Category Archives: RFX

The 39 Steps … err … The 39 Clues … err … The 39 Part Series to Help You Figure Out Where to Start with Source-to-Pay

Figuring out where to start is not easy, and often never where the majority of vendors or consultants say you should start. They’ll have great reasons for their recommendations, which will typically be true, but they will be the subset of reasons that most benefits them (as it will sell their solution), and not necessarily the subset of reasons that most benefits you now. While you will likely need every module there is in the long run, you can often only start with one or two, and you need to focus on what’s the greatest ROI now to prove the investment and help you acquire funds to get more capability later, when you are ready for it. But figuring out how much you can handle, what the greatest needs are, and the necessary starting points aren’t easy, and that’s why SI dove into this topic, with arguments and explanations and module overviews, both broader and deeper than any analyst firm or blogger has done before. Enjoy!

Introductory Posts:
Part 1: Where Do You Start?
Part 2: Where Should You Start?
Part 3: You Start with …
Part 4: e-Procurement, and Here’s Why.

e-Procurement
Part 5: Defining an e-Procurement Baseline
Part 6: There are Barriers to Selecting an e-Procurement Solution (and they are not what you think)
Part 7: Over 70 e-Procurement Companies to Check Out

Interlude 1
Part 8: What Comes Next?

Spend Analysis
Part 9: Time for Spend Analysis
Part 10: What Do You Need for A Spend Analysis Baseline, I
Part 11: What Do You Need for A Spend Analysis Baseline, II
Part 12: Over 40 Spend Analysis Vendors to Check Out

Interlude 2
Part 13: But I Can’t Touch the Sacred Cows!
(including Over 20 SaaS, 10 Legal, and 5 Marketing Spend Management / Analysis Companies to Check Out)
Part 14: Do Not Stop At Spend Analysis!

Supplier Management
Part 15: Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP Mash
Part 16: Supplier Management A-Side
Part 17: Supplier Management B-Side
Part 18: Supplier Management C-Side
Part 19: Supplier Management D-Side
Part 20: Over 90 Supplier Management Companies to Check Out

Contract Management
Part 21: Time for Contract Management
Part 22: Contract Management is a NAG: Let’s Start with Negotiation
Part 23: Contract Management is a NAG: Let’s Continue with [Contract]Analytics
Part 24: Contract Management is a NAG: Let’s End with [Contract] Governance
Part 25: Over 80 Contract Management Vendors to Check Out

e-Sourcing
Part 26: Time for e-Sourcing
Part 27: Breaking Down the ORA of Sourcing Starting With RFX
Part 28: Breaking Down the ORA of Sourcing Continuing with e-Auctions
Part 29: Breaking Down the ORA of Sourcing Ending with [Strategic Sourcing Decision] Optimization
Part 30: Over 75 e-Sourcing Vendors to Check Out!

Invoice-to-Pay (I2P):
Part 31: Time for Invoice-to-Pay
Part 32: Breaking Down the Invoice-to-Pay Core
Part 33: Over 75 Invoice-to-Pay Companies to Check Out

Orchestration:
Part 34: How Do I Orchestrate Everything?
Part 35: Do I Intake, Manage, or Orchestrate?
Part 36: Over 20 Intake, [Procurement] [Project] Management, and/or Orchestration Companies to Check Out
Part 37: Investigating Intake By Diving In to the Details
Part 38: Prettying Up the Project with Procurement Project Management
Part 39: Deobfuscating the Orchestration and Fitting it All Together

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P30) … And Sourcing IS Very Extensive … So Here Are 75 e-Sourcing Companies to Check Out!

And now the next post you’ve all been waiting for! A partial, starting, list of 75 e-Sourcing providers that may (or may not) meet some, or many, of the core baseline capabilities we outlined in the last three parts of this series (Part 27, Part 28, and Part 29) as we discussed the Optimization, RFX, and Auction sides of e-Sourcing today.

