Category Archives: Supplier Management

Ignite Wants to Spark Your Sourcing Success with Actionable Analytics!

the doctor has written about many Spend Analysis vendors over the last decade*, including Ignite Procurement, which is one of the few newer vendors that he expected would soon breakout of their (Nordic) niche and start expanding, something which they are now starting to do having tripled their customer count in the last 6 months to over 200 customers.

The reason for this expectation? They earned their top right status in the Spend Matters Spend Analysis Solution Map when the (quadrant) maps still existed and the doctor was responsible for grading them as a Top 5 Best-of-Breed Mid-Market focussed Spend Analysis player located in Western Europe / the UK.

Founded by ex-BCG (Boston Consulting Group) consultants in 2017, with the first version of the platform launching in 2018, the key players not only have a firm understanding of spend analysis, but what analysis capabilities a customer needs to find their spend waste and their opportunities. Plus, they understood since day one that spend analysis in a vacuum is not that meaningful and is most meaningful in the context of negotiations, supplier management and development, contract obligation management, labour compliance and ESG reporting, for example. Negotiations work best when they are fact based, supplier development efforts are best focussed on those suppliers where improvements would result in considerable cost reductions or value generation, contracts are meaningless if not adhered to (and the resulting overspend completely unnecessary), labour violations in the supply chain can result in huge fines to your organization, and exceeding your carbon caps can be even more expensive (not to mention the fines if you don’t properly report). (And yes, this is a bit of foreshadowing.)

The core of the Ignite “Spend Management” solution is the analytics offering which, like most spend analysis solutions, has two core components:

1. Data Management

It’s very easy to get data into the Ignite Platform. In fact, it can be as easy as dragging-and-dropping a file onto the browser pane as Ignite allows you to define all of your taxonomies as well as your standard file format mappings to those taxonomies. It can then detect if the data is new, incremental, or updated and allow you to add, add only new records, update existing records, or even load the file into an entirely new cube.

When it comes to taxonomies, you can start with your own or built-in and then, during analysis, you can define and redefine taxonomies on the fly, with reclassification as simple as dragging-and-dropping. You can also define and update mapping rules quickly and easily as well, fixing errors or updating classifications as the need arises.

Data enrichment is easy-peasy compared to generic analytic platforms or suites as they support a number of financial metric, industry classification, currency exchanges, commodity intelligence, CO2 emission sources, and risk metric sources out of the box and provide a full integration platform with APIs, pre-built connectors, and timed data pulls (via SFTP, for example) for those who need custom integrations.

The platform also supports multiple tables and spend cubes and allows you to work on global tables and cubes or local tables and cubes for what-if analysis.

But most importantly, it’s one of the few best-of-breed platforms with a fully integrated visual data flow manager where you can define the entire loading, mapping, enrichment, classification, and automated analytics, reporting, and notification process, including automated supplier normalization.

2. Analytics

The Ignite Platform has just about everything you would expect from a modern analytics platform including arbitrary dimension selection, formula-based dimension derivation, easy (powerful metric based) filters, multiple chart and widget types, easy drill down, easy view/report modification, and ad-hoc analytics.

It also comes with a full suite of out-of-the-box analytics to help you identify potential savings opportunities through contracting (off-contract spend), renegotiation, supplier (re) negotiation, supplier benchmark improvements, spend consolidation, invoice management, payment term rationalization, price improvement, etc. Contract coverage, PO Coverage, key supplier coverage, and a suite of KPI reports are also available out-of-the-box (including a spend development dashboard that can go beyond just spend to impacting metrics such as OTD, quality incidents, etc. if you track the data in the supplier management module).

It’s ability to identify supplier-based (re)negotiation and development opportunities is extremely good and based on its proprietary Ignite Matrix that maps “share of wallet” vs EBIT Margin (which it calculates using mandatory government disclosures and integration with appropriate feeds, such as Enin in the Nordics, and appropriate adjustments) and scatter plots the results to help you quickly identify where your business is contributing to a supplier’s high profit margiin (and where the supplier has room to negotiate without jeopardizing its stability).

