Category Archives: Sustainability

The Sourcing Innovation Source-to-Pay+ Mega Map!

Now slightly less useless than every other logo map that clogs your feeds!

1. Every vendor verified to still be operating as of 4 days ago!
Compare that to the maps that often have vendors / solutions that haven’t been in business / operating as a standalone entity in months on the day of release! (Or “best-of” lists that sometimes have vendors that haven’t existed in 4 years! the doctor has seen both — this year!)

2. Every vendor logo is clickable!
the doctor doesn’t know about you, but he finds it incredibly useless when all you get is a strange symbol with no explanation or a font so small that you would need an electron microscope to read it. So, to fix that, every logo is clickable so you can go to the site and at least figure out who the vendor is.

3. Every vendor is mapped to the closest standard category/categories!
Furthermore, every category has the standard definitions used by Sourcing Innovation and Spend Matters!
the doctor can’t make sense of random categories like “specialists” or “collaborative” or “innovative“, despises when maps follow this new age analyst/consultancy award trend and give you labels you just can’t use, and gets red in the face when two very distinct categories (like e-Sourcing and Marketplaces or Expenses and AP are merged into one). Now, the doctor will also readily admit that this means that not all vendors in a category are necessarily comparable on an apples-to-apples basis, but that was never the case anyway as most solutions in a category break down into subcategories and, for example, in Supplier Management (SXM) alone, you have a CORNED QUIP mash of solutions that could be focused on just a small subset of the (at least) ten different (primary) capabilities. (See the link on the sidebar that takes you to a post that indexes 90+ Supplier Management vendors across 10 key capabilities.)

Secure Download the PDF!  (or, use HTTP) [HTML]
(5.3M; Note that the Free Adobe Reader might choke on it; Preview on Mac or a Pro PDF application on Windows will work just fine)

Keep Your Procurement On PACA with FSMA with Procurant!

We don’t cover specialist Procurement providers much here on SI because many don’t have much in the way of domain specific product functionality (and differ primarily on domain knowledge, terminology customization, and service offerings), but some, like Procurant, go beyond the basics and offer domain specific functionality of relevance that the market needs to take note of. Especially when such functionality can help an organization be compliant with current and, most importantly, incoming regulations they are not ready for.

Procurant, marketing itself as a strategic platform for perishables that does Procurement AND Food Safety, offers the following core functionality:

  • P2P (Procure to Pay) for Perishables
  • Inspections (recording and auditing)
  • Traceabillity that is mobile-enabled and FSMA 204 compliant
  • Market Intelligence
  • Food Safety (workflow and remote sensor integration) (not covered in this article)

It’s the one-stop solution for retail grocers, especially those with US operations, that need to manage their perishable supply chain in a manner that is both PACA and FSMA compliant. (And if you’re a grocery retailer that does NOT know what those acronyms stand for … Uh-Oh! Better find out and give Procurant a call ASAP — because failure to comply can not only result in fines but [supply chain] shutdowns.)

Procurement/Procure-to-Pay wise there isn’t much that’s unique in core functionality (as the uniqueness is with the integrated support for the perishable space), but it’s all there, and we’ll start with the core so you can be confident the core is on par with other best-of-breed Procurement solutions.

With respect to quote management, the platform contains integrated RFQ / price request that makes it really easy to not only request (updated) quotes from suppliers, but get a commitment on that price (for a certain time or volume; i.e. one week or 100 pallets). When you get a commitment, the system tracks orders against that commitment, and then lets you know when the quote has expired because the commitment has been used up (and if you still need more product, you need a new quote with a new commitment).

With respect to order management, the solution makes it easy to select products for orders from the built-in catalog, from order templates (guides), or from demand forecasts (which can pulled in from the forecasting/demand management system OR created natively in Procurant using weighted average outbound for the last 12 weeks, with more forecasting algorithms coming in a future release). The platform even supports the definition of automatic (replenishment) orders, should the organization choose that functionality. Once the order is assembled, it’s very easy to send it to the supplier for fulfillment.

Moreover, as Procurant ‘s P2P also contains integrated support for carriers and logistics (due to the need to monitor the entire produce supply chain and ensure food safety every step of the way), in Procurant, you can also assemble orders by truckload, as you don’t want to be under-shipping if not absolutely necessary (as it takes the same amount of energy to maintain the temperature when refrigeration is necessary whether the truck is almost full or almost empty) and it’s easier to trace when you decide who is shipping what, when, and on which truck. One great feature of the platform is that it’s super easy to assemble an order for a carrier. It’s just a matter of dragging and dropping order line items until the platform notifies you that the last line won’t fit in the truck (as you can encode a max # pallets, weight, and volume by truck and as soon as one limit is reached, the platform lets you know). No complex training on a sophisticated TMS required.

