Category Archives: Marketplaces

Basware: P2P for the Global “E” Part III

In yesterday’s post, we continued our introduction to Basware, a Finnish provider of enterprise finance solutions that serves the global e-Commerce, P2P, and AP Automation marketplace with over 2,000 international customers that collectively do business with over 1 Million companies in over 100 countries. Yesterday, we focussed on the AP automation and invoice processing capabilities. Today we are going to discuss the e-Invoicing functionality and the Basware Commerce Network.

The Basware Commerce Network (BCN) is an open commerce network that connects to almost 1 Million companies in over 100 countries through over 170 partner networks which include B2BE, Cortex, Crediflow, Crossgate, Danske Bank, Edisoft, Elemica, GHX, GXS, Hubspan, Tradex, Unified Post, Ximantix and over 150 others. Customers on the Basware Commerce Network can send and receive e-Invoices and e-Documents to any company connected to the BCN through one of the partner networks free of charge1. The BCN, which has implemented tax compliance in more than 50 countries, currently delivers over 60 Million e-Invoices per year (with a combined value in excess of $420 Billion) and Basware expects to be processing over 150 Million e-Invoices a year by the end of 2015 (which will have a combined value in excess of 1 Trillion dollars).

A key feature of the BCN is that it was designed to be used by, and equally support, senders and receivers. Note that we are not using the standard terminology of buyers and suppliers because, whereas some networks were designed to be buyer centric and support the buyer who is receiving tens (or hundreds) of thousands of invoices a year, the solution was designed for companies who are receiving tens (or hundreds) of thousands of invoices a year and for companies who are sending out tens (or hundreds) of thousands of invoices a year. Since Basware started out as a enterprise finance platform, and not an e-Procurement platform, they have a unique take on P2P and design their solutions to enable both senders and receivers (and suppliers and buyers) equally. As a result, the solution is just as likely to be acquired by a large (CPG) manufacturer or apparel distributor which only receives a few invoices for raw materials but sends out ten to one hundred times as many to its customer base of all sizes that orders frequently and in small amounts.

Another key feature is that when the BCN is working flawlessly, it’s invisible. The entire point of the network is automatic delivery and automation of e-Invoice and other e-Document processing, which will either be done through a module in Basware’s application suite or your existing ERP, MRP, or AP solution. As per our last post, Basware has already integrated with over 250 ERP, MRP, AP, and other back-office systems and, if you already have a system for processing the e-Invoices, purchase orders, and other e-Documents sent over the network, it will push the documents into (and pull the appropriate documents and confirmations from) those systems. If your existing system is “plugged in” to the network, you’ll never have to use the portal2. Typically, a person in the receiving party will only log into the portal to verify that an invoice has been received when he gets a call from an individual in the sending party3 (and does not have access to the processing system — for example, the supplier might call up the account rep to ask if the invoice was received instead of someone in Accounts Payable). And typically the only senders who will sign into the portal are small suppliers who haven’t integrated the BCN into their Accounts Receivable / Back Office invoice management software and want to send an invoice over the BCN (to insure prompt receipt, processing, and payment capability).

With the BCN, it’s possible for an organization to achieve 100% e-Invoice penetration. Because the BCN supports receipt of invoices by EDI, XML, inter-operator networks, direct connect, virtual printer, Scan-and-Capture, Cloud-scan, e-mail (Lite)4 and even keyed-in by the supplier, which covers every methodology a supplier may use to send an invoice, customers of the BCN can achieve 100% paper-free invoice processing (and have in countries with strict e-Invoicing requirements, such as Brazil, Finland, Sweden and Norway). Note that they have multiple scan solutions — you can scan it and key it in locally through the BCN portal, and attach the scan; you can have it sent to your OCR provider that is plugged into the BCN; or use Basware’s Cloudscan which will take the scan, process it, and push it into your e-Invoice solution, flagging any exceptions or scanning issues that need to be manually addressed.

The supplier portal is designed to be quick and easy to use, and is divided into four main sections, current work-view, inbox, sent and purchase orders. In the current-workflow, the supplier sees all of the incoming events that need to be processed; in the inbox, the supplier sees the incoming purchasing orders, associated messages, and status updates from the buyer; in the sent tab, the supplier sees the invoices they sent through the network, associated messages and status updates they provided; and in the purchase order tab they can search purchase orders and dive into the details of the purchase order, view line items, retrieve attached files, view the processing history, and pull up associated invoices that they sent to the buyer.