On top of this they have also built:

3. Supplier Management (Information / Performance / Risk / Compliance)

With its strong data management underpinnings, the Ignite Spend Management platform can store any all supplier related you wish to track and analyze, which not only allows deep spend-related insights by supplier, but performance and risk (metric) insight by supplier, with the ability to track and compare over time.

In addition to providing a full Supplier 360 view across all data captured in the platform, the Supplier Management capability includes standard campaign management where a buyer or supplier management can create questionnaires for supplier data augmentation and collection of relevant data and documents for supplier performance / risk / compliance management.

4. Contract Management (Governance)

Due to its strong data management underpinnings, the platform can also store all relevant contract meta-data in addition to the contract documents and allow users to manage, report on, and automatically annotate spend that is covered by a contract (as well as determine if it was billed, and paid, at the contracted rate using the appropriate payment terms). Also, as with most contract management plays, it can support tasks and alerts and the linking of contracts to tasks and alerts.

5. Scope 3 Management / Carbon Accounting

The best foundation for a carbon calculator / carbon reporting application is a true analytics platform that can support the definition of all of the appropriate Scope 1, 2, and 3 Categories of relevance to the organization and/or required by the appropriate authority to which reports must be made; the integration of data feeds to allow for the appropriate carbon emission calculations; the collection of actual data from suppliers that can supply it; the generation of the appropriate reports with the appropriate calculations for mandated reporting; and the tracking of changes over time. This is precisely what the Ignite Procurement platform supports.

The entire platform is easy to use and the UX is quite modern, but you don’t have to take our word for it — you can see a three minute demo on their webpage … just scroll down to the Meet Ignite Procurement section. So if you’re looking for an analytics platform that can provide you actionable spend insights on your contracts, suppliers, and ESG that you act on to reduce waste and increase value, you should make sure that Ignite Procurement is on your shortlist, especially if you are in its current target marketplace in the EU/UK.

* Not all on SI, many write-ups are on Spend Matters, behind the revised paywall.

SupplHi – A Best of Breed Supplier Management Platform for Industrial MRO

In a recent article, we noted that It Does Not Matter Where You Start, You End with BoB in SXM, and if you in the business of industrial MRO, it’s likely that your BoB will be SupplHi.

SupplHi is one of the broadest, and deepest, solutions we’ve seen for Industrial MRO (and Direct in general, but the fact that they have 90% of the supply base in certain MRO categories makes them extremely suited for that categories, as well as the fact that they have the deepest out-of-the-box categorization for MRO which includes 2,600 categories across 250 families in 45 groups of supply [request download] makes them extremely well suited to MRO), covering (at least) baseline functionality across (at least) 7 of the 10 core areas and information tracking in 2 more (Quality and Performance), a claim that only a select few vendors can make in Direct and, as far as we know, none can make in MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operation) [for both equipment and services).

SupplHi can be summed out as the Closed Loop Supplier Management Hub for your Industrial MRO Supply Base, which not only allows you to centralize all of the data (if not manage it natively) to support all of the supplier related activities, but also gain visibility through multiple levels of the supply chain while evaluating potential (Tier 1) suppliers for risk, compliance, and performance.

If you tried to read that, you’ll realize that’s a mouthful and tightly packed with impressive claims, so let’s talk about how SupplHi supports the Industrial MRO/Classic Direct lifecycle, and then quickly overview the main features.

  • Discovery: a network of over 100K suppliers that is growing daily focused on Industrial MRO
  • Onboarding: a plethora of features and apps to make it easy to onboard suppliers
  • Evaluation: in addition to collecting information on products AND capabilities, collect and store public/shared information on risk, sustainability, certifications, perform due diligence, etc.
  • Monitoring : track all relevant quality, compliance, sustainability, risk, and performance data
  • Management/Development : performance evaluation, sustainability monitoring (including Scope 3), non-conformity management, and development campaigns
  • OffBoarding : status marking, performance evaluations, (de)qualification, etc.

… and if a supplier corrects an issue (lack of certification), adds a capability (factory upgrade), address a major risk, etc., then the cycle can begin again with (re-)onboarding. It’s truly closed loop — and the (pre-defined) master data management capability is among the most extensive data models we’ve ever seen.

