Category Archives: contract management

Mercanis: Men with a Mission to bring Modern Volkswagen Efficiency with BMW Style to Source-to-Contract! Part 1

Mercanis a new Source-to-Contract mini-suite provider based in Berlin, Germany that is bringing a powerful, affordable, and easy to use solution to the mid-market that not only has core capabilities in sourcing, supplier management, analytics, and contract management, but also has core capabilities around risk assessment AND intake, which is not something we have traditionally seen in mid-market Source-to-Contract, and even enterprise Source-to-Contract and Source-to-Pay suites.

Logging into Mercanis takes the end user, who could be a buyer, an AP clerk, or an average employee who needs to go out to market for a product or service to do their job, to their customized dashboard (according to their role) where they can see an overview of their events/requests, contracts, suppliers (including individual supplier overviews) they manage or have access to, organizational spend they oversee, and other relevant information depending on the selected widgets.

Today we’re going to discuss Sourcing, Supplier Management, and Risk.

SOURCING

Creating a sourcing event in Mercanis for new or previously sourced articles can be accomplished in just a few minutes as the platform was designed for high efficiency. With integrated intake, the system will either guide an organizational user to a self-serve sourcing event for articles (products/components/fixed services) in acceptable categories under a certain amount or funnel to the appropriate sourcing team, as appropriate.

When an organizational user wants something, they define their event name, a unique departmental project reference, category, budget, RFX due date, relevant organizational tags, affected business unit[s], preferred NDA (from those associated with the category), and then the system will either notify the requester that this needs to be a (strategic) sourcing event and direct it to the sourcing team or take the buyer to their (selected) workspace where they can set it up on their own.

In either situation, the next step is to select suppliers. Suppliers are auto-suggested by the system and it’s one click to select them (and the user can search for other known suppliers or even invite a new supplier for onboarding if they want to). After that, they select an appropriate pricing sheet (from those associated) which is automatically pulled in, and then they select appropriate RFP surveys that they want filled out (which are also auto-suggested based on the article). They can then launch the event immediately, or specify a later date, and at any time they can (come back and) add stakeholders.

For a single article, since everything is auto-suggested, they can literally select the core suppliers, price sheet, and surveys with a few clicks and launch a small event in a minute. Most events on an article or category can be reasonably defined in five to fifteen minutes (vs. the 15 hours for some first, and even second, generation suites).

In the Sourcing projects can be multi-round if necessary. Once the results come back, the buyer can kick off another event based off of that project and link it to the existing one to create a multi-round event.

Also, once response come in, as many stakeholders as desired can score it, the scores can be weighted, and once an award is decided upon, it can be sent to the contract module. Survey responses for each survey can be compared side-by-side for easy comparison against peers. And when the individual responses are scored, the buyer can see the assessment criteria scores graphically in spider graphs, including a calculated score based on total relative pricing. When it comes to price sheets, which can include embedded formulas, the buyer can select the prices of interest for side-by-side comparison as well. And to make the comparisons pop, the buyer can even shift to dark mode. While not always the best for data entry, it does make certain visual comparisons pop.

The entry point to sourcing is the dashboard which will summarize the requests, events by category, upcoming, and current sourcing events that need to be reviewed, managed, or awarded.

An organizational buyer can also two-click a new sourcing event by going to the article summary screen, locating the article of interest, clicking on it, defining an event name, selecting one of the associated sourcing workflows (defaulted if just one), selecting one of the associated pricing sheets (defaulted if just one), and confirming the event creation.

SUPPLIER MANAGEMENT

The Supplier Management module revolves around the Supplier Repository which organizes all supplier related information in the system with each supplier maintained by the system. It’s easy to search suppliers by name, category, location, associated transaction cost centers, and other information. Upon implementation, Mercanis can import all of your suppliers from your ERP, just a subset you mark as active, or only those suppliers used in the past x years.

On implementation, they will pull in as much information as they have, fill in gaps with any information they have in their system, and augment with a 360-degree profile they auto-generate using their AI tools that scrapes supplier websites and pulls in data from third party sites, Compliance Catalyst, Dun & Bradstreet and/or other third party supplier data providers you have a subscription to. This profile will include a short description, any known (reference) customers, categories the supplier (can) supply in your taxonomy, any known contacts, owners, known business units, primary / head office location, website and Linkedin URLs, and even known similar suppliers in your database. It will also contain direct links to any third party profiles you have access to, and can even pull all of that information into the platform for you.

This is in addition to the basic corporate information (and contacts) maintained by the system (which includes legal identifiers, basic accounting information, and location data), supplier states (which can be buyer organization defined), tiers (as the organization can track tier 2 suppliers or suppliers typically used by your suppliers, third party ratings (from the ERP or a data partner) and data that can be pulled in (which can be visually displayed in spider graphs), specific information collected during onboarding, and appropriate risk data (including cached data from any third party data feeds you have a license too). Note that suppliers can also be evaluated using organizational surveys that can be associated with them, and multiple evaluators can be associated with these surveys.

The SRM system also centralizes and maintains a record of all system activity, including sourcing events, contracts, risk profiles, and associated supplier analytics. It also tracks all associated tasks from across the system in one location, all associated (onboarding/sourcing/contract) requests, and any notes the buying organization wants to add.

New supplier creation is easy. It can be as easy as defining a name and email to kick-off the onboarding process, which will send a request to the buyer to provide the requested information. (Note that if you provide an appropriate legal identifier or URL and the supplier is in the Mercanis database, base information will automatically be populated to simplify the onboarding process for the supplier.)

Search can be customized to work on any given supplier identifier.