As a result of this deep support for logistics and carriers, purchase orders can be incredibly detailed and include shipping dates, carrier, load reference number(s), and even cross docks.

Also, order management is multi-state and the system will track and notify if there is an:

  • order modification by the buyer
  • order modification by the supplier
  • order cancellation by the supplier
  • order reconciliation by the supplier (on being notified the goods received didn’t match the PO)

and all changes by any party are maintained in a secure, unalterable, audit log.

With regards to order management, the buyers can choose whether or not the supplier can split orders, remove items, or add substitute orders. Whether or not they can change prices (or just quantities to match availability), and even when modifications will be accepted. Similarly, the administrator can determine the order creation capability the buyers have access to … whether or not they have (to use) guides, whether they can create cross-dock orders, etc.

With respect to invoice management, it’s super easy for a supplier to flip a PO to an invoice. All they have to do is enter the actual quantity shipped by line item and submit. The invoice then goes into a wait state until a receipt is entered, at which point if there is a discrepancy, the invoice is sent back to the supplier for correction before it goes into the normal processing queue, where it would be held up until the discrepancy was resolved, which could delay payment considerably if the organization has long approval chains for corrections and exception processing.

The platform also tracks supplier fill rates, so you can quickly see which suppliers are fulfilling the POs they accept and living up to your expectations and which suppliers are not. It also has price watch capability, and can alert you whenever PO or quote prices exceed current (or historical) prices by a certain percentage.

And, of course, there’s a dashboard which summarizes current tasks and open orders and great search and filter functionality to find just the orders, invoices, or quotes you are looking for.

The platform also integrates the inspection reports from their inspection app and, for any fulfilled order, you can quickly bring up the full report that summarizes the inspection (packaging, appearance, condition, flavor, and quality) on each item delivered as well as the number of items rejected. Also integrated with the Procurement platform is the Inspection Module that contains the overall inspection summary dashboard, dill downs by supplier, scorecards by supplier, and other key reports and data points on inspections. The inspect application is a mobile app that workers can use at the warehouse on or the dock to inspect the quality of goods as they come in and, if necessary, reject them on the spot.

What’s really cool is the Track and Trace capability where, for any item, you can see the entire journey from the source lot to the warehouse or the store shelf, as appropriate. You just need a GTIN, lot number, order number, SKU, or product description and, optionally, a date range and you see the store shipments, receivings at your warehouses, vendor shipments, and base lots. And you can click into each store shipment, receiving, vendor shipment, or lot and see complete details (such as the ship to, date, and receiver for a store shipment; order #, sales order, Lot, shipper, shipment date, and cases for a vendor shipment; etc.). And with their next release, the (default) output report formats will be usable for FSMA compliance. (Again, if you do grocery retail and you don’t know why this is critical, you better find out soon!)

Finally, their Market Intelligence Capability in Procurant Connect provides Commodity Pricing, Weather, and Transportation analytics and tracking. The commodity pricing tracks price movements across all commodities by region; the weather pane integrates forecasts down to the county level; and the transportation analytics tracks average load fees by lane (defined by city pairings), as well as price changes and shipper / transportation availability (surplus, slight surplus, adequate, slight shortage, or shortage).

Procurant can integrate with your ERP and AP (payment) system, your TMS (or onboard carriers natively, which is something not many P2P systems can do as carrier management is critical in perishable supply chain management), and your supplier master (for supplier onboarding) if it’s not your ERP.

All-in all, Procurant is a fantastic solution for the perishable supply chain procurement and one that absolutely has to be on the short list of any grocery retailer that needs to get a handle on their perishable supply chain in a manner that will allow them to be fully PACA and FSMA compliant.

Sustainability ONLY Exists In the Supply Chain

Furthermore, simply switching suppliers does not make you more sustainable no matter what you may think or what those overpriced third party ESG / Scope 3 reports may (or may not) say. Switching suppliers to a supplier approximated to be more sustainable is not increasing sustainability, because if you take someone else’s supplier, then they are just going to end up with yours. It may be a temporary net win for your company, but it’s a net loss for another company, and that doesn’t really help anyone as sustainability was not actually increased overall.