The SupplHi site markets a large number of capabilities (which it calls apps, of which there appear to be 25+, in addition to integration services, ad-hoc services, etc.), but six key capabilities that make SupplHi stand out are:

  • DEEP EXTENSIBLE PROFILE: it’s MDM capability allows it to track any and all data you need to track on the supplier, including products, capabilities, certifications, sustainability ratings, quality (metrics), performance metrics, sub-tier supplier linkages, etc.
  • DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT: all product specs, certifications, (insurance) certificates, contracts, assessments, etc.
  • CERTIFICATION AND BANK ACCOUNT VALIDATION: in the platform, no reliance on a buyer NOT fat-fingering a critical piece of info.
  • MULTI-TIER VISIBILITY: few platforms have this, but due to their deep knowledge of the Industrial MRO space and extensible Master Data Management approach that allows suppliers to identify their suppliers, they can map, and visualize, a typical supply chain to the source suppliers even during the Scouting/Discovery phase
  • SUPPLIER CAPABILITY TRACKING: it can track the types of engineer specialties, the machinery available, international codes/standards supported, sub-tier suppliers by category (down to level 3 in the category tree), policies, energy efficiency, and other data required for a proper assessment of an equipment and/or services Industrial MRO supplier
  • ACTION MANAGEMENT: simple information requests, quality issues, development projects (as part of a campaign), etc. all fall under actions that the platform can manage

In other words, as we said before, it’s broad, it’s deep, it has direct capabilities that only a few competitors posses, and it’s built-in category framework and extensive supplier network make it unparalleled in Industrial MRO.

You don’t have to just take our word for it. You can also see:

It Doesn’t Matter Where You Start, You End with BoB in SXM!

In a recent article, we asked in the battle of Suite vs. BoB (Best-of-Breed), which do you choose, and ended up with the answer of neither, but potentially both, because, as indicated in our article we asked in our post on Where’s the Procurement Management Platform, you need a true platform (that enables the creation of a true source-to-pay plus ecosystem for the various workflows and processes that need to be managed).

As a result, we indicated you could start where you wanted, provided:

  • you could conceivably manage it (if you don’t have any reasonably modern e-Procurement applications, expecting you can dive into more than a couple, learn them, and incorporate them in your daily processes in a short-time frame is completely unrealistic, so you shouldn’t buy from a suite vendor unless you can activate modules over time as you are ready for them)
  • the vendor offers, and publicly publishes, a complete Open API that, at a minimum, can be used to import and export all data the platform supports and should support the execution of core functions (so that you can script in a related module a date/time-based import/refresh process, re-execution of a core function/calculation, and retrieval of updated results)
  • the vendor offers the necessary quick-start services (you need to be able to get going quickly — if it requires a 3 to 6 month onboarding process, you’re dead in the water before you begin from both a first year ROI and adoption perspective)

But where do you end up? It depends. On what:

  • the module (Spend Analysis, Sourcing, Contract Management, Supplier Management, e-Procurement, e-Invoicing/AP, etc.)
  • the organization’s biggest need for workflow/process management
  • the organization’s biggest savings/cost avoidance/value creation opportunities

And for some modules, like e-Procurement, standard sourcing (no optimization/automation), AP (accounts payable), it’s quite hard to make the case for one over the other for an average organization (as it’s not how many features, functions, bells, and whistles, but which of those will actually add value to the organization acquiring the solution).

But for others, it’s crystal clear. And the clearest case is Supplier Management. Why? As per our recent article in our Source-to-Pay+ Series, Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP Mash, and there’s no way that a suite, which is typically only average across-the-board, is going to be deep enough for the key functionalities needed by an organization (and the majority only address SIM reasonably well, with limited SRM-related capabilities). In fact, you’re not even going to find a single BoB provider that provides leading functionality in more than a few areas of what supplier management can encompass (especially if an organization needs quality, enablement/innovation, orchestration, or other specific direct or service support requirements, etc.). (So do you think you’re finding a suite that does everything? Not a chance!)

