Category Archives: Supplier Information Management

Procurence Meercat: Still Watching Over Your Supply Chain

The last time the doctor covered Procurence was on Spend Matters in 2019 in a two-part series that provided a Vendor Introduction and a SWOT, Selection Checklist, and Market Overview.

In that coverage, we covered the supplier management solution, customized for direct supplier management, that supported the following areas of supplier management:

  • information management
  • performance / KPI management
  • risk assessment
  • quality audits
  • incident and warning management
  • NPI / PPAP / APQP support (with NCR / 8D)
  • administration management

We also noted at the time that some of the positives and unique capabilities of the platform were:

  • extensive task support and tracking
  • deep support for technical assessments and QMRs
  • great self-service administration support
  • extremely deep KPI support
  • flexible report construction

For deeper details, if you have access, we highly recommend checking out the links above (as well as Bertrand’s 2022 follow-up: Part 1: SXM and New Modules and Part 2: SWOT), which also contains the foundations of a SWOT in its 8-page summary.

Today we’ll provide an update and dive into the key capabilities of the platform, which has evolved from a supplier management focussed offering to a source-to-pay collaboration and management platform that addresses so much more than just the supplier lifecycle, with Source-to-Pay capabilities launching this quarter with appropriately enhanced SRM and Compliance capabilities.

Procurence Meercat is a modular platform where an organization can buy only what they need after starting with the core module. The platform contains offerings in six key areas:

  1. Supplier Relationship Management (Core)
  2. Source to Pay
  3. Compliance & Risk
  4. Materials & Quality Management
    (SRM++ for Direct that also encapsulates aspects of part and production management)
  5. ESG
  6. Project & Resource Management

Procurence Meercat is unique in that while they are a smaller niche vendor, the platform was made to support even the largest of enterprise customers, and do so with ease. We’re going to take the six areas one-by-one, focussing primarily on what’s new or unique:

Supplier Relationship Management

Procurence Meercat is a leading Supplier Management Platform with extremely deep supplier profiles that supports custom onboarding workflows, prequalification (in compliance with EU regulations), supplier master data management, documents (inc. contracts and translations), audits, and even supplier development. The SRM module is the core module and provides you with a complete Supplier 360 where you can quickly access any and all information associated with the supplier across the modules you have installed.

Procurence Meercat can handle all of your supplier (related) master data management because it sits between external systems and data providers and internal back-office / ERP platforms (and even existing S2P systems if you prefer to maintain those, especially for indirect/services sourcing and procurement).

Since the platform is highly integrated, onboarding can take advantage of all of the compliance, risk, and ESG data collected as well as all of the part and production data collected and give a buyer complete 360-degree insight into the supplier during the pre-qualification to ensure that no non-compliant (or sanctioned) suppliers get into the system at approval time. Moreover, the onboarding process cna be configured to have as few, or as many, steps as your organization needs to collect all the required information; do all of the external risk, compliance, and ESG validations; verify the contact information; and complete any regulatory KYS (Know Your Supplier) requirements.

One key capability is that it allows you to track all of the relations(hips) associated with a supplier by subsidiary, business unit, location and/or primary commodity type as well as who owns the relationship, what the terms (of the contracts typically) are, and the status of the supplier down to that level. (i.e. You might want to block a supplier only from certain subsidiaries or business units in certain commodities or areas due to poor performance in those commodities or areas but still allow them to do business with you for other commodities in other areas where they are meeting all the regulatory requirements and not causing you any problems.)

Another key capability that comes into effect during onboarding, information management, and procurement is bank account validation. In order to greatly reduce payment fraud, they have introduced multi-step approvals to create or change a bank account profile to ensure only verified information gets into the system.

Another overlooked capability is the ability to define rules that will automatically assign the different individuals required for different aspects of supplier management: overall relationship, assessments, risk, compliance, purchase orders, (payment) approvals, etc. etc. etc. based on role, team or other factors. The platform includes features that support high workforce mobility including temporary delegations and permanent delegations which can be done using rules that reassign tasks in bulk or individually, ensuring that a task always has someone assigned to it. (It also has automatic blocking of user access on a bounced email, helping with ISO 27001 compliance, a certification which they hold.)