Since the network is designed to integrate with the buyer’s current ERP, MRP, AP and back-office systems and Basware P2P modules, the buyer portal is equally minimal and easy to use. The buyer can log in to search and view incoming invoices, send messages or queries to the supplier about those invoices, and run reports on the invoices in the system to query the number, and ids, of open invoices, invoices by supplier, invoices unpaid, etc. Since there was no need to duplicate the functionality in the other Basware modules and/or the other back-office systems currently in place in most customer organizations, Basware designed the portal to support quick and simple confirmational queries and messaging between the buyer and supplier, and it does this quite well. In addition, all discussions are included in the audit trail and can be retrieved at any time.

And the proof of the value is in the e-Invoice pudding it supports. A Major Engineering firm in the Netherlands that was receiving over 150,000 (paper) invoices a year was able to replace over 50% of these paper invoices with e-Invoices in less than six months and automatically match more than 80% of them, which translated into a 60% reduction in manpower required for invoice processing (which had an associated cost of 6.5 FTEs). A leading energy company in Europe which received over 700,000 (paper) invoices a year was able to convert over 50% of its suppliers to e-Invoices in six months by partnering with Basware to help it with a global supplier activation (on-boarding) program. A leading mining, construction, oil & gas, and pulp and paper company in Brazil was able to achieve 100% e-Invoice penetration with the help of Basware which, with its Cloudscan solution, was able to help the company help its suppliers push 100% of its 200,000 plus annual invoice volume through the BCN. And it’s not just buyers who have invested heavily in the BCN. One of the largest CPG companies (with a market cap in excess of 30 Billion) uses the platform to send over 400,000 invoices electronically in Scandinavia and nearby countries in the EU. No matter how big your e-Invoicing need, Basware and its BCN can handle the volume.

1 Free of charge is conditional on delivery mechanism used. Portal (invoice key-in and PO flip) and sending e-invoices via email are free for the supplier and a buyer can receive e-Invoices through the portal free of charge from a sender.

2 However, you still may want to use the value added services of the portal which include, but are not limited to, tracking invoice status and collaborating with your business partners.

3 Who could log into the supplier portal to get the same information, but, due to technical issues on the supplier side, is unable to do so at that particular point in time.

4 Scan-and-capture refers to in-house scanning and OCR (optical character recognition), cloud-scan refers to outsourced scan-and-capture, and e-mail Lite is Basware’s solution for receiving invoices via e-mail.

B2BConnex – Connecting Companies the World Over Part II

In our last post, which re-introduced you to B2BConnex, a solution for e-Document Management that was designed to automate the end-to-end purchasing process and targeted at small and mid-sized manufacturing organizations still mired in the world of ERP.

We noted that, since our first posts on e-Document Management and automating the end-to-end purchasing process back in the 2010 time-frame, they have been hard at work and have increased the number of supported document types, added scorecard corrective action reporting (SCAR), the ability to have multiple configurations of the software for different geographies/countries/divisions/departments/plants, an improved shopping cart solution, more integration options out of the box, more usability features, and considerably more customization capability. We then dived into some of the new usability features, UI streamlining, reporting capability and some of the new configuration capabilities.

Today we are going to discuss the improved shopping cart, integration options, configuration options, and a few of the workflows more in depth.

Their catalog-based shopping cart works like you would expect, with the ability to search an individual catalog or all catalogs and be presented with a list of matching products complete with images, (partial) descriptions, price (with volume break) fields, default order quantity and add-to-cart button(s). One unique feature is that the application not only supports multiple languages, but allows each product to be associated with custom descriptions in any language the buyer or supplier chooses. This allows a buying organization to present the same catalog and interface to its users around the world, who can then select the language they want to see results in if the default language isn’t their native language. In addition, currency is also configurable and can be changed by the user as well. When the user goes to check out, the system automatically generates a purchase order template where the user can override the default billing, billing contact, shipping, shipping contact, and (requested) shipping method. Once the user confirms the order, the order, broken down by supplier, will be sent back to the client’s sales order system to generate an order there. Then, through the ERP’s fulfilment functions, the order can be used to generate one or more Purchase Orders which can be sent to the supplier through the B2BConnex Direct platform or Supplier Portal.

Once the supplier receives the PO, they can immediately accept it as is and return a Sales Order Acknowledgement, or, if they can’t deliver (all) of the requested items (at once), they can request modifications to delivery dates and order quantities and even request substitutions. In addition, if the supplier can deliver some products now and some products later, the supplier can split the line items and define the quantity that can be delivered now and the quantity that can be delivered later, each with associated delivery dates, and send the PO back with a modification request.

