Category Archives: Technology

The Arrival of Aravo?

I was going to wait until Jason posted the follow-up to “Aravo Tackles the Supplier Information Management Challenge Part 1″* on Spend Matters before doing my post (as I did meet with them last month), but Tim’s post on “Do You Know Who Your Suppliers Are?” on Supply Excellence [WayBackMachine] has provided me with perfect timing.

In his post? Tim asks:

  • How clean or accurate is your company’s vendor master?
  • When was the last time it was updated?
  • Does it provide complete and detailed insight into supplier capabilities, health, and performance?
  • And how many vendor masters does your company use?

Tim then stated that if you wavered on any of these questions, you are not alone and that if you didn’t, you’re probably lying to yourself. He ended his post by stating that effectively selecting and managing suppliers in today’s fast-paced and global supply chain, requires a more accurate, current, and holistic view of suppliers – from basic contract information to capabilities and attributes to active contracts and performance data. It also requires a new approach to gathering and maintaining the supplier record … and this new approach can best be described as Supplier Information Management.

Procuri’s [acquired by Ariba, acquired by SAP] Supplier Management solution, and it’s a good start (and you could include Emptoris’ (acquired by IBM, sunset in 2017) Supplier Performance Management in this category, for example), but if you really want a supplier information management solution that will allow you to shout an emphatic yes to the above questions and

  • Let you query how many suppliers you are actively sourcing from at any time.
  • Let you query what parts you’re sourcing from any supplier at any time.
  • Let you query whether or not you have current copies of compliance and insurance certificates for any supplier that requires them at any time.
  • Let you query which suppliers are carbon neutral at any time.

then you want the solution the big guys use, which include Oracle and Google, and that’s Aravo. One of the pioneers of Supplier Information Management (having just released their 4.0 version this year, as noted in my March post), Aravo has been building, extending, and revamping their solution from a simple central supplier information repository that tracks everything you ever needed – and wanted – to know about your supplier to a solution that lets you not only proactively manage your suppliers but proactively manage your supplier initiatives – including your Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives.

Despite having an industry leading solution, Aravo has not really received their fair share of press. This is probably due to the fact that information management is not sexy. E-procurement is sexy – the ability to automatically receive invoices, match to purchase orders and receipts, and automatically make payments when everything in line is sexy – it’s fast, efficient, and saves you money. E-sourcing is sexy – the ability to streamline everything from the initial RFI through the final award in an open format over the web with your suppliers half-way around the world and get it done faster, quicker, better, cheaper is sexy. Managing your virtual file cabinets – that’s not sexy.

However, what the media has overlooked is that in today’s corporate environment, the trend is moving to sustainability and social responsibility – and this is just not something you can keep on top of if your virtual filing cabinets are in general disarray. So even though Aravo’s solution may not sound sexy, what you need to realize is that what Aravo’s solution enables is sexy.

With their new focus on Simplifying Sustainable Supply Chains, Aravo’s goal is to give you an information management platform that you can use to manage your global supply chain for your sustainability initiatives while managing the dizzying array of new industry regulations popping up around the globe. Their solutions is configurable, scalable, and comes with a full set of dashboards that provide visibility at multiple levels of detail. The solution enables on-time completion of initiative programs since visibility is available to executives on a daily basis. It is worth checking out.

* All posts prior to 2012 were removed in the Spend Matters site refresh in June, 2023.

Eye-For-Procurement Technology For Procurement Highlights I: Presentations

June’s Technology for Procurement Forum in San Francisco, put on by EyeForProcurement, had some really good presentations. In this post, I’m going to convey some of the highlights, and associated insights, in order to encourage you to consider attending this conference next year. (It also had some weak presentation, but it was the first year of this particular conference, and I’ve never been to a conference that didn’t. However, since conferences that adequately focus on technology, which is a vital tool for today’s sourcing professionals, are few and far between, it’s important to recognize when someone tries to pick up the slack.)