Remember, there is no supplier management without human interaction and oversight, and most suppliers go unmanaged because it’s usually impossible for one person to do all the work (and yet that’s how many supplier management systems were set up — one supplier owner). By allowing the work to be broken up and defined on supplier creation, a supplier actually gets managed (and then supervisors get notified when an item is past due and relationship owners notified when key tasks have not bee completed). Match this with the capability to automatically trigger workflows (that can be built up from task suggestions using existing assessments) on any change in any supplier flex status — which can be defined at the level of supplier, commodity, part, tooling, or any combination — and you have powerful, guided, semi-automated supplier (performance) management.

Source-to-Pay

Their new source-to-pay capabilities centers around two new primary modules with core support for sourcing and procurement, namely

Strategic Procurement

  • RFX
  • Contracts (enhanced)
  • Savings Tracker
  • Commodity Profiles
  • Supplier Innovation Sourcing

The core of sourcing is RFX which allows the user to create (multi-round) RFX events that can be used to collect bids and specifications, create award scenarios for evaluation, and walk the user through a templated sourcing cycle (that can be adjusted on implementation and tweaked in the administration control panel). Standard parts of an RFX are settings (type, business unit, category, terms and conditions, currency, timing, etc.), specifications (documents), positions (cost breakdowns), suppliers (suggestion capability based on sourcing history, risk, and location, but the buyer can select who they want), assessments, communications (associated with the RFX), responses (final bids, displayable side-by-side), scenarios (potential awards based on rules such as cheapest supplier or position with location, position, or risk constraints or manual selection), decisions (awards), and, post award, the event can be associated with contracts and orders.

As we noted, contract management has been enhanced as they have implemented multiple AI tools to automatically scan an uploaded document, classify it, auto-extract the suggested metadata (tagged to the appropriate location in the document), and then the user can accept, override, or reject as they see fit. In addition, they’ve also integrated DeepL for automatic document translation, so the user can get a highly accurate (but not legally certified) translation of a contract or document in their native language.

The savings tracking module, which works like most other savings tracking modules you’d be familiar with, kicks in post award and allows you to track historical to projected to actuals over time based on the sourcing event. However, if you use Procurence Meercat for S2P for your direct, it will automatically populate the historicals, projections, and actuals based on each order that flows through the system, making savings tracking easy-peasy for you.

The supplier innovation sourcing is a relatively new module that allows buyers to post challenges where they need innovation to reduce cost, streamline energy requirements, minimize environmental emissions (including carbon), stay ahead of global compliance regulations, or meet an emerging market demand. Like the first generation crowd sourcing innovation platforms (remember those?), it allows suppliers to suggest innovations to meet a buyer’s needs, which, since it’s integrated, can be flipped into RFXs if the proposal sounds promising.

This is because the submission process is partially structured and, when a supplier submits an innovation idea, they can specify the expected business benefits (in terms of sales, sustainability, quality and warranty, production, procurement, process, or logistics factors), the materials that will be used, the associated financials, and the document types that are being submitted. This semi-structured approach allows for quick searching, identification, and RFX/project creation off of a submission.

Moreover, the platform can be opened up for suppliers to provide their own innovations with respect to existing parts or processes if they feel they have a way to improve the end product they are offering to the buyer.

Operational Procurement

  • Purchase Order & ASN Management
  • Invoice Management
  • Capacity Planning

Once an award has been made, and a contract has been cut, purchase orders can be manually, or automatically using appropriate rules definitions, created and sent to the supplier. The platform can also accept ASN (Advanced Shipping Notices) from the supplier and track those as well. When the invoice is submitted, it can be captured, and if it’s an attachment, the platform uses ThinkingMachine-driven AI to automatically parse the invoice into standard metadata and line item data for matching, processing, and payment approval. The approval chains can be defined to be as simple or complex as the organization wants, with single, multi-stage, and even simultaneous approvals supported.

