Category Archives: Technology

Where’s My UI?

The title of a recent article on the “The Future of the Enterprise User Interface” by AMR’s Jim Murphy caught my attention. In it, he claims that the user interface (UI) will evolve into a pervasive layer for user interaction in the next five years, extending established enterprise systems to users in their work environments – wherever they happen to be and that it will be an intrinsic part of every company’s architecture while allowing end users a persistent, consistent, and personalized means of accessing, contributing, and delivering information across internal and external sources; structured and unstructured systems; and business, personal, and community services.

He then goes on to characterize the new UI, which will be:

  • Rich
    graphically intuitive
  • Pervasive
    consistent, reliable, secure access
  • Continuous
    users will be able to switch between access points and pick up where they left off
  • Contextual
    information and services will be presented based on context
  • Personalized
    users will have their own portals to publish and consume content and services
  • An Extension of Identity
    users will be able to establish a holistic sense of identity
  • Interface-Free
    interface tools will expand
  • Information Intelligent
    users will be able to use their native language to ask questions and get answers

Which is not only where interfaces are heading, but where they are today!

  • Microsoft is trying to do with Vista what Apple has been doing with the Mac OS X for years, and make interfaces usable
  • Most on-demand applications now provide a consistent, reliable, and secure service whose availability is only limited by availability of the underlying connection
  • Some leading on-demand applications and portals are including contextual sensitivity that remembers where the user was and returns the user to that point the next time she logs in
  • Some portals now push content based upon where the user is in the workflow
  • A host of free and low-cost platforms now exist on the web for users to publish and consume content and services
  • Leading web-sites now allow users to establish their own identify
  • Interface tools are expanding daily. Creating a web page is now child’s play. Back in the day, it was a monumental programming task.
  • Researchers are making tremendous progress in natural language interfaces.

In other words, although the title caught my eye, the article itself left something to be desired. In five years, the UI should progress well beyond where it is today. Now, I should point out that the article was focussed on the enterprise UI, and it is a fact that traditionally enterprise applications have significantly trailed consumer applications in user interface advancements, but with the recent surge in on-demand applications and the current push by many leading companies to move to web 2.0 “community” applications, I am of the belief that any software company that waits five years to upgrade its UI to these capabilities will not be around in five years. The new workforce is much more technically competent and used to a “networked” world. I don’t think they’ll wait five years for you to catch up. So, although I agree that the enterprise of the future will be rich, pervasive, continuous, contextual, personalized, an extension of identify, interface-free, and information intelligent, I believe that future will come much sooner than Mr. Murphy seems to imply.

McKinsey, Web 2.0, and India

Recently, the McKinsey Quarterly ran an interesting article on the results of their survey on “How Business are Using Web 2.0” technologies, which rely on user collaboration, including Web services, peer-to-peer networking, blogs, podcasts, and online social networks. They found that there was widespread careful interest in the trend, that most respondents expressed satisfaction with their investments to date and that they viewed Web 2.0 technologies as strategic, but that most companies were placing the greatest importance on the technologies that enable automation and networking.

When asked what their companies might have done differently during the past 5 years to make more effective investments in Web 2.0 technologies, in hindsight 42% of companies said they invested at the right time but should have invested more in internal capabilities, 24% said they should have invested sooner, and 18% would not have done anything differently. In other words, 84% have a strong belief in the value of Web 2.0 technologies.

The most popular bets that companies are using or planning to use are web services at 80%, collective intelligence at 48%, and peer-to-peer networking at 47%. Even though Web 2.0 is best known for blogs, podcasts, wikis, mash-ups, and RSS, most companies are more interested in the tools that connect all of the stakeholders together. This is backed up by the fact that the fourth most popular bet is social networking at 37%.

However, one of the most interesting points was that interest in Web 2.0 was highest in retail, and not high tech, and that investment interest in India significantly surpasses interest in China by 16%. Does this mean that forwarding thinking companies believe that Web 2.0 technology can be used to overcome many of the infrastructure short comings that plague India compared to China and put India on more even footing? I’m not sure, but it’s a very good question. Any thoughts?

You’re Losing Money on Your Invoices

Those who follow Aberdeen Research will realize that there are three levels of publication frenzy: ( a) end-of-the-month, ( b) end-of-the-quarter, and ( c) end-of-the-year. Well, end-of-the-quarter just passed, and a slew of new reports just hit the Aberdeen website. In addition to the “Supplier Performance and Risk Management Benchmark” that was the subject of yesterday’s post, the “E-Payables Benchmark Report” also hit the e-waves this week.

