In Part I, I discussed how I was quite impressed with Rosslyn Analytics‘ spend analysis platform and their overall approach to the problem as compared to many of the spend analysis providers in the space and how I saw vision, clarity, and execution in their offering. In this post, I am going to discuss their current platform capabilities and overview a few of the enhancements coming over the next few months.

Spend Basics: As I mentioned in my last post, they integrated with over 30 standard ERP/MRP systems out of the box, and can quickly add additional systems with about 1 day of effort as they have developed a rules-based integration platform that allows them to quickly bring additional systems on-line. Their rules-based system allows data to be cleansed, normalized, and enriched in one step during the extraction, which lets you get straight to the analytics. And they can automatically identify dimensions (categories). Like most platforms, their analytics are report (and dashboard) driven, but they have an ever growing library of reports, you can view data on (and drill down into) any dimension hierarchy you choose, and they are building in the ability to add user-defined parameters and indexes to certain classes of reports in the next release.

Accounts Payable Support: Not only do they suck in invoice data, but they have rule-sets that allow them to automatically detect overpayments and automatically generate reports that alert you to duplicate invoices, duplicate charges across invoices, duplicate payments, overpayments, payments to the wrong supplier, and other discrepancies. Some customers have recovered the cost of an annual license in a month with this feature alone. In addition, they also have similar tax reporting capabilities. Their tax reports will detect overpayments, underpayments, and, more importantly, missed payments that could cause import/export problems for you down the road.

Contracts Support: Integrated with their AP reporting / overpayment detection capabilities, their contracts module allows you to upload your contracts or integrate with an external contract repository. Either way, once you define the appropriate meta-data and triggers, the platform takes care of the rest.

Savings Analysis: Working with global partners, they have developed a savings module, complete with McKinsey-esque bubble charts, that identifies your top savings opportunities based upon your supply base, spend, and market indices. While the current version does not allow you to define your own customized savings plan, the next version will allow you to define your own indexes and support parameters that will allow you to tailor the opportunity reports to your company. And while this still won’t give you the control that user-defined measures will, for your average sourcing professional who’s still making seat-off-the-pants decisions based on total spend and instinct, it’s a great step in the right direction, as it’s the first step to truly bringing spend intelligence to the masses in your average organization.

Sustainability Support: While not yet available, Rosslyn is working hard to integrate a large number of external data feeds that go beyond standard price and risk indices and include carbon and sustainability data. Building on this data, and their ability to do trend analysis (which is currently built in for supplier and category data), they’re in the process of creating a sustainability tracking and reporting solution that will be on-line early next quarter.

All-in-all, it’s a great platform for any organization starting on their supply management journey or stuck in a rut because of the limited capabilities and reach of traditional on-premise platforms built with a single user in mind. And when you’re ready, you can use it to supercharge the performance of your power-analysts as they will have a normalized, cleansed, and enriched data source to start with in the application of their stand-alone analyst tools.

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I have to say that I am quite impressed with Rosslyn Analytics‘ spend analysis platform and their overall approach to the problem as compared to many of the spend analysis providers in the space, especially given the relative youth of the platform. And no, it has nothing to do with their UI, graphics, or other eye candy that, as you know, accounts for zero points of credit as far as I am concerned (despite the fact that some bloggers and analysts apparently go Gaga for fancy graphics). Heck, I’m not even going to give them points for ease of use, because that’s a basic requirement of any modern supply management application.

So why am I impressed with Rosslyn? Vision. Clarity. Execution.

Rosslyn understands that sustainable results only emerge en-masse when you enable the masses, your platform has to evolve as needs evolve, every organization is different, and even if it every organization wasn’t different, you still can’t do everything yourself, and it shows in their platform and their delivery there-of.

Rosslyn believes that you don’t have spend visibility unless that visibility is available to, and understood by, everyone in the organization. As a result, they not only sell their platform using an unlimited access model, but designed the basics of their platform to be self-explanatory to the point that anyone — be it a procurement, finance, accounts payable, accounts receivable, or sales user — can load it up and intuitively find a report on the aspects of spend or organization performance relevant to them. Their vision is to provide the foundations of a platform that everyone can use to make more informed decisions.

Rosslyn also believes that you can’t make good decisions unless you have a complete set of relevant data. As a result, they have not only streamlined extract and upload for over 30 of the most common ERP and MRP systems, but they have also built a rules-based platform that allows them to integrate with new systems in under a day, on average. They are able to automatically extend your data with D&B data, other third party index data, and even your own proprietary indexes if you have them. And cleansing is built in, as it should be, because the point, as I have stressed over and over again, is analysis. As a result, you not only see an integrated view of your data, but you have the ability to augment it with non-spend data and give it context, because A/P and invoice data is just the beginning.

Rosslyn is committed to insuring that each and every customer gets rapid results, and their execution speaks for itself. Not only are they able to get even the largest companies up, running, and fully operational — with an average refresh rate less than 24 hours (maxing out at 72 hours, which compares very well with the industry average of 4-5 weeks for most of the spend visibility platforms on the market) — in two to three weeks, but most of their customers see ROI in under 8 weeks. Furthermore, while most organizations will start with only 10 to 20 users, they find that the number of users increases 10-fold within 3 months. In addition, they are constantly upgrading their fully cloud-based multi-tenant SaaS solution with new features, with major upgrades every quarter and minor upgrades every few weeks. Sometimes they add new reports and reporting capabilities “seemingly overnight” to meet the evolving needs of their user base.

And while the platform may not do everything you might want (but then again, what platform will), you can take comfort in the facts that (1) it’s as good as the majority of the spend analysis platforms on the market and that (2) Rosslyn understands you can’t do everything. Thus, while some of the platforms are trying to broaden their footprint and do everything, Rosslyn is staying focussed on spend visibility and working with third-party e-Procurement platform providers to give you a complete solution. Furthermore, while some platforms will make it nearly impossible to get your data out in an effort to lock you into their solution exclusively, Rosslyn makes it just as easy to get your data out of their platform as they do to get your data in. Recognizing that some users will always be more comfortable with Excel, that power analysts will always be trying to come up with new ways to analyze data that current platforms don’t yet address, and that some corporations have invested Millions in proprietary data warehouses and business intelligence platforms, Rosslyn supports exports to a number of standard data formats (XLS, CSV, PDF, etc.) and supports full bi-directional integration with your data warehouses. (They can extract your data, cleanse, classify, and augment it with their rules-based classification engine, and push it back in automatically on a regular refresh cycle.)

In Part II, I will describe the built in capabilities of the platform as it exists now, and some of the exciting developments you’ll see next quarter.

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