While the catalog-based shopping cart looks plain and simple with its “old-school” PO style, it’s actually quite sophisticated as it plugs into the B2BConnex Direct platform, which can deliver the purchase orders using a variety of methods, including, but not limited to, delivery through the B2B Supplier Portal, EDI to the supplier’s ERP, and XML or EDI (X12) to the supplier’s order management software. And all of this is configurable by the client in the sophisticated administration panel that allows the customer to define the document types supported, the delivery methods required (down to the plant level if need be), and any required mappings to translate from one format to another (which is important if the customer uses their own units of measure, abbreviations, or terminology and not what is expected in the EDI standard, for example).

In addition, there is a lot of security built in. Not only is there no capability by the supplier or buyer to change fields they have not been given access to (unlike there was in a big system that shall not be named that, for years, didn’t pull in the contract price data from the database but just assumed whatever was in the XML was correct), but there is a lot of security to prevent cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and other common and uncommon hack attacks.

Another neat feature is credit limits, which can be configured for each supplier per order and on aggregate and allow the buyer to be alerted when an order will surpass a credit limit and possibly be rejected by the supplier until Accounts Payable brings the buyer’s account up to date.

Their B2BConnex Direct platform, which functions as their native data mapping middleware, allows them to not only translate document types from one format and standard to another very easily, but also provides an API that they can use to integrate into just about any ERP, finance, procurement, or back-office system of relevance with respect to one of the many e-Document types that are natively supported which include, but are not limited to, RFQs, purchase orders, sales order acknowledgements, ship notices, delivery schedules, goods receipts, invoices, payment reports, payment receipts, RMAs (return merchandise authorizations), and inventory forecasts.

The B2BConnex platform, like the B2BConnex Customer (Buyer) and Supplier Portals, are very configurable — each document type that is sent from and/or delivered to each location can have its own delivery format. For example, if you have one plant offshore that still isn’t on the enterprise ERP, and can’t accept EDI, you can have EDI documents delivered to all plants except that one, which can be required to use the portal.

In addition, customers can manage their own profiles and user base, deciding who has access to what parts of the system and add and remove accounts as necessary. The last thing you want is to have to wait for a vendor to add or remove an account every time someone joins or leaves your organization. While a number of modern systems have this feature, there are still systems out there that work on named-user licenses (and as a solution buyer, you have to watch out for that).

In a nutshell, even though the B2BConnex solution employs an old-school look, it is actually a very modern SaaS application under the covers and definitely worth looking into if you are a small-or-mid-sized organization that is still in the ERP world and need a better solution.

Vinimaya: Taking Their Procurement Marketplace Global, Part IV

In Part I we noted that since we last covered Vinimaya, the B2B Search Engine that was the next wave in product catalogue management, they have continued building out their base platform, adding (more extensive) auditing capability, workflow-based catalog management, quick-quote (RFX), e-Forms, deep analytics, mobile, and social integration on top of a base platform that supported content management, federated search, powerful connectivity options, personalization and customization, globalization, and an easy to use shopping cart. Then, in Part II and Part III we focussed in on their vTransport technology and their new vQuote, vRank, vCatalog, vAudit, and vAnalytics solution modules. Today, in the final part of this four-part series, we are going to talk about vSocial, vMobile, and their up-coming market indices.

vSocial
vSocial is the social interaction component of the Vinimaya platform. Taking a cue from Amazon, which teaches us that not only do people tend to gravitate to products with reviews but they also want the ability to comment on the products and services they receive and be part of the community, Vinimaya added social interaction capability to their platform. Buyers can post feedback on the goods they procure, suppliers can respond and provide additional details, and procurement can include explanations as to why certain products or services are preferred. In addition, the platform is artificially intelligent, so if there is no feedback for a 14.4 V cordless drill from a given manufacturer, but there is for an 18 V cordless drill from that same manufacturer, the platform will pull the feedback in for the 18 V drill in when a user is viewing the 14.4 V drill to give the user as much information as there is available about the potential purchase. It’s a simple platform, but it works quite well.