In John Ferguson’s (Vice President and CIO of Optical Cable Corporation) keynote on Technology and Procurement, The most profitable way to leverage your technology – and rise above the competition, he reminded us that technology is, at most, a tool, that one size does not fit all, and that tools that support different strategies are required for best results. After all, no matter how hard you try, software can’t fix a broken process and the only thing worse than a broken process is an automated broken process.

Furthermore, it’s also critical to understand that a technology focussed project will often take a lot longer than you expect to both complete and to see a return on, especially if it involves business process improvement. Process improvement requires time, effort, and considerable change management that should never be underestimated due to the human factor. That’s also why you should not automate for the sake of automating – make sure there is a significant return waiting to be realized.

With respect to sourcing, according to John, you should buy high volume components as commodities from the same sources as your competitors whenever possible, buy components with volatile demand cycles as needed, and make an effort to be the easiest business partner to deal with. Furthermore, your strategy should focus on penetrating less-commoditized markets through differentiated product and service offerings.

In John Cleminshaw’s (Director of Global Quality Systems Procurement at Whirlpool) keynote on the strengthening of your procurement core, Technology that improves your financial and customer focus, he focussed on the importance of process-based management and that your procurement cycle must include participation in the design, manufacturing, and logistics process flow, as these can be sources of considerable cost that will be “locked-in” if not done right.

John also offered some suggestions on how to develop a process-based system.

  • Document the Present Systemhow does it work? what’s missing? what are the gaps costing us?
  • Revise the Processcomplete it, add efficiency, and make changes if necessary
  • Turn the Process into a Systempreferably, find an existing best-of-breed COTS

    (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) system as it is time consuming and

    expensive to develop a custom system

  • Make the System Visibleand take steps to integrate into project and product management
  • Communicate Objectivesand accountability!
  • Align Expectationsmake sure everyone is on the same page!

In Betsy Miller’s (Corporate Director, Sourcing and Procurement Corporate Contracts of Northrop Grumman Corporation) keynote on global technology management, How to organize and manage the technology aspect of numerous buying platforms across a variety of geographical locations, we found out that an aggressive focus on supplier master data cleansing, commodity spend aggregation, and e-Sourcing can generate a 6% to 12% savings opportunity and that if you are a multi-billion dollar corporation (30 B ) and can apply this rigour to 40% of your spend, then you can, rather easily, save nine digits. (Or, more precisely, a number so large you might not be allowed to tell the public just how much you saved!)

According to Betsy, the drivers that you need to focus on are:

  • Value Optimizationa focus on better contracts
  • Sourcing Optimizationa focus on strategic partnerships and risk management
  • Process Efficiencyfocus on common processes
  • Complexity Reductionfocus on process streamlining and the elimination of unnecessary steps
  • Supplier Collaborationand capability development
  • Organizational Empowermentfocus on visibility

Nothing you haven’t heard before over the past year both here and on Spend Matters, but us bloggers always appreciate not being the only ones trying to drive home certain points!

the doctor’s Been Busy!

I spent all of last week in the San Francisco Bay Area (and a little beyond), and besides attending the EyeForProcurement Technology for Procurement Forum, which had some really good presentations that I’ll start blogging about in about a week (playing catch up at the moment), I also met with ten different companies (with follow-up calls to be scheduled with at least half of them). Over the next month, expect some elucidating posts on not only some of the hottest technology companies in the sourcing and procurement space, but some disruptive offerings about to come out of these shops as well. It may take me half the summer to get through them all, but you can be sure it will be worth the wait. From A to Z, in the last week I’ve had detailed conversations with:

Aravo ,
Arena ,
CombineNet (acquired by Jaggaer),
Denali (acquired by WNS Procurement),
Enporion (acquired by GEP),
Ketera (acquired by Deem),
MFG ,
Nextance (acquired by Versata Enterprises),
Provade (acquired by Smart ERP Solutions), and
TrueDemand.