So you can start with a suite (that serves as a foundation for comprehensive SIM), or even a module from a BoB provider (that likely provides baseline Supplier Information Management as a Sourcing/CLM/Analytics add-on), but if you are serious about improving supplier performance (quality, compliance, cost of service), you will eventually progress to one (or, for extensive, different, Supplier Management needs, multiple) BoB solutions.

Kodiak Hub: A Supplier Relationship Management for Sustainability

Kodiak Hub is a relatively new Swedish solution for Supplier Relationship Management. Founded in 2015, it primarily served the Nordics for its first few years but began its expansion into the DACH and UK Regions during COVID (and even serves the NA market, although they don’t plan to tackle the NA market until the coming year).

A visit to its site might lead you to believe it’s a category management platform, billing itself as the starting point in a journey towards smart strategic sourcing, but that’s not quite what it is, or at least not where it’s found its niche and its true capability shines.

It’s true capability shines in sustainability, responsibility, risk assessments, and performance evaluations of suppliers, and their products, where those suppliers are creating (custom) (build-to-order) (manufactured) products where regulations need to be adhered to, carbon/GHG needs to be reported, and the organization needs to ensure they are acquiring a sustainable product (or service) as well as a sustainable supplier.

It’s primary platform is organized into three sections: Insights, Impact, and Intelligence along with a home dashboard that visually shows you the regions of all of your global suppliers and allows you to hover over those regions to see the number of suppliers, the regional economic rating, and the Country safe(SOURCE)TM Rating.

The safe(SOURCE)TM Rating is one of the truly unique capabilities of Kodiak Hub and one of the capabilities that positions it as a strong Sustainable Supplier Relationship Management platform. Using indices and public data sources, it is able to create a regional risk assessment profile that allows an organization to quickly spot geopolitical, environmental, and sustainability risks even before sending out an assessment to a supplier, and to create a generic risk profile when specific information is (not) yet available. When this is combined with local economic indicators (to spot risks of [significant] currency fluctuations, increased bankruptcy, etc.) as well as the ability to pull in credit scores (from credit agencies) (with appropriate data feed subscriptions), it provides an organization relatively deep insight into what expectations it should have for a supplier even before analyzing its policies, practices, and external assessments.

The supplier profiles or scorecards that Kodiak Hub can maintain are quite extensive, allowing an organization to maintain all the compliance, performance, risk, and sustainability data it needs on suppliers, products, and services to power its supplier management, sourcing, and procurement. It supports all standard company profile data, including supplier type and spend totals, detailed (customizable) assessment data, detailed on-site audit data (which will override the existing data as necessary), (third-party) risk/ESG/CSR data/rankings/metrics, externally computed KPIs, and related company, product, and service linkages. It can also store any and all documents of relevance or interest (insurance, certification, specifications, contracts, etc.).

Insight is the entry point to the platform’s supplier, product, and services summary screens that capture, and allow a user to query, all of the data associated with a supplier, product, or service.

Impact allows you to create and dive into (data-driven) supplier assessments, (onsite) supplier audits, KPI-based evaluations, and identified actions (in progress).

Assessments are unlimited and can be on the supplier in general, specific products or services, and even restricted to specific category management or sourcing projects. They can cover quality, health and safety, compliance & governance, human rights, environmental, business, product, information security, and other areas of relevance to the organization and use pre-built (template) questionnaires, customized variants, or custom questionnaires.

Right now, even though they can be assigned a “type”, actions are essentially requests to the suppliers with an integrated messaging trail for asynchronous communication that allows suppliers to ask questions, buyers to provide answers, and action states to be recorded (pending approval, in progress, completed, etc.). Future versions of the platform will contain specific types to ensure necessary information is captured, processes and workflows are followed, interim checks and approvals are in place, and so on.

Intelligence is its integrated analytics platform that allows a procurement professional to analyze suppliers across campaigns, projects, KPIs, assessments, categories, products, capabilities, etc. Relationship managers and buyers can create custom dashboards and reports, and customize the pre-built dashboards as needed.