As with our lists of e-Procurement Companies (in Part 7), Spend Analysis Companies (in Part 12), Sacred Cow Companies that do, or support, customized “spend” analysis on Marketing, Legal, and SaaS (in Part 13), Supplier Management Companies (in Part 20), and Contract Management Companies (in Part 25), we must again give our disclaimer that this list is in no-way complete (as no analyst is aware of every company), is only valid as of the date of posting (as companies sometimes go out of business and acquisitions happen all of the time in our space), and does NOT include any e-Procurement vendors that support simple requisition or quick-quote capability to select vendors already in the system as that is not how we defined RFX capability.

Furthermore, as we’ve said before, not all vendors are equal, and we’d venture to say NONE of the following are equal. The companies below are of all sizes (very small to very large, relative to vendor sizes in our space), cover the baseline differently (in terms of percentage of features offered, the various degrees of depth in the feature implementations, and differing levels of customization for a vertical), offer different additional features, have different types of service offerings (backed up by different expertise), focus on different company sizes, and focus on different technology ecosystems (such as plugging into other platforms/ecosystems, serving as the core platform for certain functions or data, offering a plug-and-play module for a larger ecosystem, focussing on the dominant technology ecosystem(s) in one or more verticals), etc.

Do your research, and reach out to an expert for help if you need it in compiling a starting short list of relevant, comparable, vendors for your organization and its specific needs. For many of these vendors, good starting points can again be found in the Sourcing Innovation archives, Spend Matters Pro, and Gartner Cool Vendor write-ups if any of these sources has a write-up on the vendor.

Company LinkedIn
Employees		 HQ (State)
Country		 Optimization RFX Auction
Aestiva 17 California, USA R
Archlet 46 Switzerland O R
Aufait 114 India R
Bamboo Rose 205 Massachusetts, USA R
Bideg 3 Turkey A
Bonfire 87 Ontario, USA R
Claritum 8 United Kingdom R
Cloudia 40 Finland R
Cobblestone Software 131 New Jersey, USA R
Corcentric 588 New Jersey, USA R
cosmoONE 20 Greece R A
Coupa 3674 California, USA O R A
Deep Stream 25 United Kingdom R A
Delta eSourcing ?? United Kingdom R
ebidToPay ?? Bavaria R
Elcom 18 United Kingdom R A
eSupplier 6 Dubai R A
FairMarkit 161 Massachusetts, USA R
FullStep 128 Spain R
GEP 4650 New Jersey, USA O R A
Intenda 111 South Africa R
Ion Wave 22 Missouri, USA R A
ISPnext 59 Netherlands R
Ivalua 849 Ivalua O R A
Jaggaer 1266 North Carolina, USA O R A
K2 Sourcing 10 Wisconsin, USA R A
Keelvar 117 Cork, Ireland O R A
LevaData 58 California, USA O R
LGX Corporation ?? North Carolina, USA O R
LiveSource 7 Georgia, USA R
loopio 304 Ontario, Canada R
Market Dojo 34 United Kingdom R
MarketPlanet 72 Poland R A
Medius 562 Sweden R A
Merlin Sourcing 29 Germany R A
MySupply 15 Germany O R
NegoMetrix (Mercell) ?? Netherlands R A
Newtron 54 Germany R A
Oalia 22 France R
Oboloo 6 United Kingdom R
One Market (LogicSource) 307 Connecticut, USA R
One More Source ?? Bulgaria R
Onventis 129 Germany R A
Pantavanij 213 Thailand A
Penny Software 35 Saudi Arabia R
PostRFP ?? United Kingdom R
PratisPro (SabancıDx) ?? Turkey R A
Proactis 557 United Kingdom R
ProcurementFlow 5 Estonia R
ProcurePort 8 Indianapolis, USA R A
ProcureWare (Bentley Systems) 4830 Pennsylvania, USA R
Prokuria 8 Romania R A
Promena 20 Turkey R A
Prospeum 6 Germany R
Raindrop 27 Raindrop R
Ready Contracts 243 Australia R
RFP360 20 United States R
SafeSourcing 10 Arizona, USA R
SAP (Ariba) 2963 California, USA O R A
ScanMarket (Unit4) 60 Denmark R A
ScoutRFP 44 California, USA R A
Serex Procurement Solutions ?? Ontario, Canada R
Simfoni (EC Sourcing) 260 California, USA O R A
Sorcity ?? Texas, USA R A
SourceDogg 31 Ireland R
Sourcing Force 4 Ontario, Canada R A
SupplyFrame 310 California, USA R
SupplyOn 239 Germany R A
Synertrade 180 Germany R
TenderEasy (Alpega) 6 Sweden R
The Green RFP ?? Texas, USA R
Trade Interchange 27 United Kingdom R A
Vendorful 14 New York, USA R A
Vortal 188 Portugal R A
Zycus 1464 New Jersey, USA R A