Compliance & Risk

They’ve had compliance and risk management (including a risk decision matrix) since 2012, but it’s been significantly enhanced over the past few years. This includes a number of out-of-the-box integrations including riskmethods, prewave, Z2DATA, Euler Hermes, and D&B. New capabilities revolved around:

  • Sanction Checks
  • Semiconductor Risk
  • AI Risk Review

Procurence integrates with multiple sources to check (potential) suppliers against sanctions list and these checks can be included early in the pre-qualification process (to prevent time being wasted on qualifying a supplier that your organization ultimately can’t do business with. It also integrated with multiple AI technologies in addition to third party risk ratings and can parse available data from documents and the internet to estimate certain risks and help you pre-populate models and then generate an overview of supplier risk from that model. Finally, it integrates with Z2DATA to provide you with deep insight into the semiconductor risk of every part you source that uses semiconductors (as long as you maintain your semiconductor listing in the parts management and associate the semiconductors with the parts they are used in). This isn’t hard to do because you can track the composition (level 1 of the Bill of Materials by default, but the system can track components at multiple levels if required for risk, ESG, etc.) of each part that you purchase (which you need to do for Scope3 CO2 tracking and reporting).

The risk management also includes risk monitoring (which can be continuous on every risk data element update or on a schedule), which can not only support the manual scheduling of automatic (technical) reviews based on identified risk types or scores, but automatic scheduling if a risk factor gets too high.

Materials & Quality

They’ve had part masters, material profiles, PPAP/APQP, NCR/8D, compensation claims, and even NPD for a decade, but all of the capability has been enhanced in recent years as it was spun out of core SRM (which revolved around parts linked to the supplier) into its own product development and quality module which supports highly integrated part development and management centered around a buying organization’s part, and now even supports tooling management.

Their part and material master is quite deep. For each part, in addition to tracking metadata that tracks all of the classification data (id, eClass, HTS, SIC, HS, CN, TARIC, CAS, ECN, SCIP, etc.), it also tracks the default units, criticality, risk, type, tooling, specification documents, related plants, projects, materials, and whether or not it uses semiconductors. It maintains RoHS Data, validations, and current status. Finally, it maintains the lifecycle status, timelines, and cost models required for purchasing; associated RFXs; and, post award, the associated factories, purchase orders, ASNs, and information on received lots.

ESG

They’ve always had the ability to support ESG, as you could extend supplier and part profiles to capture whatever you wanted, but with the recent rise of ESG in the EU (especially around Scope-3 reporting and the German Supply Chain Act [LkSG]), they now have custom capabilities to support both of these requirements, and even have a whistleblower portal. They also have out of the box integrations with ecovadis, and Integrity Next.

As we noted above, you can track the carbon down to the part component level, and this includes the packaging and logistics emissions, where you can track the logistics emissions at the route level, with the emissions tracked for each leg of the route (which might use a different method or carrier). In other words, in Procurence Meercat, your Scope 3 calculations can approach 100% accuracy and, more importantly, you can not only identify real opportunities for Scope 3 improvement (based upon different plant or production efficiencies and production rebalancing) but quick improvements through packaging changes and packaging reduction, better routings, etc. — which is sometimes the only improvements you can really make (if your parts are custom and you can’t easily switch factories, or you’ve already optimized the production and the only way to further reduce carbon is a redesign that takes months or years, etc.).

Project & Resource Management

They’ve had basic project management since last decade, but with a growing customer base in a few key industries (including wind power), they have expanded their capabilities significantly to also support staffing and resourcing profiles (including HSE Compliance), with training requirements, down to the individual employee — like an Avetta but specifically designed for complex industrial supply chains.

Communication

Finally, they have a 7th core module that serves as the communication hub across your organization and its supply base that centralizes asynchronous online communication, mass mailings and notifications, generic platform content in a CMS/Library, and even a generic portal for supplier/third party access to communications. The platform even supports the definition of meeting protocols with topic specific templates to guide staff through supplier meetings.

Procurence Meercat has come a long way since its humble beginnings when it first poked it’s head out of the hole to take it’s first shift in watching over the supply chain landscape, and it’s one Meercat you definitely shouldn’t overlook!