RISK

The risk module, primarily used in supplier pre-qualification, tracks country and industry risk across the globe and can instantly associate the relevant country and industry risks with an existing, or new, supplier based on its address and NAICS code. The platform uses over 40 different data sources to analyze country and industry risk in accordance with the German Supply Chain Act and computes a score for every country-industry risk correlation.

In addition, it can integrate with third party data from providers like IntegrityNext and Ecovadis and, for any supplier, pull in all the relevant data if the customer has the data feed licenses and automatically compute advanced risk measures using their data (from public sources) and third party data.

Come back tomorrow for Contracts, Spend Analysis, and Administration.

If You Need to Bring The Hammer Down, Make Sure You Have An Anvil (Analytical)!

On New Year’s Day, 2022, Anvil Analytical (Anvil) was spun out of 4C Associates to bring a stand-alone spend-analysis technology solution to the market, based on the solution that 4C had developed over the course of a decade or so. (4C was founded back in 2000 to help companies with their Supply Chain and Procurement operations, and that required a deep understanding of the supply base and spend, and that required the ability to dig deep into the organizational spend.)

However, while the solution revolves around their service-oriented spend analytics solution (which can include a contract-focussed spend analytics module), Anvil Analytical also offers a Scope-3 Carbon Tracking, a country-based Risk Intelligence, a Market & Inflation Intelligence solution, and a Project Management (Savings Tracking) module.

When we say service-oriented spend analytics solution, we mean it’s a hybrid service/DIY solution. Anvil handles the data loads and refreshes, the validations, the mappings to your chosen taxonomy (which also maps to their internal taxonomy, more on this later), the initial implementation of the system, new report (dashboard) creation and customization (a certain number of hours for this are included in the annual subscription), and monthly/quarterly check-ins and advisory. (Depending on the client’s typical refresh interval and assessment cadence.) The client does regular monitoring, analysis, project identification and creation, savings tracking, and what-if analysis on market/inflation/project trends to identify new projects that the client wants to undertake. It’s designed for a Procurement department that is sophisticated enough to understand the power of spend analytics and use a modern tool to extract the insights it needs, but doesn’t have the manpower to do a lot of deep analysis work and/or any real data analysts on staff and wants help with the heavy lifting.

Implementation

Depending on the organization size and maturity, the initial implementation and setup will take anywhere from 2 weeks to 4 months from the kick-off meeting. The first step is for the client to provide the Anvil team with data exports for the previous years [they need at least 2 years, or the year-on-year analysis won’t work, for example] from all relevant systems (ERP/AP/I2P). Anvil then manually processes subsets of these to create training sets and verification sets for its traditional AI-classification engine, trains the models, runs the verification sets, corrects the model, repeats until high accuracy, and then runs the full data set. At this point, the client is engaged, remaining errors corrected, the model retrained, and then the system is delivered. Simultaneous to the training process, they work with the client to identify any special reports or customizations the client wants to the primary reports and dashboards and build them simultaneously. Once the system is rolled out, they do an initial training session, review the primary analysis and identify initial areas for analysis, set up the support processes and methodology for the regular (incremental) data updates, and determine the goals of the monthly/quarterly cadence meetings and future training sessions. Every cadence meeting will review the results of the last update(s), identify new suppliers, and identify new analysis of interest.

With respect to validation and cleansing, they will establish data standards and formats and ensure all data adhere to them, normalize and identify suppliers against their database (or a third party database if you have a subscription to one where they have, or can develop, an API) which has almost a million suppliers, validate key pieces of supplier information (such as tax and registration ids), and fill in key missing data elements if they have it (or identify missing data that needs to be collected).

Spend Analytics

Spend analytics revolves around Materiality, Growth, Fragmentation, and Churn. Materiality, defined as a measure of both the scale of your spend and how easy it may be to access, is all about understanding the category spend breakdown, where the most spend, and possibly the most opportunity, is. Growth identifies which categories are the fastest growing (or fastest shrinking) in terms of your spend, and helps you identify where you may need more contracts, monitoring, control, or even (key) supplier development to reduce spend. Fragmentation, which measures how fragmented your spend is in each category compared to the average fragmentation that has been identified through thousand of engagements undertaken by 4C and Anvil Analytical, helps you identify [with color coding that show 50%, 75%, and 90% thresholds] where there is likely significant opportunity through consolidation (or significant opportunity to reduce risk if fragmentation is too low). Churn measures how much spend is being gobbled up by new suppliers in a category and helps you identify where you may need to introduce competition or innovation to keep costs down. This is summarized on one of the primary dashboards included in spend analysis – Deep Dives. Each of these area can be drilled into. For example, drilling into a materiality category from the main deep dive dashboard will give you your overall category spend, supplier count, high materiality supplier count, medium materiality supplier count, spend per business unit, spend per country, supplier spend per business unit, and so on. (And from here you can dive into just the higher materiality suppliers, or just one, and get the relevant insight.)

Like every other spend analysis tool, the entry point is the Summary Dashboard that summarizes your spend, on contract (if you have the contract [sub] module), supplier count, on PO, invoice count, average payment time, consolidation percentage, on-time payment, spend by L1 (top level of the) category (hierarchy), by business unit, by country, overall spend growth summary, and top X suppliers. Each of these can be drilled into for more detail. There’s also an insights dashboard that will give you, for a category, the materiality rating, growth rating, fragmentation rating, churn rating, and opportunity rating. Key insights and observations across each area (based on insights from Anvil’s market-intelligence modules, anonymized recent 4C project results or recent 4C insights, or market partners) are also included, as well as a breakdown by country, the likely chance of success against the main procurement levers (compete, consolidate, demand, or collaborate), and a Pareto analysis. It also highlights the top 5 opportunities based on spend and likely savings potential (based on market intelligence and/or a variance analysis), supplier growth by threshold, inflation impact, and index sensitivity. Finally, you can drill down to line level transactions if needed, or search for, and bring up, summary reports on any supplier in the system.