And now, as you probably guessed, it’s on to Invoice-to-Pay in Part 31.

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P27) … Breaking down the ORA of Sourcing, Starting with RFX

In our last post, Part 26, we noted that, after covering e-Procurement, Spend Analysis, Supplier Management, and Contract Management, it was finally time for Strategic Sourcing. When it comes to Sourcing, we have to deal with the ORA et labora. The work, and the prayer (that it gets the results we want). But at least when it comes to the prayer, we have three tools at our disposal:

  • Optimization
  • RFX
  • Auction

Today we’ll start with the most classic sourcing tool, RFX, where RFX stands for Request for X, where X could be Bid, Information, Proposal, Quote, etc. depending on the depth of response required and the terminology used in the industry and geography the RFX is being issued in. So what is RFX? What must it do? We’ll break down the basics in this post.

BASIC

Surveys
This is so fundamental and obvious that you’d think we shouldn’t even need to mention it, but we do. The platform has to support the creation of arbitrary surveys, using all of the standard HTML form elements (check boxes, multi-select, text boxes, etc.), and allow them to be created in sections that can be mandatory or optional, depending upon what the supplier is bidding on, and re-used as needed.

Cost Breakdowns / Should Cost Modelling
In the beginning, back in 1995, man didn’t know that we should use TCO, for savings strive; ERP had the parts; but spreadsheets had the bids; no one new what they was gonna do; but FreeMarkets had the news; they said “let there be web”; there was web; “let there be bids”; there were bids; “let their be portals”‘ there were portals; “oh, let their be SaaS”. And it was great. But unit costs, and even landed costs, weren’t reminiscent of the full costs associated with a buy. And even worse, it didn’t give you any insight into why a product cost what it cost.

When sourcing expensive, or complex products, if you’re trying to understand the cost, it’s not average, or lowest bid, it’s what the product costs to make, plus a fair margin. This is why cost breakdown bidding / should cost modelling capability is key to understand the cost baseline.

Templates
Having to setup an RFX from scratch every time is very time consuming and unnecessary if the RFX you need is (almost) the same as an RFX for the last product you sourced in the category. That’s why it’s critical that the platform support templates that can be used to instantiate RFX events and then modified as needed to publish the event. The organization should be able to create as many templates as they want, and even create templates off of templates (adding detail and complexity as categories warrant).

Workflow
The platform must include basic workflow support, which should be configurable to the needs of the organization and the type of event — single round, double round; sealed envelope, blind; etc. This is especially critical for the public sector which must meet strict requirements in its call for bids in many countries.

Excel Support
The platform must support every buyer’s, and supplier’s, favourite tool, Excel, for RFX completion. Specifically, any supplier, or the buyer on behalf of any supplier, must be able to export the entire RFX to Excel, fill out the Excel spreadsheet, and then upload it into the system. While one may think this is not as critical now that broadband is more ubiquitous, there are many suppliers whose sales people are not very technologically proficient and still not comfortable using modern platforms, being used to bidding in Excel for years (and years).

