Category Archives: SaaS

Intelligent Sourcing through Intesource

Founded in 1999, Intesource is another player in the e-Sourcing / e-Negotiation space, but one with a bit of a twist. Whereas most SaaS providers are trying to sell you the all-powerful self-service fluffy magic box cloud solution, Intesource is still focussed on providing a full-service offering. Specifically, while you are given full access to the platform, their sourcing experts, who have conducted tens of thousands of events for hundreds of companies with a combined supply base that consists of over 10,000 companies, handle all of the event details for you which frees your organization to focus on high-level strategy and analysis. (Of course, if you need guidance in that respect, their sourcing experts are willing to work with you to identify the categories that are likely to generate the greatest ROI.) This approach has proved very successful for them and their customer base, and they typically drive an ROI of 10x for their clients within one year.

In addition to their sourcing expertise, they also have the ability to deliver a customized platform, as they built their entire solution in-house. This customization can go beyond just look and feel and include integration to external systems or new functionality and customized workflows based on organizational processes and best practices.

Platform-wise, they have a fully featured e-Negotiation platform with extensive RFX, Auction, Supplier Information Management (SIM), and document/contract management capabilities, which integrates with Microsoft Sharepoint for those who want a (collaborative) contract and document authoring solution in addition to the ability to track contracts and associated meta-data. And while the platform is not multi-lingual, it is multi-currency and they are integrated with multiple currency exchange data feeds. As a result, up-to-date currency conversions are always available.

With respect to e-Negotiation, or the RFX and Auction component, a buyer can use a templated workflow, capture as much cost and supplier information as they need to, and iterate through as many rounds as required. Plus, there are thousands of templates available to choose from for just about every category imaginable, built up by the Intesource sourcing team over the last decade as they captured the knowledge and best practices that materialized from the tens of thousands of events they ran, many with the global sourcing teams of some of the largest food, beverage, and retail companies in North America (which are the verticals they have particular expertise in). These templates contain complete workflows, customized RFIs, and customized bid templates with all of the relevant cost components. This allows bids to be broken down into unit cost, transport cost, duties & tariffs, utilization costs, warranty costs, etc. And, of course, the auction functionality is full featured and permits suppliers to be ranked against each item, group, or total award; the auction to be automatically extended based on last bid time; and bids to require a minimum decrement.

With respect to Supplier Information Management (SIM), you can capture all of the basic overview, classification, financial, product, service, and catalogue information associated with a company and augment it with feeds from D&B that include risk indicators and MWBE information. You can augment this with your own categories and fields of interest, and collect the data with the built in RFI capabilities. You can also get current marketing pricing on a wide range of commodities, as they have integrated data feeds from over 160 market exchanges.

The document / contract management module is a straight-forward repository- based solution that lets you manage as many documents, and as many kinds of documents, as you want with meta-data indexing and search. Creation capabilities are available through Sharepoint integration.

Based on their extensive workflow capabilities, which supports the hundreds of customized templates that are available across hundreds of categories, they have built a solid e-Sourcing Project Management Module that allows you to not only track your progress, but build your own customized workflows and category templates which can capture a significant amount of detailed information with respect to each task.

Finally, Intesource has an extensive SaaS interface for the supplier as well as the buyer, where the home-page dashboard — which shows current events, previous events, offered awards, accepted awards, pending tasks, etc. — can be customized for each supplier as well as the buyer.

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More Reasons the Cloud is Not a Fluffy Magic Box

Soon after I told you that the cloud is not a fluffy magic box, I found this great post over on an Information Week blog on “3 things that could kill the cloud” which points out some more sobering realities of the cloud, which is just really an abstraction of the multi-tenant SaaS model where one provider provides the software and another provides the infrastructure the software runs on. The article has some good points that should be taken into account before you decide that the cloud is the answer. (Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.)

