Category Archives: Supplier Management

Source-to-Pay+ part 2: End-to-End Risk Management

In Part 1 we noted that Risk Management goes much beyond Supplier Risk, and a primitive Supplier “Risk” Management application (which we prefer to label Supplier Uncertainty Management since it’s not full blown risk management, and there’s uncertainty as to how much it will actually do for you) is only the beginning of what your organization will likely need.

When it comes to risk, there are risks in:

  • your company
  • your suppliers
  • their suppliers
  • third parties you interact with (which may not be [direct] suppliers of goods or services)
  • your carriers
  • your supply chain network (ports, warehouses, [cross]docks, etc.)

These risks can be with

  • your people
  • your board
  • your investors
  • your supplier’s people, board, or investors
  • the materials your suppliers use
  • the locale they operate in
  • the suppliers your suppliers use
  • the locale they operate in
  • the carriers
  • the ports your carriers use
  • the warehouses used for interim storage
  • and any other part of, or player in, the supply chain

And the types of risks are numerous. They include, but are far from limited to:

  • unskilled/uncertified people
  • sanctioned/prohibited individuals and entity
  • restricted / banned materials
  • use of underage / forced / slave labour
  • geo-politics
  • economics / currency fluctuations
  • natural disasters
  • labour unrest / strikes
  • fraud / theft
  • the internet
  • and so on

And you need a very extensive application to identify, analyze, monitor, mitigate, and manage these risks. In fact, you may even need a suite of these applications, especially when you consider that most applications consider risks from the viewpoint of:

  • the company (especially those that offer GRC applications)
  • the supplier / third party (SRM/SUM+ / TPRM)
  • supply chain visibility
  • … w/or in-transport visibility
  • w/or multi-tier (manufacturing chain) visibility
  • cyber monitoring

And such an application will need entity/function specific capabilities as well as generic capabilities. The generic capabilities might include, but not be limited to:

  • data feed/stream integration
  • metric definition
  • trend analysis
  • user defined reports
  • data / trend monitoring
  • (mitigation) plan creation
  • plan management

Risk is broad, and the solution footprint needs to be broad as well. In the next few articles we will tackle some of the major application areas we noted above.

Source-to-Pay+ Part 1: The Beginning.

Once upon a time
not so long ago …

SI ran The 39 Steps … err … The 39 Clues … err … The 39 Part Series to Help You Figure Out Where to Start with Source-to-Pay and helped you understand what each of the six core technologies in Source-to-Pay do, how to evaluate them, and the order of implementation necessary to maximize short-term results (which is the only thing the CFO cutting the check for the systems cares about). Not that it should be hard, given that, as the doctor explained, if your organization is a mid market, the answer to Per Year, How Much Should You Outlay for Source to Pay? 120K! (because Yes Mid-Markets, 120K is More Than Enough for Source-to-Pay!). That’s cheap, and if you can’t get a 10X ROI on that, the doctor would be surprised. (Yes, you’ll need some integrations and some services, and that will double or triple the price and you may only see a 5X or 7X ROI, but still.)

But the reality is, especially in today’s turbulent times (where me and my wine is not enough), even full Source-to-Pay is not enough. Risks abound, and even if your Supplier Management Platform has an Uncertainty (Risk) module, there’s more than supplier risk to worry about. There’s third party, supply chain, logistics, geographic, natural disaster, and many other risks that Supplier Risk Management, which we prefer to call Supplier Uncertainty Management (due to the lack of depth, action management, support for mitigation planning, etc. we prefer NOT to call these Risk modules), applications in Source-to-Pay typically don’t address.

Then we have Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Environmental & Social Governance (ESG), and Carbon / Scope 1,2,3. Today, a non-responsible company that buys from suppliers who are particularly environmentally unfriendly, don’t treat their workers well, or, even worse, use forced or slave labour is the one that gets the consumer backlash, and possibly the civil AND criminal liability (with certain jurisdictions introducing laws making the last company down the chain responsible). A company that just hoards profit and doesn’t make an effort to give back is frowned upon. And a company that stays on dirty power when there is an alternative, wastefully uses fresh water, or unnecessarily consumes non-recyclable resources in its day to day operations is just being dumb. Moreover, when you consider that Carbon Tracking is Important — But a Calculator or a Credit is Not A Solution! but What You’re Really Concerned About is YOUR e-Liability, that it’s not just about tracking, but reducing where possible, and that there are real baselines given that it’s impossible to mine, process, produce, ship, or consume without emitting carbon, it’s not easy to figure out what you need.