Reporting
The platform must support basic report(build)ing capability that will allow a buyer to build the appropriate side-by-side comparison reports as well as custom reports by supplier, product, lot, and so on. Unless the platform supports some basic capability, it will be impossible for a buyer to identify an award.

Award Creation
Once a buyer has identified the award they want to make, the buyer must be able to mark the award, store it, associate custom reports that demonstrate the savings (and costs), create notes as to rationale for the award (especially if it is not the lowest cost award), link to associated documentation, and if the organization has SXM and/or CLM modules (or systems), link to the appropriate supplier records and contract(s) in those systems.

Real Time Management
It should be possible to manage the RFX, and process, as necessary at any time. While this doesn’t require the same “real-time” nature as an e-Auction system might require for a 30 minute auction, it must be possible to pause, and if necessary extend, the RFX at anytime if an issue is discovered, add documentation and details when a supplier question indicates a weakness in the documentation, and even modify the lots if it is discovered that items were overlooked or substitutions can be permitted.

ADVANCED

Integrated Optimization
A great RFX solution will integrate with the strategic sourcing decision optimization module, automatically run an unconstrained scenario, highlight the lowest cost award; automatically run a scenario with just the current suppliers, highlight the lowest cost award for an award to the current supply base; and automatically run a min 2/max 3 supplier scenario, with each supplier getting at least 20%, highlight the lowest cost award in a risk mitigation scenario; and then show a side-by-side comparison across those 3 scenarios (or organizational tweaks to these defaults) to help a buyer understand the cost differential between different options so they can optimize price vs. quality vs. risk vs. other factors of interest in an informed fashion.

Sourcing Strategy Enabled Dynamic Workflows
A basic solution should support standard, somewhat configurable, workflows, but those will be rather rigid once the RFP is launched. A more advanced solution will allow the organization to define different sourcing workflows based upon current market conditions (supply vs. demand, current bids, potential supply base, etc.), differentials between first round bids and the prices the organization is currently paying, potential supply base shifts, and so on and, after the first round is complete, shift to a second round RFX, push to an e-Auction, or divert to strategic negotiations with the incumbent (or a new supplier that is significantly more appropriate for the buyer under the current situation), as appropriate. While such functionality may not be capable of being used in the public sector, it’s perfectly fine in the private sector, especially if you tell your bidders up front it will be a multi-round process and, based upon the first round, there may be a second round, or you may go straight to negotiations with the leading supplier(s).

Bill of Materials (BoM)
While not strictly necessary for an RFX to support a multi-level bill of materials, especially since it could be flattened into a lot, if the organization sources direct on a regular basis, then the RFX should support multi-level bill of materials, as well as allow suppliers to bid at any level they want to.

Enhanced Globalization
The platform should support multi-currency, multi-language, and be fully localizable to any supplier, including support for auto-translation of documents as required. The platform should even support customized workflows and input screens tailored to the suppliers based upon their region, their requirements, and the workflows that work for them.

Market Intelligence
A good RFX platform will integrate with market intelligence sources that give you current commodity pricing, average pricing from public sector contracts, average on-line pricing, and/or average GPO savings to help a buyer understand how good, or bad, the quotes are that they are getting.

Automation
A modern sourcing platform will also support rules-based automation, and will allow a multi-round event to run on auto-pilot all the way from launch to award recommendation, with the exception of the buyer possibly having to answer a few supplier questions. For example, if the RFX was defined as a 2 round RFX with only the top 5 initial responses going into the 2nd round, if the weightings for the responses are predefined, the system will automate the closure of the first round, launching of the second round, and the identification of the recommended award based upon the sourcing strategy defined (dual-source, 80/20, price vs. non-price factor weightings, etc.)

Of course, this is not a complete list of what an RFX platform might have, or necessarily should have, as systems continue to improve, but a baseline of what they must have to be considered a modern RFX solution.

Onward to the “A” in Part 28.