Sustainability only comes from net improvement. The reason it only comes from the supply chain is because the products you buy come from the supply chain. The energy you use comes from the supply chain. The water you use (and drink) comes from the supply chain. The services come from your partners (in the supply chain). The transport to you (and/or to your customers) is the supply chain. Everything comes from the supply chain. The only way you can increase your sustainability is to reduce the energy, water, and products you use and the travel you undertake. For most companies, this is a negligible part of the supply chain … sometimes so negligible it rounds to zero.

So how do you increase sustainability in your supply chain? You start by helping your suppliers be more sustainable, which, believe it or not, starts with you being a better buyer and a better partner. Sustainability requires investment, and when they are operating at slimmer margins than you, significantly smaller bank accounts than you, and a lot more uncertainty than you, it can be hard for them to invest in new technology or processes when they don’t even know if they can invest in next week’s payroll.

And it requires more than a piece of paper from you saying you’re going to award them two years of business after a multi-round RFP when you’re a first time buyer. Because they know that while you may have the wherewithal to enforce a contract in another country half a world away, they often don’t. And they know how many times they’ve been screwed in the past when they were told they’d get 100,000 units, but COVID hit, the market crashed, or the transport lanes (ports, borders, etc.) closed down and the orders never came.

You need to develop a true partnership, work with them, build up shared trust and commitment, stick to your promises, help them with their processes so they become more efficient, identify efforts they can make to significantly increase sustainability, and then make the long term commitment they need from you (and other major customers) to invest in better technology, build their own renewable energy grids, etc.

Why are we bringing this up? Because a recent article in VOGUE Business that asked if fashion’s buying practices are really improving had a very good point. While fashion brands make strong claims they are investing in longer-term strategic partnerships, and big consultancies like McKinsey quote impressive statistics (such as an increase from 26% to 43% over the last 4 years) on how the percentage of CPOs reporting longer-term strategic partnerships (which just translates into longer term contracts, but not necessarily guaranteed awards over the long term, as there are usually so many out clauses the contracts mean nothing), the reality is that when you ask the suppliers how things are going, it’s a completely different story. As the Vogue Business article point out, this year’s Better Buying Partnership Index saw just a one point increase in the garment industry’s buyer-supplier partnerships score. Just one point! That could be a rounding error.

Despite all the lip service, there has been no improvement in the fashion supply chain because, at the end of the day, as Lindsay Wright was quoted, simply claiming you have good partnerships with your suppliers isn’t going to cut it. If you want an honest picture of what’s really happening on the ground, you need to be asking suppliers, because they’re the only real arbiters of whether purchasing practices are improving.

And this holds true across supply chains. Partner with your suppliers on long term contracts and work on development initiatives with them if you want to increase sustainability. Otherwise, the best thing you can do is to just shut the f*ck up because you’re only contributing to the hot air.

Open Gen-AI Isn’t Just Dumbing Your Business, It’s Killing the Planet!

Open Gen-AI is not just one of the most dangerous technologies we’ve ever invented* (as it lulls the uninformed into a false sense of security who will depend on it to make increasingly more critical decisions that could have increasingly more disastrous consequences), it’s also about to pose the biggest threat to planetary survival!

As it is, an average Data Center requires at least 10X the energy consumption of an average American home per square meter, with Open Gen AI data centers (which require ultra dense servers with cores running flat out all the time) requiring even more energy than that. However, whereas traditional AI models, including traditional Deep Learning Neural Nets which can be optimized post-training to often 10% of their original size using techniques developed by MIT researchers (including those described in this article) are now smaller and more stable than they used to be, these models just keep expanding exponentially in a futile quest to have them do more and now require models thousands of times bigger (and more energy intensive) than traditional models, often to generate output that wouldn’t even net a C grade in a high school class!

Think about that and read this article by Kate Crawford on Nature on how AI’s environmental costs are soaring (which notes that even OpenAI’s CEO has finally admitted that the AI industry is heading towards an energy crisis as there just isn’t enough power to keep up with the exponential energy demands [with ChatGPT already requiring more power than 33,000 average American homes … think about that, if you shut down just TWO Open Gen-AI models, you could power an entire small city]) before needlessly throwing a solution you don’t understand at a problem you don’t even have (when a better process would eliminate that problem and replace it with a smaller, different, problem that traditional technology and a human with just a bit of training could completely solve).

Because Open Gen-AI is just NOT ready for prime time, and just because these companies raised Billions of dollars on false promises that it would be ready years or decades sooner than AI development has traditionally taken, that doesn’t make it our responsibility to adopt the technology before it’s ready.

* And if a man afraid of nothing acknowledges this, we really should listen! (See this article.)

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.