Contract Analytics

We’ll cover contract analytics next as it builds on spend analytics. In the Anvil platform, contract analytics is another set of dashboards that works off of contract metadata, which would be loaded during implementation and then updated in the regular refreshes. (Note that if you happen to be using one of their partner contract management solutions, they already have pre-built APIs and the loading of this data will take minutes. If your CLM has an API for metadata, they can build an extraction facility to extract that data as a service, and if not, they can work with flat-files as they do with spend.)

Contract Analytics is essentially another (set of) dashboard(s) and reports but focussed on breaking down spend by contract. The main dashboard will breakdown spend by on-contract vs. off contract, % category spend > XK (default 250K) on contract, suppliers on contract, expiring in the short term (3 to 9 months, for e.g.), contracts by business unit, and suppliers with > xK (default 250K) spend with no contract. Other relevant measures can be easily defined on implementation and, of course, all summaries can be drilled down to the line level. Since it’s essentially just another dimension of spend, we’ll conclude our high-level summary of it here.

Carbon Management

The Anvil Carbon Management platform was designed to help a company assess the scope 3 emissions of the goods and services they buy, segment the supply base as needed to support the different engagement approaches needed to maximize reach and results, support decisions when scores for tenders are carbon-adjusted, and determine B-corp accreditation based on carbon-based market ability.

The main entry point to the Carbon Management module is the Carbon Baseline Dashboard that allows you to drill into the spend carbon baseline, quantity carbon baseline, carbon insights, and carbon project tracker. The spend carbon baseline will give you your spend-based carbon footprint, your supplier count, and invoice count. It will break it down by Level 1 Category, Level 2 Category, and Level 3 Category. It will give it to you by supplier, by country, by business unit, and display the monthly totals relative to the supplier count. The supplier spend vs. carbon footprint breakdown can be particularly insightful when you find out that your top supplier with 5% of your spend only contributes 1% of your carbon footprint while your 11th place supplier (not included in the Top 10 report) that only accounts for 1% of your spend contributes 15% of your carbon footprint. It can happen, since carbon production is directly tied to the product/service — certain extraction and manufacturing activities are way more carbon intensive than others, and, even worse, depending on the technology being used, there can often be a 5X to 10X difference between traditional approaches and new techniques that only a few extractors/manufactures use. For example, in the EV industry, the production of a battery can produce anywhere between 2,000 and 16,000 kg of CO2. That means a poor process using materials from dirty raw material extractors can produce 8X the amount of carbon that needs to be produced. Now, it’s likely that in the automotive industry a battery supplier would be a top 10 supplier, but it might not be as obvious just how much carbon is in that Scope 3 battery supply chain vs. the steel supply chain or the electronics supply chain for the control system.

The quantity carbon baseline allows an organization to focus in on new carbon emissions between two points in time, scope 1 vs scope 2 vs scope 3, the measured % (vs estimated from third party sources), and the breakdown by business unit, country, supplier, and combination thereof.

The carbon insight dashboard allows you to drill into a summary of your carbon (project) pipeline and expected carbon savings, vs. carbon savings realized in categories in which you have undertaken improvement activities and marked such in the system (with a start date). You can drill into the forecast, the projects by status, and (potential) by business unit. The corresponding carbon savings dashboard allows you to see the carbon savings you’ve realized over time as a results of projects that have already started delivering results.

For the Carbon Management module to be a success, the organization needs to have data for each level 3 / level 4 product or service purchased. Most organizations won’t have this, and nor will their suppliers, but Anvil will work with you to produce the figures using average carbon production for the industry, category, and region using the appropriate carbon data source which may include, but is not limited to, the ONS (UK), Carnegie Mellon (USA), Project Carbon (France), and other sources they, or you, have access to that may be more accurate. This data will be updated on regular intervals when more accurate estimates and/or actual emissions tracking becomes available for a supplier, methods change as a result of development projects, or suppliers make extraction or production improvements on their own.

Note that use of this module could require significantly more services than the other modules as spend and contract analytics are more-or-less cookie-cutter, risk management is based on standard measures, and the market inflation & analytics offering is also based on market data, 4C & Anvil Analytical project results, and anonymized data from their e-Sourcing partners (which include Market Dojo and Unit4 Scan Market).

Risk Management

Once you have a grip on your carbon/GHG, you can get a grip on your risk. The risk management module tracks location based risks by country and allows you to determine the location-based risks of a supplier based on the country they are in and the risks associated with transport based on the route(s) available between an origin, intermediate, and destination country and the transport method chosen (as the risks are different for truck, rail, air, and water). When you select a country, or a set of countries that would represent a transport route, it will give you, for a slew of major risk factors, a risk score, origin rank, and total rank. These risk factors include factors such as:

  • carbon factor
  • economic quality
  • education
  • electric grid emissions
  • enterprise conditions
  • global slavery
  • governance

The idea is to provide you with a foundation on which to identify which Environmental, Social Responsibility, and Governance factors may be the most relevant to consider for a supplier, based on their location and the trade routes available to you from their location to your consumer market. This could allow you to short circuit an analysis (as you can quickly identify the most likely high risk factors that might eliminate the supplier from consideration). The data comes from 1500+ different open/publicly available sources that include the corruption perception index and transparency.org.