Don’t Cheat Yourself with Cheat Sheets, Kid Yourself with KPI Quick Lists, or Rip Yourself Off with Bad RFPs!

In an effort to quickly catch up on the parts of S2P the doctor hasn’t been covering as much in the past few years, when he was focussed primarily on Analytics, Optimization, Modelling, and advanced tech in S2P (inc. RPI, ML, “AI”, etc.), he’s been paying more attention to LinkedIn. Probably too much, even though he can (speed) read very fast and skim a semi-infinite scroll page in a minute. Why? Because a lot of what he’s been seeing is troubling him, and as per last Friday’s post, sometimes angering him when predatory sales-people and consultants are giving other sales-people and consultants bad advice (presumably to increase their follower count or coaching sales or whatever) that will not only hurt what could be a well-intentioned sales-person or consultant (they still exist, though sometimes it seems they are fewer by the year as more sales people bleed into our space from enterprise software, looking for the next hot software solution and the next big payday), but also the individuals, and companies, those influenced sales people sell to in the thoughtless, emotionless, uncaring aggressive style the predatory sales coaches are mandating. (Not to say that a sales person shouldn’t be aggressive about getting a sale, just that they should be focussed on the companies they can actually help and be focussed on getting the customer all the information and insight that customer needs to make the right choice, feel comfortable about it, and feel prepared to defend it. The aggression should be channeled into making sure their company does everything it can to properly educate the potential client before that client commits to a long term relationship.)

A few of the things that have been repeatedly troubling him is

  1. all the cheat sheets he’s been seeing for those looking to get a better grip on Procurement and how it integrates into the rest of the business, that supposedly summarize everything you need to know about accounting, finance, payments / accounts payable, etc. to help you make good choices about Procurement in general;
  2. all the 10/20/50 Procurement, Spend, Manufacturing, etc. KPIs that you need to keep tabs on your Procurement, cashflow plan, product lifecycle, etc.; and
  3. all the RFP outlines or guidances that are being made available, sometimes by leaving your email, to help buyers acquire a certain technology.

And it’s not because they’re bad. They’re not. Some of them are actually quite good. A few are even excellent. Some of the cheat sheets and KPI lists the doctor has seen are incredibly well thought out, incredibly clear, and incredibly useful to you. Some are so good that, as a buyer, likely with little support from your organization and even less of a training budget, you should be profusely thanking whomever was so kind to create this for you and give it away for free.

Nor is it because the doctor suspects any ill intent or malice behind the efforts (in the vast majority of the cases). Many of these people giving away the cheat sheets or the KPI lists are generally trying to help their fellow humans get better at the job and improve the profession overall. And when the RFP outline is coming from a former practitioner, it’s also the case that they are typically trying to help you out (and maybe sell their services as a consultant, but they are providing proof of value up-front).

So why has it been troubling the doctor so? It took a while and some thought to put his finger on it, and the answer is, surprisingly, one of the reasons [but not the obvious one] that the doctor hates software vendor RFPs and despises any vendor that gives you one.

Now, the primary reason the doctor despises those RFPs, which became popular when Procuri started doing it en-masse in the mid-to-late 2000s (before being acquired by Ariba and quietly sunsetted as the integration never finished by the time Ariba sold to SAP, for those of you who remember the APE circus), is that these RFIPs are always written to be entirely one sided and ensure the vendor giving them away ALWAYS comes out on top. The feature list is exactly what the vendor offers, the weightings correspond exactly to the vendor core strengths, etc. etc. etc. And don’t tell me you can start with a vendor RFP and alter it to suit other vendors, because you can’t. You’d have to know all the features as the vendor focussed on point features, not integrated functions, and you, as a buyer who’s never used a modern system, have no knowledge of how to equate features (when vendor specific terminology is used), or how to determine if one feature is more advanced than another. (That was the reason the doctor co-developed Solution Map, to help rate and evaluate technology, which is the one thing most buying organizations can’t do well. Not the things they can do well, and better than most analyst firms, like rate the appropriateness of services to them, assess whether or not the vendor has a culture that will be a good fit, define their business needs and goals, etc.)