Stay tuned!

Manufacturing Process Optimization

New methodologies and standards can make the difference between a relatively smooth-running, flexible infrastructure or a maelstrom of competitive and proprietary systems that can only be modified by vendors at an annual cost running in the millions.

Lance Murphy, “Process Optimization : Fine-Tuning the Manufacturing Enterprise,”  Supply & Demand Chain Executive

This is important because many management teams don’t understand that their current operational infrastructures may have reached critical mass because most of their so-called heterogeneous environments consist of patchwork layers of new and legacy applications and systems, often hard-wired, point-to-point integrations designed to perform yesterday’s tasks with an every-changing array of co-conspirators. Even though, in manufacturing, there has been an almost exclusive focus on powerful design and collaboration tools to stay ahead of escalating product complexity and global complication this has just further complicated the interopability challenge.

So, what can be done to improve the situation? Process improvement based on “business flow” and not just function. Apply Product Lifecycle Manufacturing (PLM) methodologies to manage not just the product development, but the process behind it. Identify and evaluate critical path processes and focus on streamlining and managing those while eliminating any process not on the critical path that does not provide any added value.

Furthermore, you can take advantage of advances in XML standards, application programming interface (API) design, web services, business process management (BPM), and service oriented architecture (SOA) frameworks to develop and integrate the PLM processes you need to streamline and manage your critical process flows.

And it works. According to Lance’s article, a Canadian company that has led the market in the design and manufacturing of state-of-the-art aircraft engines that employed PLM-based process optimization substantially improved their process for managing corrective action requests. Seventy-five percent of these requests, which have averaged around 5,000 at any one time since program inception, are now processed in minutes rather than days – a savings of hundreds of man-years annually! In addition, the resources required to manage these requests has continued to plummet and standardization has reduced risk and streamlined processes, making most operations easier to modify and adapt to changing conditions.

(e-Sourcing Helps You) Save Billions the Easy Way

Not that long ago, Oregon State University released a press release stating that its computer scientists have created a new, much simpler approach to fixing errors in spreadsheets, a system that is easy to use and might help businesses around the world reduce mistakes and save billions of dollars.

According to the article in the United States it has been estimated that 11 million people create about 100 million spreadsheets a year, which in turn might be managed by up to 60 million users … but they are notoriously prone to errors. And that most users of spreadsheets are overconfident, they believe that the data is correct but that it has been observed that up to 90 percent of the spreadsheets being used have non-trivial errors in them. In fact, one auditor has said he never inspected a single spreadsheet during his entire career that was completely accurate.

Thus, the new approach to fixing errors, which allows a non-specialist to identify and fix a problem by selecting a fix from a short list of change suggestions, is expected to be quite beneficial. The system, which attempts to try and identify the ways that humans commonly make mistakes and then suggest what the correct approach might have been, can suggest several programming mistakes that might have created the error when an error is found and allow the user to sort through them and identify the root cause. The system is currently performing rather well. In 80% of the cases, the fix is in the top five suggestions and in 72% of the cases, the fix is among the first two suggestions. The GoalDebug System (short for “Goal Directed Debugging of Spreadsheets”) gives end users the chance to explore, apply refine, and reject suggested changes, a systematic approach that allows people with comparatively little training in programming and spreadsheet development to identify and repair errors.

However, as far as I’m concerned, this is not good news. All I see is tens of thousands of man hours and millions of dollars of research funding wasted on a patch solution that doesn’t address the real, underlying problem – spreadsheets are bad!

As far as I’m concerned, the answer is the development of appropriate financial applications that contain the calculations and report creation abilities end users need and negate the need for them to develop these huge complicated spreadsheets. Then there wouldn’t be errors to track down in the first place.

Fortunately, for your procurement department, there is an answer – and the answer is e-Sourcing complete with spend analysis and decision optimization. That’s the easy way to save billions.