  1. Scalability is not UnlimitedFirst of all, at any point in time, the infrastructure provider has a limited amount of hardware and bandwith available. When that is reached, you’re out of scalability until the provider ramps up. Furthermore, even if the provider ramps up, there’s still a practical limit dictated by the software. Most databases start to fail miserably when you get to the Terrabyte range. Most analytics applications fail miserably when you ask them to process millions of records in real time. Etc.
  2. Security is not AbsoluteThe cloud does not inherently provide more security as some vendors would have you believe. In fact, it might even provide less. In reality, the security of any platform comes down to the knowledge and vigilance of the provider’s people and how well they are at identifying potential holes, locking them down, and keeping up with patches. If the software vendor assumes a certain port will be locked down and the infrastructure provider leaves it open or if the hardware vendors assumes the software vendor will patch core applications and vice versa, security is weakened.
  3. Prices can be HigherWhile up front prices are quite cheap as you’re primarily paying for energy costs (to run and cool the CPUs) and bandwidth, and while the Cloud will be cheaper for small-scale applications, the reality is that for large scale, high-bandwidth, applications, the total costs can be more expensive than running your own data centre as most providers don’t yet have the scale and expertise to beat in-house costs. You have to do the analysis.
  4. Your application can disappear in a puff of smoke.Thanks to the Patriot act, if a drug dealer happens to be using the same multi-tenant provider, in the US the FBI can sweep in and seize *every* server in the data centre, regardless of what else is on the servers, shutting down the entire operation of the infrastructure provider for an unspecified time — like they did to Core IP Networks in April.

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The Cloud Is Not a Fluffy Magic Box

It’s just another delivery method for multi-tenant SaaS. That’s it. Nothing more. After reading some recent articles trumping the tenets of the Cloud, and this article in World Trade in particular that asks if “supply chain management [is] emerging from the clouds”, I feel that I need to make this point abundantly clear. Reading this article, I get the feeling that most people think the Cloud is a fluffy magic box that will solve all their problems. It’s not. Nowhere close. It’s just another multi-tenant SaaS delivery model where a third party maintains the data centre that is used by the software / service / solution provider you buy / license / contract your supply chain management solutions from. This allows the vendor to focus on their strengths (software development & delivery) and the third party Cloud provider to focus on their strengths (on-demand data centre).

To help you better understand what the Cloud is, I’m going to point out what it is not using egregious examples from the aforementioned WT article.

  • two aspects to the benefit of cloud computing … the second is … increased visibility across organizational boundariesThis has nothing to do with the delivery model, but who is given access to the platform and how many suppliers and partners buy in to the platform. If you don’t give more of your employees, partners, suppliers, and customers access or if they refuse to use the platform, it doesn’t matter if its Cloud, traditional multi-tenant vendor-hosted SaaS, or ASP.
  • critical information can be analyzed by using cloud-based supply chains to see if cost efficiencies are being realizedThis has nothing to do with the delivery model, but the data and analytics software at your disposal.
  • Cloud-based supply chain solutions give these organizations the ability to quickly scale and compete as the global economy bounces backSo does traditional multi-tenant SaaS.
  • a means to automate many standard processes while managing the exceptions more effectivelyThis is entirely dependent upon the capabilities of the software.
  • a typical cloud supply chain solution already has all of the infrastructure in place … when a client comes to us, we are able to connect them to a rich community of partners almost instantaneouslyThis is true of traditional multi-tenant SaaS vendor platforms that maintain supplier communities, as well as current marketplaces and third-party exchanges. The Cloud just provides a new delivery model for the platforms.
  • cloud-based supply chain solutions can improve competitive advantageThis comes down to the TCO and ROI of the solution and how it stacks up to the TCO and ROI of the other solutions under consideration.

And if this wasn’t bad enough, just before it went offline, Purchasing reached new lows in software’s future breaks through the “clouds” where it called cloud computing a killer app, which shows a complete and utter lack of understanding about what the cloud is. An app is what you run on a platform, it is not the platform. (Of course, it’s still better than calling Twitter a killer app for Purchasing, which they also did. Aargh!)

Don’t get me wrong, I think the Cloud is great because, done right, it maximizes the efficiencies of SaaS and virtualized, on-demand, data centre models. However, it’s not a magical box that will solve all your problems and hyping it like it is does more harm than good because the uninformed will buy in, and then quickly abandon it when they see it does them no more good than their current solution because they didn’t take into account that everything has to fit perfectly — software, platform, solution partners, etc. — in order to realize additional value, and this will often necessitate upgrades to systems and software and processes across the board.

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Decideware: Agency Performance Management Experts

DecideWare, an Australian Company (with offices in the US and the UK) that dubs itself as a Supplier Performance Expert with a Scorecard Deployment Service, offers a niche Vendor Management Solution that excels in managing certain types of vendors. Specifically, their niche solution, which started out as a niche play in HR Management, is used globally by a number of Fortune 500 Multi-Nationals — which include P&G, Dell, Pfizer, Target, and Wal-Mart — to manage their vendor relationships, and their Agency relationships in particular.