vMobile
vMobile is the mobile instantiation of their platform, and one of the most unique offerings on the marketplace. Not only was the Vinimaya platform the first to do real-time federated search across punch-outs, catalogs, and databases and present the results to a user through a single buying platform, but it’s now the first platform to do the same on a mobile device. Designed for a smart-phone, a corporate buyer now has access to all of the goods and services available through the Vinimaya platform on their corporate smartphone, and despite the small amount of real-estate, it is very useable. Vinimaya put a lot of thought into their solution and made search and product retrieval very easy. In addition to the standard keyword search, the mobile solution also supports artificially intelligent barcode based retrieval. If the buyer happens to have the packaging for an item of interest in close proximity (such as the box for the last printer cartridge that requires an immediate reorder when used), she just has to scan the barcode and the solution will find all instances of the product. And if an exact match is unavailable, because the solution is intelligent and retrieves the manufacturer and product description, the search application will find all related products. Maybe the Brother cartridge is currently unavailable from your current suppliers, but a third party Staples replacement cartridge is. The platform will find that option and present it to you. The results are returned in a list and choosing an option brings up a summary of the product details which has an option to add the product to the cart. The cart can be accessed at any time from the app menu bar, which also allows quick access to search, favorites, and history functionality, and checkout can be as easy as one-click as your data is pre-populated. It’s a very slick catalog-based Procurement solution.

Market Indices

Sometimes, not a week goes by where a Procurement doesn’t hear “your contracts suck — I can get the same printer cartridge 5-pack on Amazon today for 5% less” from an office manager or “prove to me that our prices are as good as you say they are and that we are beating the market average because I don’t believe you” from the CFO who only seems to notice Procurement when, a year after a contract has been cut, market prices for a given commodity drop or when the CIO complains that the organization is spending too much on hardware as it’s forced to buy from an overpriced supplier at last year’s prices that are no longer the best price.

In order to get the monkeys off its back, Procurement really needs to be able to demonstrate how good it’s doing — how the majority of it’s contracts are at, or better than, market price, how paying slightly more for that printer cartridge gives it a discount on a range of electronic products from the same provider at 5% below market average pricing, and how IT isn’t factoring in the huge end-of-year rebate the organization is expecting once it meets the million-dollar spend threshold. But to do this, Procurement needs three things:

  1. index data, to know what market prices are,
  2. pricing data, to know what it’s really paying, and
  3. deep analytics, to put two and two together and map reality to potential.

Vinimaya has the pricing data. Not only does Vinimaya manage all of an organization’s punch-outs, catalogs, and pricing databases — but they save every search result to maintain historical pricing data for all products in the database. And, with the recent release of vAudit and vAnalytics, they have the audit trails and the analytics to analyze purchases in detail. That just leave one element to go — the pricing indexes.

The Vinimaya platform crawls a large number of consumer sites (including Amazon, Alibaba, and other online storefronts) and has a huge database of commercial pricing in its archives. This provides the foundation for a consumer price index that will allow an organization to compare its pricing for a product in many consumer categories with the average price charged to a consumer. Vinimaya serves a large number of public sector clients and since public sector pricing is public, this provides the foundation for a market index that will allow an organization to compare its pricing for a product with the average price charged in the public sector for products for which Vinimaya has a lot of data. If you’re beating the public index, you’re doing good but not great. If you’re beating the consumer index, you’re doing okay but not that good. Better shape up. And if you’re not even beating the consumer index, better get your house in order before trying to enforce your contracts on the rest of the organization!

In conclusion, since we last covered Vinimaya, they have made many advancements to their base platform in the last 5 years, but the best may be yet to come. The market indexes are just the tip of the iceberg! More to come in 2014!

Vinimaya: Taking Their Procurement Marketplace Global, Part III

In Part I we noted that since we last covered Vinimaya, the B2B Search Engine that was the the next wave in product catalogue management with their ability to do real-time federated search across all of your supplier databases, catalogues, and punch-outs through a single consumer-like search and shop interface, they have continued building out their base platform, adding (more extensive) auditing capability, workflow-based catalog management, quick-quote (RFX) capability, e-Forms, deep analytics capability, mobile capabilities, and social integration on top of a base platform that supported content management, federated search, powerful connectivity options, personalization and customization, globalization, and an easy to use shopping cart. Then, in Part II, we focused in on their vTransport and their new quick-order and e-Forms functionality, known as vQuote. Today we’re going to dive a little deeper into five of the new capabilities added since our last major review, starting with vQuote.

vQuote
vQuote was specifically designed for the time when multiple bids is the right, or only, option but the situation does not warrant a full-scale sourcing event. For example, unless the organization is bundling the printer cartridge spend with the printers (which is generally NOT a good idea, by the way, since most printer manufacturers make their money off of ink that costs more than blood), running a full sourcing event to award next year’s printer cartridge buy is not worth the effort. Also, many small projects in the public sector, such as network support services at a small local government office, have to go to bid, but aren’t worth full scale sourcing events either. In this case, a quick quote — often to known suppliers already in the system, is typically the way to go. The Vinimaya vQuote solution was designed to make this process as quick, easy, and painless as possible — whether the request for quote was going to existing suppliers in the system or to new suppliers.