In addition, with the risk management module you will also get a set of risk-based spend management dashboards which profile an organization’s spend and show the likely types of risk associated with these areas.

Market Inflation & Analytics

The market inflation & analytics module provides category specific inflation projections with geographic variances to allow an organization to identify the categories where their costs are likely to rise, determine the projected spend uplift, dive into the sensitivity of each category (against a single inflation point), and, most importantly, counter supplier price increases when there is no data to support the increase.

The platform tracks over 1,000 commodity prices using indices from markets, banks, national bodies, and commodity markets and contains detailed forecasts for almost 100 commodities. The buyer can also drill into CPI Data, PPI data, SPPI power, ONS data, FRED data, Bureau of Labor Statistics data, IMF data, and Worldbank data.

The most interesting parts of the offering are the Market Insights and Buyer Power. The Market Insights integrate category risk weightings, weightings by subject matter (such as human & labour rights, business conflicts, health & safety, service performance, diversity, environment, etc.), and deep dices into constraints, drivers, opportunities and challenges from a demand/risk perspective and trends from a low, medium, high perspective which provide interesting insight into growth, models, inflation, or other factors. You can drill into a regional market and see its size, portion of global market, regional growth rate, global growth rate, average supplier maturity, average buyer maturity, and a Porter’s Five Forces analysis.

Buyer Power allows you to drill into the relevant data around buyer power vs. supplier power, which supports the Procurement levers widget in the summary dashboard (if you have the market inflation module). This insight is unique as it is based on the results of recent, anonymized, sourcing events from the client base of Anvil and its Sourcing Partners and allows you to see the expected results vs. (forecasted) inflation in the category.

Project Management

Project Management is one of the newest modules and accompanies the suite-wide UX update that is being released in December, 2023. It is standard GANTT-based project management for savings and carbon project management that integrates with the analytics and carbon modules so that an organization can also track savings/reductions over time. When we say standard capabilities, we mean that you can allocate resources, manage approvals, define tasks and milestones, track progress, get real-time updates and reports, drill into the project data, and customize it to your organizational processes. There’s nothing unusual, unexpected, or uncharacteristic, but that’s typically what you want for a project management tool.

Services

While Sourcing Innovation is focussed on products, we will note that Anvil also provides sourcing & savings project management on demand, and will manage its partner companies who execute the event for you as well as extract all of the relevant event data and push it into your systems as appropriate.

So if the hammer must fall, consider bringing it down with the Anvil’s support. It’s a solid service-oriented spend-analytics solution that can start you off with the carbon, risk, and market insights you need as well as provide a baseline of services to help your Procurement team mature in their analytics skills and get going quickly.

Promena’s Upgraded Platform Packs a Rich Caffeinated Turkish Punch

Promena is a two-decades old company (founded in 2001) that has been offering e-Sourcing (and, more recently, source-to-contract) solutions to Turkish enterprises to major enterprises in Türkiye that you likely never heard off on this side of the world until their coverage over on Spend Matters in 2019 (Vendor Analysis Part I and Part II by Nick Heinzmann, Pro/ContentHub subscription required), if you’ve heard of them at all.

However, they are another mid-market source-to-contract (with some e-Procurement capability) that you should be aware of, as they are a two-decade old company with an annual transaction volume nearing 3 Billion that is now expanding throughout the European market and into North America (mainly through partners for integration and services). The solution is solid, time-tested, modular, multi-lingual (13 languages at the present time), being improved annually (with new capabilities in development for late Q4 and 2024 release), and offered at an affordable price-point for mid-markets. In this article, we will overview the main components of their solution and highlights. (We’ll refer you back to Nick Heinzmann’s Vendor Analysis on Spend Matters for a deeper dive as well as Xavier Olivera’s 2022 Update, especially if you want analyst commentary. Note that a Pro/ContentHub subscription will be required for all of these.)

The typical entry point into Promena for most buyers is e-Sourcing project creation, which allows buyers to define an e-Sourcing project (with basic meta-data like name, department/child company, owner, description, etc.), define the RFX and Auction events that will constitute that project (so you’re not mixing categories, creating projects where only a subset of suppliers can bid on each item or lot, and balancing the need for detailed RFX events for strategic or high value products or services with low-value/non-strategic products or services that can be sourced through a quick-hit auction), define the project milestones and project tasks, and create the team (which will allow different team members to be responsible for sub-events, milestones or tasks). Overarching documents can also be attached at the project level. Note that the platform also supports a Gantt chart view of a project if the milestones and tasks are given start and end dates and tasks associated with the milestones.

RFX functionality is more-or-less what you would expect from a mid-market sourcing platform. You can attach any RFI/RFP/Qualification survey forms that you want the suppliers to fill out (that can be constructed in the internal form builder), select the products from the internal product management functionality (which we’ll cover later) or define new product/service requirements free-form, define the quantity, select the suppliers who you want to invite (from the built in supplier management functionality, more on this later), and immediately send it off. Once the bids are returned, the associated team members can score each supplier-product or supplier-service combination based on the qualification surveys and then see the total price for each supplier-product or supplier-service combination, with the lowest price for each pairing highlighted. In addition, it will show you the lowest bid by supplier across all products/services as well as the savings if you cherry pick the lowest bid for each product or service. Also, the user can, at any time, pop up a complete bid change history for every supplier, which is incredibly useful if you’re doing a multi-round RFX and/or want to see the drop between current system price and the new bid price. Note that, currently, it only supports unit prices (and calculates total prices based on demand), but the 2024 roadmap includes the ability to breakdown the unit price by primary component type (item, freight, interim storage, waste, etc.).

e-Auctions are similarly easy to set up. Simply define the products / services, indicate the quantities, define the auction parameters (starting prices, weightings, start and end times, bid requirements [equal allowed, min/max changes, auto extension, etc.]), invite the suppliers … and go! As with all auction tools, you can see the bids change (graphically) in real time, and suppliers can see where they stand by rank, or, if you so choose, rank and distance to next competitor. It’s important to note that they support Dutch as well as English/standard reverse auctions as not all platforms support Dutch auctions.