The UX is very clean, modern, broken into logical segments, and very easy to use. It’s intuitive where to go to get the information you need and how to update new information when it comes in. This reviewer finds it so intuitive that he believes you can jump in and be productive with it without any training whatsoever.

So if you’re looking for a great supplier relationship management platform to manage your sustainability efforts and assess your supplier risks, we recommend you include Kodiak Hub in your shortlist.

Sustainability Begins in SRM

We recently broke records in global temperature. RECORDS IN GLOBAL TEMPERATURE! If sustainability isn’t on your mind now, then obviously you don’t have a mind that is working because not only does it mean the planet is in very dire straits*, but

  • the acceleration of natural disasters is going to intensify beyond anything that was predicted (and a five-fold increase was recently predicted)
  • natural resources (and food) are going to get scarcer faster as fires destroy our usable lumber and crops
  • hurricanes are going to drench and destroy coastal cropland, possibly long-term
  • rapidly melting polar ice caps are going to raise sea level, drown our richest coastal farmlands, and damage our coastal (shipping) infrastructure
  • rapidly heating equatorial zones are going to dry out our freshwater lakes and canals (like the Panama canal we rely on for shipping)

… and that’s just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. (There’ll soon be no more “dildo” icebergs for Dildo, and that won’t be a good thing. Canadians rarely get angry, and when they do, that’s bad. the doctor, who is about as Canadian as it gets, has never seen a Newfoundlander angry, and when that day comes, he’d rather not be one province away … so please make sure that day never comes!)

Unless we lower

  • fossil fuel energy production and utilization
  • clean water utilization
  • waste byproducts
  • dependence on non-renewable resources that are getting more expensive, and environmentally damaging, to mine

environmental and societal damage is going to only intensify. We need to be sustainable. But sustainability has to start at the source — and the consumer is NOT the source (it’s the sink, and anyone who’s studied networks will tell you that by the time you reach the consumer, the product has been produced, the service has been rendered, and there’s nothing consumers can do to undo the damage that has been done … sure we can do our best to consume less and waste less, but the damage starts at the mine or the farm and propagates through the supply chain).

As a result, sustainability starts with the source supplier, and must be maintained throughout the entire supply chain.

And at the end of the day, for a Fortune 500 / Global 3000, it doesn’t matter if a CEO gives up the corporate jet — it matters only if they instruct their company to be sustainable in all aspects of operations and force their supply base to do the same.

Why? The aviation industry as a whole contributes 2.5% of worldwide CO2 pollution. 2.5% overall! So how much do you think one private jet contributes? Not enough to really matter. (On average, it’s like removing the emissions of 400 cars, and while that sounds significant, once you realize there’s over 300 million registered vehicles in North America that contribute to about 30% of GHG produced, it’s barely a drop in the CO2 bucket [giving it up for show while your factories pollute unhindered is not the solution]; and FYI, most of that vehicular CO2 production is NOT our private automobiles, its commercial transportation [as we have catalytic converters, there’s no laws that can be enforced mandating equivalent technology on ships in international waters].)

In comparison, a coal burning energy plant will generate about 2.26 pounds of CO2 per kWH, or about 7 Billion pounds of CO2 annually (which is over 3 Million Metric Tonnes) in an average 500 megawatt coal power plant. (In comparison, a private jet burning an average of 5,000 pounds of jet fuel per year at 7 pounds of carbon dioxide will produce only 35,000 pounds of CO2 a year. This is still a lot, but a supply chain that consumes the equivalent output in electricity in its manufacturing and shipping operations as that produced by a coal burning 500 megawatt power plant will produce 200,000 times the CO2. TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND TIMES. So don’t get distracted by the little things in your quest for improving your carbon footprint, which will soon be mandated in more and more countries globally. Your CEO should give up the jet, especially when he can still fly in those first class cabins no one else can afford, but that’s just the start of what your organization needs to do.)

And the only way to monitor and manage your supply base, require and track reporting from, and ensure improvements are made, is with SRM. It’s not just supplier development anymore, it’s supplier sustainability.

* and not the good kind of Dire Straits, the bad, bad, kind