Since it was designed specifically for those categories of buys that fit between spot-buy from a catalog and full-fledged sourcing event, Vinimaya was able to streamline the solution significantly. Creating a quote request is as easy as giving a quote a name, specifying line items, selecting suppliers, and providing a due date – which can all be done on a single screen. If the line items are services, a SOW can be attached and quickly sent off. The buyer can see the status of the quote requests on a summary screen, review each quote as it is returned, compare them side-by-side in a summary report, and select a winner just by marking a quote, or line item from a quote, as awarded. It’s as quick and simple as a quoting solution can get and meet the needs of the quoting category they designed for.

vRank
vRank is the ability for a senior buyer or contract manager to ensure that contract items always appear first in the search results, that items from preferred suppliers always appear before items from non-preferred suppliers, and that prohibited items never appear. Basically, the administrator has the ability to assign each item that appears in a search result a rank between 1 (do not include) and 4 (show first), where 3 is (show ahead of other items) and 2 is (normal rank). It’s pretty simple, and it works based on the simple fact that almost half of all people who use search functionality click on the first link that is returned. (Recent Google statistics indicate that a whopping 47% of searchers click on the first search result.) The ranks can be applied to individual items or suppliers, with item ranks overriding supplier ranks). In addition, these ranks can be defined in real-time on every search and will take effect immediately on all future searches. This allows an administrator to define priorities as needed based upon what users are actually searching for and buying, saving a lot of up-front configuration to define ranks for products that might not even be searched for!

vCatalog
vCatalog updates the capability Vinimaya has always had to manage local catalogs in a manner that pushes all of the work back on the supplier. With vCatalog, a supplier that is not technical enough to, or that does not want to, maintain a punch-out or other on-line catalog can upload their entire catalog to the buyer through a web portal. The catalog file is completely validated, and any errors are pushed back to the supplier, with specific details on the error, for correction before it is allowed to be pushed to production.

vAudit
vAudit is what allows a buying organization to take advantage of vendor managed catalogs with confidence. It continuously monitors products and pricing from punch-out, vCatalog, and web-db suppliers to make sure that prices are compliant with contracted prices or original quotes. As soon as a price is detected that is above the contracted price, the appropriate buyer representative is alerted to the issue. The system can be configured in three different ways:

  1. block a purchase for a product over the contract amount
  2. allow the checkout to proceed, but don’t send the PO to the supplier until the price is corrected
    (and alert an administrator to contact the supplier to get the price fixed)
  3. allow the checkout to proceed at the current price, but tag the item for proactive cost recovery

With the vAudit solution, it’s quick and painless to retrieve a report of all items bought above contract or quoted price in a given timeframe, and just as simple to break it down by supplier to allow the AP department to go after suppliers for money owed.

vAnalytics
vAnalytics is Vinimaya’s new reporting engine that was designed to provide Procurement Directors with an understanding of what people were buying and how they were selecting the items they were buying. With the understanding that the purchase process cannot be optimized without a good understanding of shopper behaviour, Vinimaya built a platform that allowed a Procurement Director to understand not only the the top purchases, the top suppliers, and the top buyers, but also the top search terms, the items they led to, the failed search terms, and the actions the buyer took on a failed search.

vAnalytics, which includes a report builder, has all of the standard reporting package features you would expect in a Procurement reporting system and allows reports to be created by supplier, buyer, item, and even checkout process. Common report types include unique users, spend by supplier, line items by supplier, utilization by search time, and out of compliance check-outs (if they are permitted). Since these reports are against real-time data (and not cached in an OLAP system), some can take a few minutes to run, but those restricted to a single-user or supplier will typically be quite responsive. And, of course, all data in the entire Vinimaya platform is exportable.

Vinimaya has also made advancements in mobile and social, but these enhancements will be the subject of a future post on the Vinimaya Global Procurement Marketplace.

Bravo Business Center 2.0 – A Complete Category Solution for MRO: Part II.2

In Part II.1, after noting how BravoSolution transformed a solution that was a complete category management solution for nine (9) somewhat disparate categories, to a complete vertical solution for five different verticals (with more coming in the future) that was based on the collective decades of experience of their global sourcing team (working out of ten offices in four continents) in those verticals, we noted how in BravoSolution’s Business Center, the basic templates are loaded and ready to go. All that an organization has to do to get started with a basic event is upload its item list, market baskets, list pricing for each supplier (and current / previous bid discounts), and current contracts; define it’s service level equations and cost-vs-service level trade-offs; and define its bidding guidelines and key milestones, and a basic event is ready to go!