Once RFX events and auctions are complete, awards can be defined in the system through the creation of award document. These award documents can then be used to kick off contract creation. In the current release, contract management is foundational and is essentially a searchable electronic filing cabinet that stores meta-data indexed executed contracts with complete pricing information (extracted from the award documents), but a new version with negotiation support is currently in beta and final (security) testing and should be released by year end.

For every contract, you can define system-wide foundational meta-data fields, additional fields that may be specific to that contract, or the product/service category the contract falls under, parties (and who signed on behalf), associated documents and addendums, add it to a group, and break out the price for every product or service in the contract for easy access.

The next major area of the system is supplier management. Supplier Management in Promena is essentially information, relationship, and baseline performance management. Supplier management starts with basic profile creation (company details, HQ address, and third party identification numbers) and onboarding. Onboarding asks a supplier to identify the products they provide, their banking information (for payment), and additional information (through buyer defined forms) specific to the organization’s need (which could be around ESG, product reliability metrics, etc.). Individual forms can be assigned to different individuals in the organization to review and approve (as the platform allows for approval flows across each major platform area, which will be discussed later), and suppliers onboarded (and approved) as soon as all information is completed and reviewed. Once a supplier is onboarded, it’s quick and easy to access all of this information and maintain it going forward.

One differentiating feature of the supplier information management module is that the supplier suitability score for specific products and services is continually assessed through supplier responses to the buyer’s form-based questions using the company’s pre-defined weighted criteria. This score, while providing insights to the buyer during the onboarding process, is kept continuously updated through subsequent sourcing events, contracts and addendums, and development projects.

Moving on to the relationship management, that is primarily accomplished through Action Management, where a user can make a CAPA (Corrective Action/Preventive Action) request, assign an owner/reviewer, send the request to the supplier, and then evaluate and either accept or reject the response from the supplier. A request consists of defining information (name, reason, category, supplier, product, required completion date), a detailed overview of the problem and the resolution needed, any associated (e-)documentation (which could consist of multimedia files), and the log of all accesses/activity on the action. It’s also really easy to search for actions, which can be queried by id, name, status, category, supplier, assigned supplier rep, assigned team member, reason (which is limited to a standard list, which the buying organization can configure in the company settings upon implementation), date range, and/or success status. It’s also easy to use this capability to find all actions associated with a supplier, product, or individual, by status.

Moving on to performance management, it’s specifically survey and KPI-based performance management. At the present time, they don’t integrate with third party data feeds to automatically bring in data that can be used to automatically compute KPIs such as on time delivery / average delivery time, average response time, defect rate (based on returns), etc. Thus, if you want this data included in a supplier performance scorecard, you have to define the KPI you want and the organization user who is going to provide it. But once the KPIs are defined, the relevant organizational users can be identified to either fill out (or validate) the data (if you are asking the supplier to provide metrics) and then you can see a summary by supplier in the performance management area or see a summary across suppliers / products / categories in the reporting section (which will be addressed later). Note that evaluations, and KPIs, can be defined for arbitrary periods, which means that you can collect and track KPIs over time (and the ability to display and analyze those trends in the reporting section is on the roadmap for 2024).

The platform also contains a section for ESG Management, but it’s just a named section for collecting surveys and centralizing KPIs related to ESG. It doesn’t specifically address Scope 2/3 carbon, integrate with third party data feeds (with audited data), or provide ESG best practices. In other words, it doesn’t contain any unique capabilities. However, for many firms that need to track ESG data from suppliers / for their associated products, it’s great to have a separate named section. Plus, Promena is in the process of integrating with third-party data providers to enhance data-driven decision-making and when those integrations are launched in 2024, the data will appear in this section (assuming the buyer licenses the appropriate data subscriptions).

Moving on to reporting, while the platform does not contain a full self-serve reporting engine or spend analysis capability, it does have a number of built-in drill-down dashboard reports built in Qlik Sense that provide the users with a lot of information. Standard reports (and more can be built by Promena or their partners using services) include Project Reports (across sourcing events) and Event (RFX/e-Auctions) reports, SRM reports (on supplier statistics, participation and performance), and Contract Reports. There are also reports on POs (for the purchase order capability we’ll define soon), and the ability to drill down to REQs (data related to individual purchase requests, which we’ll discuss later). When we say Project or Event reports, we mean that each of these groups contain one or more sub-reports (pages) that a user can drill into. For events, this includes category analysis, participant analysis, auction analysis, RFQ analysis, and authorized person analysis. Similar breakdowns exist for other reporting areas.

This more-or-less completes coverage of their Source-to-Contract capability, with the exception of configuration settings (that will be discussed later), so now we will move onto e-Procurement.

The first capability we will overview is the product management capability of the Promena platform. Within the platform, the buying organization can define its own category hierarchy, and once this is defined, an organization can define the products and services it needs (and buys) across the category hierarchy. Products can have all necessary meta data information (name, id, units, dimensions, etc.) along with associated prices by supplier, which can be defined for individual time frames (so if a contract has price escalation or de-escalation, the price table can be adequately captured), and images. The latter is important because the platform also supports catalogs.