But the primary reason doesn’t apply here. So what’s the secondary reason? When an average, overworked, underpaid, and overstressed buyer got their hands on one of these free vendor RFPs, especially when the RFP was thick, heavy, and professionally edited and prepared to look polished and ready for use, and was more detailed than what the buyer could do, they thought they had their answer and could run with it. They thought it was all they needed to know, for now, and that they could send it out, collect the responses, and get back to fire-fighting. They were lulled into a false sense of security.

And that’s why these cheat sheets and KPI guides and former buyer/consultant RFPs are so troubling. When you’ve been struggling without even the basics, and these are so good that they teach you all the basics, and more, it seems like they have all the answers you need and that when you learn those basics, encapsulate them in the tool, and start running your business against them, things will be better. Then you configure your tool to respect the basics, encode the KPIs, and things are better. Significantly better, and for once processes start going smoothly. And then you believe you know everything you need to in that area (that’s not your primary area) to interface with those functions and that those KPIs will be enough to keep you on the Procurement track and let you know if there are any issues to be addressed. And you start operating like that’s the case. But it’s not.

And that’s the problem — these cheat sheet, guides, and templates, which are much better than what you’d get in the past, can make such a drastic difference when you first learn and implement them that they instill a false sense of security. You get complacent with your integrations, reports, and KPI monitors, not recognizing that they only capture and catch what they were encoded to capture and catch. However, real world conditions are constantly changing, the supply base is constantly changing, and external events such as natural disasters, political squabbles, and endemics are coming fast and furious. If the risk metric doesn’t take into account external events, real-time slips in OTD (as it is based on risk profiles upon onboarding, and updates upon contract completion), or past regulatory compliance violations (as an indicator of potential violations in the future), the organization could be blindsided by a disruption the buyer thought the KPI would prevent. Similarly, the wrong cash-flow related KPIS can give a false sense of liquidity and financial security and the wrong inventory metrics can lead to the wrong forecasts in outlier categories (very fast moving, very slow moving, or recently promoted).

In other words, by giving you the answers, without the rationale behind them, or deep insight into how appropriate those answers are to your situation, you will cheat yourself, kid yourself, or, even worse, rip yourself off. And that’s worrisome. So please, please, please remember what these are — learning aids and starting points only — not the end result. (Especially if it’s an RFP template.)

Dear Procurement Organization, Are You Making The Big RFX Faux-Pas?

Short answer: If you have an RFX due this month, you in all probability are!

Right now, many vendors have more RFXs due this month then they have had due the last two months, and the big question we all need to be asking is why.

Are these organizations really going to make a decision this month? Are they even going to evaluate these proposals this month? The answers are, of course, no and no! So why are the proposals due?

the doctor completely understands the desire to start evaluating proposals as early as soon as possible, but when as soon as possible is probably mid-January or later (when everyone returns from holiday vacation and deals with the fires that have been lit in their absence), why should the proposal be due this week?

Yes, vendor representatives take holidays too, but the best vendor representatives for the best vendors do not take holidays when you need them — or their best. And if you delayed your proposal due date until you actually needed the proposal in January, the best vendor reps would be back to work on the 27th spending even more time on your RFX to get you all of the details, value models, and other information you need to make the right decision.

But if you insist on a proposal weeks, or even months, before you are going to seriously evaluate it and make a decision, you are shorting yourself … and your supply chain peers (and even suppliers) who also have RFXs in to the vendor and need the vendor to put its best foot forward to make a proper decision.

So, don’t ask for an RFX until you are truly ready to review it when all you need is a confirmation of intent to submit and maybe a simple RFI with basic vendor information to (pre)qualify them. Ask for what you need only when you need it and you will get better responses, make better choices, and get better results!