You’re Not Doing Supplier Performance Management (SPM) Right Unless it Improves You!

This post was inspired by a LinkedIn post from Celia, founder of Vendor Score IT, who says that if your suppliers aren’t evolving, they’re holding you back.

Celia is perfectly correct in that you will be held back by suppliers who refuse to progress, but another key point that really needs to be addressed that all of the supplier performance management advocates miss is the following:

If you’re not evolving, you’re holding your suppliers back.

When you need to step up performance, you can’t put all of the blame or all of the responsibility on the supplier. You have to take some too. First of all, you selected the supplier. Secondly, you didn’t monitor the supplier closely to ensure that the supplier performed up to your level of expectation. Thirdly, you know what the customer wants, as well as the performance you expect, better than your supplier. Fourthly, you should be leading the innovation charge, as the one responsible for value-add for the end-customer.

Furthermore, when it comes to Supplier Performance Management (SPM), while it’s super easy to just drop the under-performing suppliers and replace them with better performing ones … simply adopting better suppliers doesn’t make you any better as an organization. In fact, not only will you have a new set of suppliers in the lower median who then become under-performing, but overall performance scores will go down because you are not enabling them to perform better.

You don’t want to ditch poor metrics because they are holding you back, vendor reviews to ensure they are striving to get better, or take a growth mindset to make them perform better.

You want to ditch poor metrics because they are forcing suppliers to perform sub-optimally to score well in your system, you want to do “vendor reviews” to open dialogues about how you can help them improve (because, with a three year commitment, they’ll buy a new machine, upgrade their warehouse and use new pallets to reduce breakage, improve quality control processes, etc.), and use your growth to fuel theirs as well.

How do you identify the bad metrics? How do you identify where you are holding them back (vs. them holding you back)? How do ensure that you get the growth you need? By taking the mindset that it’s at least as much your fault as there’s (and probably more), by going in with a joint improvement mindset, by listening to them (and, if necessary, reading between the lines to see how their focus on certain metrics, such as OTD or year-over-year production cost decrease [when energy costs are going up and it’s forcing them to sacrifice quality], is actually degrading their performance), and asking them to contribute to improvement plans. (i.e. You make it clear that you are going to work with them on joint improvement, not just dictate plans to them or expect them to do all the work. And that they should take advantage of that because, otherwise, you’ll find another supplier who will work with you if they won’t. A good supplier will jump at this opportunity.)

By improving your organizational performance, you will encourage your suppliers to improve their performance as well!

The Green Cabbage Grows Another Leaf

When we first invited you to Take a Leaf from the Green Cabbage eighteen months ago, we covered one of the most extensive services-backed indirect-focussed spend analysis players in the market (serving clients like Delta, Home Depot, Dell, Adobe, etc.) with deep support for:

  • SaaS Subscriptions: going well beyond many of the dime-a-dozen SaaS cost analyzers (and there are quite a number of those now, see our coverage of the Sacred Cows), Green Cabbage can unpack the purposely confusing consumption models the big players throw at you (to try and get you to spend more than you need to), do SKU level price comparisons, provide you deep insight into negotiation opportunities, and, through their MITs, provide guidance into how to achieve actual savings
  • Contingent Workforce (CW): detailed insights into over 70,000 position-level-market (geography) combinations for deep negotiation insights across 120 countries
  • Clinicals: deep knowledge and insights into clinical SKUs and sourcing
  • Invari: their Invoice management platform, which allows invoice and payment data to automatically be extracted into the appropriate spend cubes while also providing core I2P capability (and eliminating the need for YAP — yet another platform)
  • MITs (Market Intelligence Theses) across SaaS, CW, and Clinicals: which could be lightweight, comprehensive, or competitive; guaranteed to be completed within 3 days, and usually completed in 1 to 2 days for lightweight and comprehensive
  • Contract Library: Green Cabbage starts by loading your contracts, not your spend data, extracting the key terms and pricing, and then loads your spend data, tying as much as they can to your contracts (for immediate insights into any pricing violations); this is important because this is the foundation for the deep insights they can provide via Elegion, which we mentioned, but didn’t get into as it was in earlier stages at the time