The catalog functionality makes it easy for organizational end-users to purchase standard, approved, on-contract, products and services they need to do their daily jobs (such as office supplies, MRO, and repair services). The catalog functionality is standard and straight forward. A user can select a sub-catalog by supplier or category or simply search the integrated catalog (maintained by the buying department, it is not a supplier maintained catalog) by description or product number/code. When the user finds what they want, they can define a quantity and add it to a cart. Once they’ve found everything they want, they can “checkout” which will automatically create a PO and send it to the associated supplier(s) by default. Alternatively, if they are requesting a large quantity, they can create a REQuistion and send it to the supplier(s) who offer the product in hopes of getting a better price quote. When the REQuisition is returned, if the user accepts, it can be converted to a Purchase Order.

Purchase orders complete Promena’s e-Procurement capability. Purchase orders basically consist of order information against a catalog item, REQ, sourcing event (RFX, e-Auction) award, or contract and allow an organization to track orders, and spend, in the platform. This is useful because, for every category, the organization can define a budget, the platform can track PO-based spend against that budget, and prevent a PO from being issued (using rule configurations) without approval if the budget would be exceeded.

The final capability of the platform is the (self-service) configuration for user and platform management. We’ll start with platform management. The buying organization administrator(s) can define general company information, approved users, locations (for shipments from POs), organizational structure, default organizational currencies (which can be associated with different levels of the organization), units of measures (metric system used), standard organizational payment terms (for awards and POs), inco terms, any additional terms to be included in POs (such as delivery, invoice requirements, etc.), account codes for products and services, their category hierarchy, their cost centers, event settings, supplier search/internal discovery settings, and approval flows (for award creation from RFXs and e-Auctions, supplier onboarding, contracts, actions, REQs, and Purchase Orders). User definition is simply the user, organizational profile, and their platform roles (and thus permissions). Finally, the company settings area displays the Promena platform license the organization has acquired and when it renews (or expires).

Finally, while this is not platform related, we should also point out that Promena offers on-demand professional services. While the buyer can use the platform as a self-service solution, they can engage the Promena Account team to take over and manage end-to end sourcing activities on their behalf at any time. Their account teams currently manage more than 5,000 sourcing activities a year.

While you may not find anything truly unique in the Promena platform if you compare it to high end suites (which come with high-end seven figure price tags), it’s a very solid platform for mid-market enterprises and one where the entirety of the source-to-pay workflow that is supported is tightly integrated, easy to use, and affordably priced (and supported, with 10 global partners for integration and support services). Given that there are only a few such platforms out there (due to all the M&A activity in the later part of the teens), Promena’s global expansion is definitely a welcome addition to the marketplace.

MarketDojo has stepped up it’s Mid-Market Game!

The last time we covered MarketDojo (which recently had a majority stake in the company acquired by Esker) was in 2016 where we noted that marketdojo opens the dojo to suppliers as well after introducing you to MarketDojo in 2014 back when it was a simple RFX/e-Auction platform with some category intelligence and SIM (in our posts on how you could walk your own way and plan your own path). Since then, they have improved the platform greatly. For details on some of these improvements, we recommend their 2016 Vendor Analysis on Spend Matters by Jason Busch (Part I, Part II, and Part III) and their 2020 Vendor Analysis on Spend Matters by Magnus Bergfors (Part I, Part II, and Part III) [Pro or ContentHub subscription required].

Today, we’re going to quickly overview the primary capabilities of the platform, and then focus in on the new and advanced capabilities added since our last review.

MarketDojo is primarily an e-Sourcing platform with foundational supplier management (information and relationship capabilities) and contract tracking (baseline governance). (They still have their categorydojo solution, where they identify current market opportunities that you may want to pursue, but that isn’t the focus of this piece, so we will refer you back to previous articles for details on that functionality.)

e-Sourcing primarily consists of (multi-round) RFX capability, lot-based e-Auctions, and quick quotes (for quick one-time buys/quotes where full sourcing events are not needed). e-RFX creation is quick and easy — define some basic meta-data under settings, add any necessary documents, create the specific questionnaires and additional supplier data collection forms, define the items (which can be lotted in RFX as well as Auctions), add the collaborators (that can be given full access or limited view access), and even invite new suppliers (which can be onboarded later if the responses to the survey forms look good).

The major improvements and/or differentiation since we covered them last is in the


event instantiation
they now support templates, with a library of out-of-the-box templates (for the categories they track in categorydojo and then some) for RFX and e-Auction as well as custom templates built by the organization
survey creation
(in beta) you can now use Bard to identify common questions / characteristics of a category or product/service and then edit the form accordingly [which is a decent use of NLP, gives you some good ideas you might miss but keeps you, the intelligent human, in full control]
lots
lots now support transformational bids (where bids can be marked up by a percentage or a fixed amount to implement switching costs or penalties for reduced quality/utilization rations) as well as bids in DPD (Dynamic Parcel Distribution), FOB (Free on Board), and EXW (ExWorks).
bids
bids can defined as a complex formula over an arbitrary number of bid components and they support a brand new formula builder
collaborators
collaborators weren’t part of the initial solution, and they didn’t have tiered access
bid ranking
easily see the top bid for every item in every lot in a default lowest cost award scenario and easily dive in to see all the bids for every item of every lot in rank order
bid component ranking
see how every bid component ranks against all supplier bids for an item; this helps you identify the cost components that a #2 or #3 supplier (that you want to do business with) is not competitive on (such as freight, overhead, etc.), which might allow you to work with the supplier to get those cost components down to make their bid more competitive
dynamic RFX round creation
you can easily create a new round and control which suppliers and collaborators from the current round get invited to a new round

And, of course, the quick-quote functionality is brand new. These are super simple. All that a requester has to specify is what do they want, when do they want it by, what requirements must be satisfied, what are the payment terms, and which (approved) suppliers should it go out to and off the quote request can go. They can also attach spec documents, add special instructions, and request physical copies, but that’s not necessary. And if they want a certain currency or quotes in a certain unit of measure, that can also be specified. When the quotes come back, they’ll see an easy-to-understand quote summary and can choose one for award. Easy-peasy and, most importantly, the spend is captured and can be managed.