In addition to being able to capture all of the categories, sub-categories, and items of interest, the platform can also capture all of the buyer locations — organized by region, state, and city — and supplier service locations — also organized by region, state, and city — and the platform allows a buyer to restrict which service locations can service a buyer location and the supplier is still able to define further restrictions still based on the supplier’s capabilities. In addition, a supplier can also suggest alternate items, with alternate pricing, for each item (over those selected by the buyer) and a buyer can accept or reject the alternates that are proposed. These alternates can have their own pricing, discount, and shipping & handling rules as well. For any category, sub-category, or item with a price that is largely driven off of one or more market costs (like steel or energy), the supplier can specify the relevant price index(es) and the percent that the market cost is driven off of the index(es). So, if a steel part is 50% steel, 10% energy, 25% specialized labour, and 15% other, the supplier can indicate that steel, energy, and specialized labour are the primary cost drivers, link them to the buyer recognized indices, and indicate the threshold change at which a price will need to increase or decrease. The buyer can then accept, or reject, the bid and if accepted, do multi-year what-if scenarios and make optimized multi-year awards that take expected cost increases or decreases into account, reducing the number of sourcing events and freeing up its strategic sourcing team for more strategic value-add activities, such as supplier performance improvement.

And the best thing about the solution is that the entire workflow is mapped out and easy to follow by even the most novice buyer on the sourcing team. First, the buyer is walked through setting up the guidelines for the supplier and customizing the workflow. This involves sending out an intent to respond (to avoid wasting time creating RFX sheets for uninterested suppliers), creating the general instructions for the event, identifying the milestones (steps) and target dates for completing each milestone (step), drafting the announcements for the various milestones and tracking their distribution, and selecting/creating the appropriate training materials for download by the suppliers (which can include step-by-step instructional videos for each step of the process).

Then the RFI is initiated to collect basic supplier information, product and service capabilities, service history, and standard pricing practices. Based on this, a basic product and service level evaluation is conducted (which insures that minimum required service levels can be met and that minimum quality levels are achievable), and any suppliers that don’t meet the minimum requirements are eliminated before the RFQ. At this point, the required service areas are defined (based upon the uploaded and/or historical service areas that can be defined at the region, state, and/or city level), the market baskets (and the component categories, sub-categories, and items and their mappings to default, pre-approved, supplier items) are finalized, discount categories are created, and any required shipping & handling rules are created.

The RFQ is then sent out and the suppliers can either enter their bids through the supplier portal, or download an Excel sheet, which can include their historical bids (if they bid in a previous event) that they can complete offline and upload if it’s easier. The suppliers can then define any general or (basket specific) discounts through the portal in a powerful and flexible manner on their list-price bids (which makes bidding for them as easy as cutting and pasting their list-price bid-sheet into the Excel sheet and then defining their discount categories, versus having to create multiple pricing sheets for each type of discount). Finally, the suppliers can fill in their shipping and handling costs and requirements (such as minimum order size, service location restrictions, etc.) and submit their bid. Optionally, the suppliers can also specify the dependence of high-dollar, or variable, categories on price-indices and additional discounts for alternate payment terms.

When all of the suppliers have bid, or the cut-off date is reached, the buyer can then push all of the bids into BravoSolution’s Collaborative Sourcing Solution into a pre-built, ready-to-go, optimization model that, based on the predefined service rules, cost trade-offs, and preferred contract length, will compute the optimal solution. The buyer can then create multiple what-if scenarios to determine the cost dependency on service level (or vice versa) or the potential savings with different contract terms. Once an award scenario is chosen, it can be saved, pushed into the contract management solution, and template contracts generated for each supplier in the award scenario.

It’s a very well thought out solution for MRO optimized to make sourcing, and re-sourcing, as quick, easy, painless, and error-free as possible so that, if needed, it can be driven by a junior buyer (under the guidance of a senior buyer) and free up the senior buyer in the organization for more value-add or strategic activities. And with the decades upon decades of experience in BravoSolution’s Global Team, they can get it up, running, and customized to your specific organizational needs in a matter of weeks. If you are an MRO organization, or an organization with a large MRO spend, BravoSolution’s MRO Business Center is definitely a solution to look at closely.