Now, since it’s only been six months, you’re probably wondering how much new stuff could there be that would entice Sourcing Innovation to pen an update after such a short time. Quite a bit actually. There are five improved and new offerings in particular that need to be addressed:

Elegion (formerly GC Legal)

Elegion, their in-depth contract clause repository, contains hundreds of business, commercial, and legal terms; conditions; and standard contract clauses with an explanation of what each term is along with best-in-class definitions of each clause.
The platform makes it a point to call out the highly-relevant “mousetraps” that suppliers will use to (often unfairly) protect themselves through inclusion, exclusion, or modified language. The best-in-class definitions are drafted by licensed attorneys with expertise in the relevant subject matter and areas specifically supported by Green Cabbage (IT, Marketing, and Contingent Workforce). Moreover, the attorneys who drafted these clauses have collectively negotiated thousands of deals from both sides of the table in these areas.

In addition, directly through the platform, via secure end-to-end encryption, users can use their credits* to asynchronously request input on specific clauses in the agreements presented to them during their negotiation with a response guaranteed within 48 hours. Moreover, they can also request synchronous 30 min or 60 min 1-on-1 consultations with an on-staff Green Cabbage Attorney who is an expert in the contract they are currently negotiating. (Green Cabbage‘s top attorneys used to work for the top tech giants and contingent workforce providers.) This service, of course, uses up credits much faster than one-time asynchronous message requests, but can be invaluable when negotiating a multi-million dollar contract. However, the best part of the offering is the deep insight into terms, conditions, clauses, and best language/practice that can allow a buyer to address most of their legal questions self-serve with confidence!

* each subscription comes with a certain number of credits, and clients can always buy more

Better Support for Corporate Hierarchies

As we indicated in our first article, Green Cabbage supports a number of big Private Equity firms, including Private Equity Firms that manage a number of other Private Equity Firms (where each has specialized funds). As such, they have built an infinitely extensible corporate hierarchy with appropriate view and access permissions, that allow an individual, with the right permissions in any department or company, to see all of the spend in all of the departments and companies under their purview down the chain to identify opportunities for contract (re)negotiations through the utilization of a common platform provider, CWM provider, etc. (You may not believe it, but even the mega-corps will respond to a renegotiate now or we stop using you across 10 of our companies … no need to wait for the renewal.) This helps them answer questions like “how much do I spend across my portfolio with supplier S or on category X”, which is very powerful information to have for leverage and can often support contract negotiation at a group or higher level.

Receptio Integration (GPA)

If you’re a large mid-market or Global 3000, you use a lot of tech. These will range from small task/function/department specific small SaaS apps that go on the P-Card to multi-million contracts with the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, or Google. And while there is savings available in virtually every contract in every price range, for a large mid-market or global multi-national, it’s not worth chasing 5K on a 50K contract when there is likely 200K to be saved on a 1M contract. In this situation, you’ll just blindly accept the renewal for the small SaaS app if the price increase is 10% or less, and spend your hours negotiating an extra 10% from the behemoth because that’s big bucks. But what about the mid-range? The 50K to 250K contracts where there’s likely 5K to 50K of savings? That’s nothing to scoff at, but the cost of the effort involved, especially if you need to involve Legal, sometimes negates the value you realize.

So what’s the answer? Pre-negotiated Terms and Conditions from specialized GPOs that specialize in the best rates, on average, from these providers by bringing these, usually smaller, providers more business volume than they’d get on their own. That’s Receptio — an integration platform that connects you to Green Cabbage‘s Group Purchasing Arm partners that can get you better deals from many SaaS providers and Contingent Workforce providers than you can get on your own when your needs fall into the mid-range of spending.

Supplier Newstand

What’s the one thing missing from most supplier management and contract management platforms? Supplier Insights that are meaningful at contract negotiation and renewal time. Why is this typically missing? Because it requires scouring the internet to find relevant news that relates to the supplier, pulling in the links and creating summaries (hallucination free), and then tagging the articles to relevant subject matter (ownership, management, product, etc.) to allow a buyer to determine not only the org type and management but whether that’s likely to change (e.g. the organization just brought in an expert consultant on going public, announced a new CEO, etc.).