The supplier information management primarily covers the onboarding of new suppliers, to ensure that the appropriate information is captured, and then supports ongoing maintenance of the data. Onboarding is quite simple. A buyer defines the basic supplier information (name and corporate e-mail address), adds any mandatory and optional tags (such as DPST Tier, ESG, Minority, specialized category, etc.), selects the questionnaires they want the supplier to answer (of which a default set will be automatically selected upon tag definition), identifies the business users, either by role or by name, that will approve the forms as the supplier returns them, and then the corporate/contact email the onboarding request will be sent to (and the language the request should be sent in — it’s relevant to note that MarketDojo now supports 23 languages in its platform, but if you want the forms in 23 languages, someone will need to translate them, unless you are using MarketDojo out-of-the-box forms where those forms have already been translated).

The relationship management solution is straight-forward as well and is primarily designed to track supplier contacts and organizational users, associated sourcing events (that they participated in, not just awards), onboarding status (by requested survey/form) and associated surveys, contracts, identified innovation opportunities, and activities. Activities have a type (such as call, task, objective, audit, review), an assigned organizational user who is responsible for ensuring the supplier completes the activity, associated documents, organizational (and user) notes, and possibly even an (optional) associated hierarchy of sub-tasks.

Reporting has been updated and is currently supported in PowerBI through MarketDojo’s OpenAPI (and it is also supported by MarketDojos partner SpendKey) and the default built in reporting suite is pretty decent for a Sourcing platform with click-through dashboards on contracts, sourcing events, suppliers, overall spend, spend by category, spend by supplier, spend by country, spend distribution, PO (vs non-PO) Analysis, Compliance, and even Supply Chain Geographic Coverage. While not a full-fledged analytics platform by any stretch of the imagination, it’s enough to give buyers some insights as to where they may want to begin their analytics efforts if they are looking to increase savings, increase diversity, increase compliance, or decrease risk.

Contract management is baseline. It’s basically a searchable meta-data index of contracts, which can be associated with suppliers. However, for smaller mid-size organizations, that might be all they need.

MarketDojo is a great mid-market SIM-powered sourcing platform at an affordable mid-market price point.

SourceDogg dogs the Sourcing Process so You Don’t Have To!

SourceDogg was founded over a decade ago (in 2009 in Ireland, with the UK subsidiary opening a decade ago in 2013) by founders from the construction industry who decided they just didn’t have any good tools for sourcing products and managing suppliers. Since then, it has evolved into a full indirect Source-to-Contract application for requesting (intake support) and sourcing products (and services) (through traditional RFX and e-Auction), managing suppliers (with information, relationship, compliance, performance, and development support), and managing contracts for customers across a wide range of industries, including a strong customer base in manufacturing, pharma / health-care, and CPG/F&B.

Like the majority of modern Source-to-Contract applications, it is a fully SaaS-based product that can also be integrated with your organization’s ERP to pull supplier and product data, especially on initial product deployment. And, like the majority of modern Source-to-Contract applications, it has a fully functional Supplier Portal that allows suppliers to fully interact with all of the sourcing, management, and contracting processes employed by the organization.

The process starts with intake, where an organizational user can request a product or request a supplier. When a user needs a new product, they can go to the web portal and select the appropriate option (by clicking on the appropriate tile) that lets them do a general product request or a request in particular categories defined by the organization. When they make a general request, the application walks them through the process (using wizard-like functionality) to collect the appropriate information on category, volume, expected cost, requirements, etc. so that a buyer can kick off the appropriate sourcing process. Category specific requests function similarly, but are designed to minimize the process steps and information required for commonly requested categories. Now, if you’re using our core requirements for intake, as defined in Part 37 of our Source-to-Pay+ series Investigating Intake – Diving in to the Details, it’s not quite a full intake platform as there’s no budget tracking and process visibility (and in-process messaging depends on whether or not the requester is made a member of the sourcing event team), but it’s better than what many traditional sourcing platforms offer with respect to intake (if they even offer intake at all). Plus, SourceDogg is continually improving their product and we do expect their intake capabilities will continue to improve over time.

From intake, we move onto sourcing which supports full, multi-round, e-RFX and e-Auction with all of the typical functionality that you expect. One thing that stands out is their ability to include matrices (and built-in formulas) in not only the quotation fields, but all forms and elements of the process, allowing the organization to collect matrix options for product/packaging configurations, team configurations (on services), compliance/certification options, and so on.