Their uniquely designed solution — which allows for simultaneous 360° degree assessments and self-assessments between buyers, agencies, and vendors (which allow a buyer to rate an agency who can self-assess while it rates the buyer and a third party vendor, such as a print shop, which can rate the agency in turn) — is built on the ultimate application of the KIS(S) (Keep It Simple, Stupid) philosophy. Knowing that their target market are not very technically sophisticated, they opted for the 80% solution, free of bells and whistles, with easy SaaS deployment and an easier-to-follow step-by-step methodology for building vendor capability repositories, scopes of work, vendor assessments, and reports that allow vendor performance to be quickly determined, performance gaps immediately identified, and a vendor’s relative performance graphed against their competitors.

While the base capabilities may not exceed the capabilities of a standard RFX tool with extensive survey creation (which they have), process management (which the tool is built around), and reporting capabilities (which are fairly extensive), the extensive amount of industry knowledge they’ve built in for their niche markets is impressive. They understand that organizations have units, geography, account structures, account types, locations, functions, and accounts; that profiles need criteria, contacts, priorities, questions, and documents; that accounts have definitions, assessors, and reviews; and that business people in non-technical areas of the business like lots of ready-to-use pre-packaged reports and easy-to-use drop down interfaces for drilling into performance data and performing gap analysis. The tool literally walks an administrator through the definition of a vendor capability database, a scope of work, and an assessment step-by-step. (And the tool is even more streamlined for the assessors.)

All of these tools have all of the basic capabilities, and a few advanced ones, that you would expect in a scorecard-based on-demand performance management tool. The vendor capability database, which is a streamlined Supplier Information Management (SIM) tool, allows you to approve supplier (agency) representatives to manage their supplier profiles. The scopes of work (or, for us in North America, statements of work) module allows you to define the services, initiatives, and deliverables that are required, broken down by organizational unit, type, and geography, as well as the details of the quotes required (line items, fees, expenses, etc.), with fees that can be broken down by type and include overhead rate, profit margin, and total hours and benefits for FTE quotes. And the assessment creator, which is part of their Relationship Optimizer, includes all of your standard RFX Survey creation features including configurable variable weight scales, the ability to include quantitative measures, and the ability to define weightings to each section and each component question. The tool contains significant support for comments and detailed explanations for questions as the goal is to take the qualitative and fuzzy and generate numeric scores that are quantitative and precise which can be used to generate actionable intelligence for semi-annual, or quarterly, performance reviews.

In summary, while a number of providers might offer more powerful Supplier Information Management (SIM), RFX, Reporting, or Supplier Performance Management (SPM), the tool is exceptionally well defined for the niche Vendor Management Spaces DecideWare is going after. And their client list, most of whom have rolled out the solution globally, speaks for itself — as will the case studies from Pfizer and Dell that they will be releasing in the near future.

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Are Open-Source Data Interchange Standards for SaaS the Key to Radically Simple Supply Chains?

A couple of years ago, the Harvard Business Review ran an article on “Radically Simple IT” that noted that the fundamental problem with enterprise IT projects, which continue to be a headache for business leaders, is that these systems are constructed using a cathedral approach. Like the great cathedrals erected in Europe in the middle ages, enterprise IT projects are costly, take a great deal of time, and deliver value only when the project is completed. Furthermore, they yield systems that are inflexible and cement companies into functioning the way their businesses worked several years ago, when the project started.

What’s needed are systems that can be improved — rapidly and continuously — well after they’ve gone live. The systems should be built on a “path-based” approach that provides a path for the system to be developed over time. After all, it’s difficult and costly to map out all requirements before a project starts because people often cannot specify everything they’ll need beforehand.

Given the rapid escalation of supply chain systems, designs, regulation, and security requirements, it’s pretty much impossible to map out all of the requirements of a supply chain systems project before it starts. And even if it could be done, they’d just change tomorrow anyway! A new approach is definitely needed for developing and implementing systems that serve the supply chain, and I think we’re reaching the point where they will be born of necessity.

You see, even though there are now a number of big players out there that offer very broad solution suites, these suites are, still, for the most part restricted to sourcing and procurement, logistics and inventory management, or global trade and data exchange. While the footprints of each type of system is rapidly expanding within their respective domains, most systems are still not expanding beyond the comfort domains of the vendors providing the systems.

And to be honest, most vendors with expertise in sourcing and procurement, have little in logistics, inventory, or shop floor operations and most with expertise in logistics, inventory, or shop floor operations have little in global trade regulations and security requirements. The key is going to be the development of modular SaaS platforms that can interoperate using a common data language that is open and not owned by any single vendor. (Single vendor standards just build a single vendor eco-system, or a bigger Ariba Supply Network.) Just like the web was built on true open standards, next generation supply chains need to be as well. The question is, who will lead the effort and when will the major players buy in?

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