Green Cabbage recently released the first version (that currently scours over 750 news channels and vetted news sources) of this that allows you to see and search all of the recent news associated with a supplier — including, but not limited to: acquisition/merger activity, pricing changes, layoffs, executive movement, etc. — and is currently working on the next release that will associate these articles with pre-defined tags to provide quick insights.

Marketing Spend Intelligence

This is the newest offering of the Green Cabbage platform — deep, specialized insight into marketing spend. IT Spend may be the biggest at 5 Trillion Spend, but Marketing is no slouch either at an extrapolated estimated value approaching 2 Trillion when you correlate various sources and metrics, with Advertising spending alone topping 1 Trillion in 2024 (with the E&M industry being a 2.8 Trillion industry in the US alone). And, like SaaS, there is a huge amount of overspend in this category as well, especially in the non-creative spend in production and distribution when material and standardized service costs are not analyzed. Moreover, very few spend analysis, procurement software, or consultancies can provide these deep insights and guidance — and fewer still with guidance for marketing professionals with little-to-no Procurement experience. This alone almost warrants an update as market intelligence alone unveils huge opportunities, but, as you just noticed, this is just one of many improvements.

In other words, Green Cabbage has been advancing their offering at a rapid rate, as they also expand globally, with offices in the United Kingdom and India to complement their US office, and expansion into AustralAsia imminent.

Myth-busting 2025 2015 Procurement Predictions and Trends! Part 4

Introduction

In our first instalment, we noted that the ambitious started pumping out 2025 prediction and trend articles in late November / early December, wanting to be ahead of the pack, even though there is rarely much value in these articles. First of all, and we say this with 25 years of experience in this space, the more they proclaim things will change … Secondly, the predictions all revolve around the same topics we’ve been talking about for almost two decades. In fact, if you dug up a Procurement predictions article for 2015, there’s a good chance 9 of the top 10 topic areas would be the same. (And see the links in our first article for two “future” series with about 3 dozen trends that are more or less as relevant now as they were then.)

In our last instalment, we continued our review of the 10 core predictions (and variants) that came out of our initial review of 71 “predictions” and “trends” across the first eight articles we found, in an effort to demonstrate that most of these aren’t ground-shattering, new, or, if they actually are, not going to happen because the more they proclaim things will change …

In this instalment, we’re again continuing to work our way up the list from the bottom to the top and continuing with “supplier management”.

Supplier Management

There were 6 predictions across the eight articles which basically revolved around “collaboration” with some focus on “development”. This is yet another topic that is overhyped and needs to be addressed, but, as with our last two articles, we will start by listing all of the individual predictions:

  • Agile Supplier Management
  • Collaborative Platforms
  • Enhanced Supplier Collaboration
  • Enhanced Supplier Collaboration
  • Supplier Collaboration and Strategic Partnerships
  • Supplier Development and Growth

Here’s the thing. For anything not a commodity, an organization’s success ultimately depends on supplier performance. While supplier performance will be good from the start for some suppliers, it won’t be so good for others. In these cases, it won’t always improve just be rejecting shipments. Sometimes it will require collaboration, which means that collaboration has always been, and will always be, important. So it’s nothing new. The only difference is that, as disruptions become more common, products require more differentiation and rapid advancement, and supply chains need to rapidly shift as raw material sources and distribution routes become unavailable, we are in a situation where collaboration is becoming increasingly more critical.

As a result, collaboration will increase in some supply chains as it is needed, but you won’t see a sudden shift en masse for Procurement to all of a sudden become more collaborative with its suppliers unless it needs to. While there is always a lot of talk about how collaborative an organization is, especially at RFP time, the reality is, as we all know, once the contract is inked, unless the supplier is considered very strategic, the chance of actual collaboration is very low.

The best one can hope for is that the organization selects supplier management software that enables better communication and collaboration than is usually supported by such software, which will mean that, over time, collaboration may increase before a disaster scenario that requires it to do so.