As expected, setting up an event in SourceDogg is super easy. You define the typical sourcing event meta data (name, description, products, team, internal budget estimates, scoring system, etc.), create the content (forms and bid matrices), invite the suppliers (who need to already be defined/onboard in the core supplier management module), create the FAQ (which can be extended as needed during the process), and release it into the wild. (Suppliers can then login to their portal upon receiving the notification and fill it out within the designated window. If the bid sheets or data collection forms are complex, they can be output or collected using every Purchaser’s favourite tool and format, Microsoft Excel.) When the event concludes, the responses can be viewed, various side-by-side reports generated (and output to multiple standard formats including DOCX, PDF, and, of course, Microsoft Excel), responses scored, and final decision(s) recorded in the tool (and an email auto-generated and sent to the winning supplier[s] if desired). There is also the ability to capture notes at a question level (by individual who reviewed/scored the response), the supplier level, and the project level.

e-Auctions are setup similarly, and, as expected, run for a much shorter time. The degree of feedback presented to the suppliers depends on the configuration. Upon event completion, the platform automatically generates reports ranking the bidders on cost or, if the event was preceded by an RFI/RFP with a qualitative component, on a weighted score. (And, of course, the buyer can always go in and view the complete bid history.) Note that the Q&A feature can be used to post updates during the auction to all suppliers, a supplier group associated with a lot, or just a specific supplier who asked a question or obviously needs guidance.

Supplier Management consists of four primary modules: Supplier (Information) Management (SIM), Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Supplier Performance Management (SPM), and Action Plans.

Let’s start with Supplier (Information) Management. The system tracks all the core supplier meta-data you would expect as well as all associated contacts, product data sheets, RFX and other data from specific collection effort (from SRM, SPM, or Development Actions) responses, certifications, contracts (including full version history support), other relevant documents (the organization wishes to track), and any critical notes. It also maintains a full-history of interaction with the supplier that can be viewed and queried as well as allowing the supplier to be tagged using category and location tags (that can be defined by both the buyer and supplier.

The Supplier Relationship Management module allows the organization to define supplier reviews, track the results of those reviews, and define actions to be completed by the supplier and followed up on by buyer personnel when the supplier indicates the action has been taken. It’s nothing fancy, but it gets the job done efficiently, and that’s what’s important.

The Supplier Performance Management module allows the organization to design and track KPIs and supplier scorecards in support of processes to measure, analyze and manage supplier performance. The scorecards can be simple or complex across a wide range of metrics and categories. It really depends on what data the organization has and is willing to collect (through surveys) or enter into the application. (At present, it does not integrate with risk/etc. data feeds out of the box, but if these feeds are pushed into your ERP and associated with suppliers and products, that data can be pulled in.) Creating a Performance Review is easy. Once simply creates an instance, and a record for every area, sub-area, and rating that one wants to record. The review can then be sent to as many team members as you want and they can be limited to rating specific areas, sub-areas, or records, as appropriate.

The Action Plans module allows for the creation of specific improvement plans and non-conformance reports for a supplier that needs to improve generally or specifically on one product. The Action Plan modules supports multiple default plans (called forms) that can be used to quickly an initiate a new action plan. The forms can be used as is or modified to the appropriate situation, and the monitoring team can include as many organizational personnel as required. Once a supplier responds, the team can then accept or reject the response, and once all responses have been accepted, the response can be approved and archived. If performance slips or the issue comes up again, an action plan can also be “reactivated” and parts, or all, of the plan kicked-off again.

Layered on top of all of the supplier related modules is a supplier visualization dashboard for non-procurement organizational users and executives that make it really easy to get statistics on organizational suppliers (total, approved, by-size [SME, MM, Large], by type [Product, Services, Subcontractor]) and filter down by category & sub-category, status, and other key identifiers as well as see the (subset of) suppliers on a map. From this primary visualization screen, the user can jump into individual supplier records (with key performance dashboards also displayed)

The contracts module, which revolves around contract governance, is very straight-forward and easy to use as well. Contracts can be grouped by area for easy human location, searched on key metadata and tags, and viewed within the tool. The default meta data is fairly extensive (and can be extended by the organization on implementation) and should capture all of the key information necessary to locate a contract, track expiry, track key terms, and track key clauses. While there’s nothing fancy about the contracts module, we want to re-iterate just how straight-forward it is for an average user to add a contract (addendum or updated version), define or edit the metadata, and locate any contract in the system quickly and easily. Some of the more advanced CLM tools focussed around negotiation support or analytics lose sight of the fact that the average person who needs to retrieve a contract is not a Procurement or Legal or Technology super user and just need a system that follows the KISS principle.

The entire suite also contains a fully modifiable tile-based entry dashboard that allows an average user to define the parts of the application they use, as well as any customized intake forms or application modules, organize them by frequency of access, and see which modules have updated information or new actions assigned to them.

This fully modifiable tile-based entry dashboard with alerts is also the first thing a supplier sees when they login to the platform (and, to complete the tri-fecta, a non-Procurement organizational stakeholder who needs to make a Procurement request, review an RFX, or participate in a supplier development initiative). While simplistic, this is a key feature as you can ensure that supplier or organizational users are not overwhelmed with over-crowded dashboards or 40 menu items they will never use (and likely never understand).

The application is also highly configurable by the client admin who can define the organizational profile and branding, the settings, the certifications it requires from all its suppliers, data-sheet categories, security settings, users and user categories, guides (which can also have an access tile on a main dashboard), default fields for core system objects (requisitions, auctions, supplier profiles, contracts, action plan forms, etc.), supplier onboarding workflow, tags and tag groups, SourceDogg Connect (for ERP and/or organizational data feed pulls), etc. Plus, the SourceDogg team can make additional customizations across the product during implementation and support initial data loads as required.

Finally, they have extensive support guides and courses on their customer web site to help you extract maximum value from the platform. (And those constant iOS/Android action required alerts will dog you through the process of getting things done.) If you’re a SME or MM company looking for a modern best-of-breed S2C (Source-to-Contract) suite (especially in construction/facilities, manufacturing, pharma / health, O&G, CPG, and F&B) to get the job done, SourceDogg is a platform we suggest that you check out.