine it’s requirements (and location parameters), make notes on the supplier to share with her team (who can do the same), see available actions (i.e. what external data sources are available such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. for supplier information), and then select a starting list of suppliers for engaging with.

To make it easy to determine which suppliers/manufacturers the buyer wants to start with, the platform summarizes how many of the requirements appear to have been met (based on available data) in a colour-coded fashion (with hover-over to allow a buyer to quickly see which requirements do not appear to be met). Once a buyer has selected a starting list, the buyer can export the list to Excel/CSV for import into their sourcing system.

All of the projects are archived in the system, to make future research efforts for (re) sourcing easy, as well as an audit trail for the justification of why a new supplier was invited.

Even though the platform only launched late last year, additional features of the platform include:

  • multiple workspaces: which can be customized to department, product category, etc.
  • search settings: you can determine how deep to search potential data sources (websites, directory profiles, etc.) and how wide to extend the search (sources most likely to contain relevant suppliers or data to sources least likely)
  • custom research agents: you can define your own research agents that you can train over time (by using the same agent across multiple research projects); for example, if you are concerned about brand, you can train one to determine if the manufacturer has bad press

The platform is being built to support any company that needs to find a new company, regardless of manufacturing need, and is currently serving (and targeting) automotive, industrial, and retail customers. While it’s search and match capabilities are not as deep as platforms that specialize in a single industry or on a single manufacturing type, and its profiles not as extensive as supplier discovery platforms designed to build extensive market intelligence profiles, it was built to solve a need — generic supplier discovery at an affordable price point for the mid-market (for teams willing to do the research required to narrow suggestions down to potential candidates).

By asking the right questions (and creating the right research parameters), the buyer can use the platform to narrow in on suppliers more likely than not to meet the organization’s requirements. For example, if you know your machine and tooling requirements for a custom part, it can look for manufacturers that advertise the capabilities. If you have specific material requirements for your consumer product, you can specify the material requirements (tempered glass, aluminum lids for your jars) and it will look for suppliers that have those materials on their site.

It’s not perfect, as the supplier might not have the metrology, capacity, or expertise for something outside the norm, but if you can get 70% or more on the accuracy, that means seven out of ten recommendations are valid and you won’t waste a lot of time researching inappropriate suppliers. If you’re a mid-market company that can’t afford a custom solution per category, this is still a significant improvement over not having anything, and cuts weeks (or months of research) down to hours, and maybe days at most. Thus, if you’re a mid-market that needs an affordable supplier discovery platform that works, be sure to check out Find My Factory.