The only prediction that may become true in a small number of Procurement organizations that install more modern, collaborative, agile platforms is they become more agile in supplier management, begin collaboration when potential issues are detected, see how easy it is, and actually start supplier development before major problems arise.

What Should Happen? (But Won’t!)

Organizations should acquire supplier performance management and development systems that allow them to track supplier performance, identify blips and downward trends, and immediately identity, and implement, appropriate supplier development programs … in a collaborative fashion with the suppliers. This will identify which suppliers need more collaboration, when, and help you get to the why. That’s it. It’s not giving collaboration lip service, looking for “agile” systems, creating new “partnerships”, etc. It’s just identifying which suppliers need collaboration, when, why, how, and getting it done … with straight-forward supplier performance management and development systems.

Three down, seven to go.

oboloo: Bringing e-Sourcing to the SME masses

e-Sourcing is a critical part of proper strategic procurement, but one that not a lot of SMEs and lower-end mid-markets have access to due to the cost of most strategic sourcing suites designed for the upper mid-market and enterprise that are beyond their budget, typically leaving them with only ultra-basic RFX solutions which are not enough.

In contrast, oboloo offers a Source-to-Contract platform with basic supplier management, contract document management, and savings management capability which can be obtained for $1,000 / user / year, allowing a SME Procurement department of 5 users to obtain decent sourcing software for 5K a year and put it on a P-card.

e-Sourcing

Their new, V2, e-Sourcing module is the core of the recently upgraded platform and allows an organization to build and issue RFIs, RFPs, and RFQs custom tailored to their needs for every event.

The entry dashboard to the Sourcing module allows a user to search the sourcing event database by opening and / or closing date, location, department, category, sub-category, event type, and event creator. From this dashboard, the user can access an existing event they have access to or create a new event.

If they choose to create a new event, they start with the sourcing wizard that allows them to configure the RFX event as a collection of (pre-defined) (standard) sections for internal use, standard information gathering (supplier questionnaires), event specific supplier sections, and a pricing section. (There’s only one standard product/item pricing template at the moment, but they are looking at including more for services [based on rate hours] and/or [manufacturing] cost breakdowns in future releases. If the user desired a more detailed price breakdown, they can attach an Excel spreadsheet.)

The platform walks the buyer through the process of

  • defining the activity that captures all the sourcing meta-data
  • selecting the sections for internal use
  • selecting the sections for supplier response
  • selecting the standard questionnaires (sustainability, security, etc.)
  • defining the pricing request
  • attaching any supporting documents
  • defining the scoring criteria
  • inviting the suppliers

Internal sections might consist of information on evaluation criteria and current pricing and cost structures.

Supplier sections consist of relevant criteria on required confidentiality, contact information, implementation plans, and future roadmap. Once a section is selected, it can be edited as needed.

Questionnaires are for the gathering of standard security and privacy information, sustainability information, service and support information, quality assurance, and other standard information required of any supplier for the product, category, or doing business requirements.

The pricing section is where the products are defined, by name, code, unit of measure, and quantity. The buyer can add as many products as she wants.

Once the products are defined, the buyer moves on to the scoring section where she defines the weighted scoring across each section included in the RFX.

Finally, the user selects the suppliers she wants to send the RFX to as well as the contacts at each supplier who will receive the RFX. If she chooses, she can switch to a supplier view before issuing the RFX. When she’s done, she presses send, and the RFP is complete.

The whole process can be completed in 10 minutes if the products are defined in the system and the buyer is okay with standard templates.

With regards to the construction process, the platform comes with a suite of standard sections and questionnaires that the buying organization can start with, and then the buying organization administrator can alter these as desired upon implementation.

Once the RFX is complete, and issued, the buyer can easily access the current status at any time. They can see which suppliers have responded, what they have responded to, and where the RFX is in the process. Once the RFX is closed, the buyer can start scoring and once scoring is complete, make an award.

Scoring is done on a section by section basis, with the information for each supplier displayed in consecutive rows for each supplier. The platform supports multiple scorers, and the weighted average will be used across scorers if multiple scorers are defined. Once scoring is done, the buyer sees the average score by section by supplier as well as the average score by supplier and can then mark a supplier for the award.