When you are buying direct, you have to consider the supply chain as well as the implications of a change in the supply base. The ink on the contract is when the fun truly begins. The product has to arrive on time, on budget, damage free, at the right location. This requires logistics coordination, and if the contract will change the supply base configuration, this is something that should be considered up front. So logistics/network analysis is creeping into Sourcing.

Then there is the issue of T&E — what happens when it’s put on the card, because its too small to bother with a Procurement effort (it never is, although it’s not always worth the time of a Procurement Pro, and that’s why you need an appropriate T&E/Tail Spend system to make sure the end buyer gets it right) or someone is trying to bury something that they know is not truly needed, off contract, or shouldn’t be expensed.

Plus, at the end of the day, you have to pay … and most Source-to-Pay end at the OK-to-Pay. What do you do when it’s time to pay?

And so it goes.

As such, it’s time to start another multi-part series to help you, dear reader, understand the extended Procurement landscape and what you should be looking for in such systems. We’re not going to attempt to tell you what to implement first, as that will depend upon what your biggest need is, which will usually depend on what the biggest risks are to the organization at the current time — unidentified spend, risk of supply, breaks in the supply network, forthcoming legislation, global payments, and so on. We’re just going to take an area and explore it, for as many articles as it takes. More to come. Much More.

Visibility into Vizibl, The Collaboration Platform for True Supplier Innovation

It’s been a decade in the making, especially since it took years for Vizibl (founded in 2013) to find it’s focus, but what was once yet another SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) platform is now a truly leading Supplier Collaboration, Innovation, and Transformation platform.

Starting out with the vision of a better SRM, it took a while for Vizibl to find its niche and double down on it. In fact, it took years of working with clients with highly specific (customization/process) needs for them to realize that they were good at developing for and supporting specific, sometimes, complex processes and years more for them to sit back and identify the commonality, design standard project and service layers, and bring them to market. But they did, and they have, and we will discuss the first major project/service layer they are bringing to market later in this article.

The Vizibl platform has seven main components:

  • Supplier Information Management Foundation
  • Supplier Collaboration Workspace
  • Supplier Innovation Hub
  • Supplier Relationship Management Module
  • Dashboards, Analytics, and Reporting
  • Program Layer: (Foundation for) Specific Development/Improvement Programs that Cross-Cut the Entire Platform
    (built on a virtual platform integration layer)
  • Supplier Sustainability Management

1. The Supplier Information Management Foundation is what you would expect from a leading SRM platform — it can track all of the core data and meta data you would expect on a supplier and can be extended as needed to track all of the data you require across all areas of supplier information, products, risks, compliance requirements, performance requirements, contracts, projects, initiatives, and activities you wish to manage.

Supplier Onboarding is straight forward as it’s quick and simple to create a new company record to begin the process, with only minimal data needed. New suppliers can be onboarded as standalone, children of an existing company, or related entities. The platform can maintain complex supplier tree relationships and the tree can be visualized along with a roll up of relevant metrics, project counts, and appropriate relationship data.

2. The Supplier Collaboration workspace is where the buyer can communicate with the supplier, spin off action plans and initiatives, store ideas and plans, pull in and push out data as needed, and put thought into action.

3. The Supplier Innovation Hub is where the core of the magic happens. This is where challenges can be issued, goals set, and projects planned. It’s where projects are defined to increase supplier performance, improve product designs or manufacturing, increase sustainability, or decrease CO2/GHG emissions.

Projects have activities (or tasks), roadmaps that link them together, objectives (outcomes), value tracking metrics, integrated communications, and teams.

4. The Supplier Relationship Management Module is the glue that holds it all together. In addition to integrating all of the pieces, it also supports the creation of basic supplier action/account plans, the definition of strategic objectives, and integrated overview dashboards. It also allows for the definition of supplier teams (that it calls circles) that represent the different teams the organization will be working with, the management teams, and boards of relevance.

5. The Dashboards, Analytics, and Reporting capability is used to summarize and display the various types of data, metrics, and indicators tracked by the platform. These dashboards cannot only roll up metrics across the platform, but can also roll up metrics in, and across, projects by stages, as well as break them down by regions or supplier trees.

6. The Supplier Sustainability Management module is one of their latest modules focussed on tracking and managing an organization’s sustainability initiatives. It can track all of the emissions for each supplier, those that are reporting, the associated spend, and any other GHG data of relevance to the organization. It can also track all of the data associated with ESG surveys requested by the organization, which can be custom created and as broad or deep as required.