Contract Management

oboloo defines their contract management as a customized document management system, and that’s essentially what it is. It’s simply a repository for tracking organizational contracts, indexing them with metadata, defining relevant dates and alerts, and providing some basic reporting. But for most small organizations, that’s all they really need. They don’t use complicated contracts, they don’t want a separate document management system they won’t use, and they certainly don’t need the ability to define extensive clause libraries with multiple versions of each clause.

With respect to reporting, the system tracks expiring contracts by month, and can break them down by department, location, category, manager, type, etc. The user can also search across all of these criteria to quickly identify contracts of interest. It also tracks the number of documents (not) approved, the number of documents that have expired, and the number of contract records associated with suppliers that have been marked approved. And, of course, it can be setup with automated alerts/notifications to let the buyer know when contracts are coming up for expiry, when they are expired, etc. (And, of course these alerts/notifications exist throughout supplier management, RFX, and savings tracking when tasks are due.)

Each contract is a record consisting of key metadata classifiers, owners, financials, termination information, associated information, savings tracking, and a change log.

Supplier Management

The platform is defined as a basic supplier information and performance management platform that can maintain records for all suppliers used, or invited, by the buying organization and these can be searched by key identifiers that include industry, sub-industry, supplier type, preferred status, location, active (status), and contract as well as supplier name.

Supplier records are rather basic and consist of basic identifying information, owners, contacts, contracts, and scorecards. Performance management is scorecard centric in the application, and scorecards are also used to manage risk and track sustainability in the platform, as the buying organization can start with oboloo templates and set up their own to track the information they are interested in from a supplier performance management perspective.

Like contract management it is also fairly basic, but that’s what most SMEs and small midsized organizations need. Most of them don’t need extensive records on suppliers they are mainly buying indirect and MRO products from, and performance management is just a matter of ensuring quality, timely delivery, sustainability, low risk, and adherence to contract(s). This makes it easy for the buying organization to define and manage their suppliers.

Savings Tracking

Savings tracking is a simple module where, on a product, or contract, basis, a buyer can setup a savings tracking project on a fixed or variable time period for a set number of milestone dates. The buyer defines the product(s), current baseline spend (adjusted for the quantity, the projections, and then, at every milestone, defines the actual spend and the platform automatically computes the savings (or the lack thereof) and, once the last milestone is entered, computes the savings for the project.

As with the contract module, the system can then create meta-reports across all savings projects by month, year, and all time, as well as the remaining projected savings (and percentage). This can be broken down by category, sub-category, location, department, saving project type, and the responsible buyer.

Configuration

The platform supports roles-based security, comes with four pre-defined roles, and more can be configured to define created, read, edit, approval, archive, and similar rights across each module. Each user has a role as well as a unique profile.

It also supports the ability to define the industry and sub-industry hierarchy, the category and product hierarchy, corporate locations, departments, and each element type used by the system as identifying metadata (such as sourcing, contract, supplier, saving, document, etc. type). In addition, all of this information can be uploaded from excel (csv). The backend is built on APIs and the next version will have well-defined open APIs for data import as well as third party software integrations by 2025 Q1. Finally, users can select their currency (and define their preferred exchange rate) as well as their language, with approximately 15 languages currently supported.

Finally, the user can see their current licence and the corporate administrator can see all the currently active user licenses on the platform.

At the end of the day, oboloo contains the basic functionality you found in best-in-class first generation sourcing platforms almost two decades ago, with a few key differentiators. It’s a fully modern cloud-native SaaS stack, which can be fully self-implemented and self-configured, with a streamlined UX for SMEs, fully customizable template sections to allow for supplier records, contracts, RFXs, and savings projects to be created in minutes (vs hours or days). Most importantly, all of this comes at a cost that is a fraction of what these early SaaS platforms used to cost (and of what most [mini-]suites targeted at large mid-market and above, with a lot more bells and whistles than SMEs need, cost today), allowing a small sourcing team to get started for under 10K instead of having to spend 100K or more.