7A. The Program Layer is the toolkit that they use to build custom cross-platform program management capability that allows an organization to tackle new, and possibly exciting, initiatives that can transform their operations, product, and / or supply chains. Programs consist of suppliers, goals and targets, indicator metrics, associated data and reporting, summary dashboards, and scores.

7B: Decarbonization as a service is the first offering from Vizibl built on the program layer that integrates all of the platform capabilities to track scope 3 carbon across the supply chain by extending the sustainability management module to focus on the import and calculation of carbon emissions by supplier over time as well as best practices and learnings that can be shared with a supplier to help them reduce their emissions through leaner production, cleaner energy sources, new production processes, etc.

When it comes to the administration of the Vizibl platform, an administrator can configure, more-or-less, everything. First of all, they can configure the organizational tree as needed to match their organizational structure and include subsidiaries and use a variable number of levels for each organizational branch. So, the organization can have the global holding company; American, European and Asian holding company subsidiaries; individual (holding) companies for each country it operates in; and, if necessary, breakdown into individual locations or divisions if needed for management purposes. You can have five levels in Asia, four levels in Europe, and three levels in the Americas if that’s what’s necessary to exactly match the organizational structure. And of course, each company node in the organizational tree can have its unique settings, inheriting from the node above anything that does not need to be changed.

Similarly, because a company is a company in the system, full supplier organizational structures can also be modelled according to their company structure and modelled down to the individual (factory) location. This is particularly important since a diversity initiative may be global but improvement efforts might be restricted to one factory producing one particularly unique component for one product line.

Then, the organization can configure, for that company:

Account Plans
for each supplier, the company can define the strategic objectives, guiding principles, and target behaviours; these can be defined from scratch or added from a common library
Data Imports
to define regular / repeating file-based imports
Initiatives & Opportunities
the overarching initiatives and/or opportunities being sought, the plans and project stages, questionnaires, suppliers, etc.; the form builder is section based, supports all standard HTML objects, and all of the (numeric) data collected can be subjected to metrics and rules (to map to binary/integer) which can be defined on multiple choices
Performance
allows a user to define the performance metrics / KPIs, organized into categories, that are to be tracked, define what levels they are tracked at / rolled up to, and even customize the metric calculation in individual nodes
Permissions
define the user permissions (by role)
Projects
centralizes the organizational projects
Relationships
define the supplier relationships by mapping the supplier to the specific nodes in the organizational structure where the relationship exists as well as the segment (division/category) they are servicing
Reports
define and customize the reports
Statuses
define the project states for initiatives and opportunities, rejections, suppliers, etc. as needed to match the organizational process; can start with defaults
Surveys
encapsulates all of the surveys that can be reused across initiatives and opportunities
Tags
custom tags for tagging initiatives, opportunities, suppliers, etc. for quick search & filter
User Management
define the organizational users
Value Trackers
defines, and centralizes, the metrics that will be used in the innovations, opportunities, and performance tracking

In summary, the administration is very powerful … in fact, it’s one of the few solutions where the organizational structure for all companies (buying and supplying organizations) is extensively customizable, where initiatives can be tailored to the subset of relevant relationships and locations, where the inheritance for an initiative can be customized, and where you fully customize and localize all supplier interactions to just the organizations and teams that you need.

This is the first aspect of Vizibl that truly makes it stand out. The degree of customization of initiatives only to the relationships of relevance, teams of relevance, with metrics of relevance is far beyond what most of the traditional “Relationship” solutions actually offer.

The second aspect of Vizibl that makes it stand out is the new program layer they’ve built to support the creation of programs that tie together all of the relevant SXM capabilities needed to completely manage an organizational initiative across the supply base. In many platforms, the organization needs to manage the surveys, performance metrics, reports, projects, collaborations separately across the different modules of the platform that were built up over time.

The third aspect of Vizibl that makes it stand out is the new Decarbonation-as-a-Service offering built on this program layer that integrates all of the platform capabilities to track carbon down to scope 3 across the supply chain, provide insight into best practices and learnings to reduce emissions, allow for the creation of projects and initiatives to tackle the opportunities, track improvement over time, and essentially turn measurement into action into improvement. Carbon calculators are a dime-a-dozen from everyone and their dog, and can be built in 15 minutes in any good modern (spend) analytics platform, but few platforms do real monitoring, few platforms allow for the creation of supplier development projects, and fewer still provide real insight into what can be done to get results.

In other words, if you really care about the “R” in Supplier Relationship Management, and truly want to manage that relationship for true supplier development and improvement, you should definitely make sure Vizibl is on your short-list.

Promena’s Upgraded Platform Packs a Rich Caffeinated Turkish Punch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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