The report found that Best-in-Class enterprises that utilize automation to drive performance report the following advantages:

  • 91% lower invoice-processing costs
    ($1.50 to $2.00 compared to $10.54 for industry average and $58.09 for laggard)
  • 46% shorter process cycle time
  • 12% fewer late payments
  • 30% less time responding to inquiries

The report also gives some advice to organizations that want to become Best-in-Class. These recommendations include:

  • Moving toward a fully automated environment that integrates A/P with existing procurement and financial systems
  • Establish a linkage between your A/P goals and objectives and the broader goals of the finance and procurement groups
  • Develop disbursement strategies in concert with your treasury and finance teams that seek to optimize working capital
  • Leverage data visibility to drive performance improvement across the enterprise
  • Increase collaboration with IT to assist in the development of a portfolio strategy to best manage an array of electronic receipt and payment methods

These recommendations are important because over 60% of enterprise lack visibility into the primary A/P spend and invoice data and paper invoices cost 74% to 89% more to process than electronic invoices. This lack of visibility cascades into lost opportunities across the enterprise, including treasury, procurement, and supplier management. Treasury is unable to make optimal working capital decisions, procurement is unable to identify opportunities for leverage, and supplier management is unable to even answer the simple question “have you received my invoice?”.

The sad thing is that getting to best-in-class is not very hard, especially compared to risk management or strategic sourcing. The enabling technologies are straight-forward, have existed for a while now, and include:

  • E-Invoicing
  • Document Scanning, Workflow, and Management
  • Spend Analytics for Invoices and Compliance
  • Reporting Capabilities
  • Invoice Dashboards
  • Payment Networks

Moreover, Aberdeen lays out a straight-forward e-payable framework to follow. The framework is a four-part solution that progresses from receipt through approval and inquiry to validation and reconciliation, and finally to settlement. After all, in addition to significantly lower invoicing costs, A/P automation also allows for improved resource productivity, stronger controls, fewer errors, better payment performance, reduced cycle times, and improved visibility into spend. This is another report I’d make time for if you’re not best-in-class already.

Ahoya, Akoya

When I was being blown away in the windy city, I had a chance to sit down with Brett Holland, Co-Founder and SVP of Akoya (acquired by i-Cubed). It was an illuminating conversation, and one that highlighted why companies like Akoya and Apriori are taking spend management to a whole new level, especially in manufacturing (even though they are both attacking problems at different ends of the spectrum using two different approaches). Not wanting to spoil Brett’s upcoming posts over on Spend Matters, I decided to hold off on a post of my own.

In his “Getting Ahead of the Product Cost Management Curve”* post on Spend Matters [WayBackMachine], Brett points out that procurement and sourcing play a very critical role in understanding the product cost implications associated with the sourcing and purchasing of engineered components and that procurement and supply management can and should lead conversations regarding product costs since today’s spend management 2.0 solutions allow procurement and sourcing professionals to arm themselves with much more information about what drives costs and where there are opportunities to save money in direct materials and contract manufactured component categories. Furthermore, most of the current approaches in the market are highly complementary to each other and manufacturing companies should be working with all types of product cost management techniques to maximize their position in an increasingly competitive environment. And this last point is key. One solution is great – a small basket of complementary solutions that attack cost from all the angles is either better.

In his “Taking Control of Cost Management for Engineered Direct Materials”* post on Spend Matters, Brett points out that in the past, there have not been very good ways to systematically find cost inefficiencies and take action on them within engineered direct materials. Companies have developed cross functional teams, conducted six sigma projects, brought in consultants and domain experts, but none of them have had the direct access to the critical data and the analytical tools to dissect it so they could have a clear picture on the factors that drive cost inefficiencies in the direct materials across the organization.

However, today, analytical solutions are available for product cost management that can take the data that is within your control – financial, purchasing, supplier, and manufacturing – analyze it, and present you with a highly accurate list of parts that have potential cost savings. Additionally, these analytical solutions provide reasons why these savings opportunities exist and potential actions to take to capture them. The analytical solutions can then be complimented by activity-based cost models, risk management solutions, supplier relationship management solutions, and e-Procurement packages that help execute on the actions.

Furthermore, Today’s product cost management analytics work by drawing out the elemental factors within the part and its manufacturing requirements that drive the cost. They then analyze this data to determine commonality and comparability, and can predict target costs. They augment (and sometimes correct) this predicted cost with data that determines the factors that may contribute to cost inefficiencies (you can think of it as the evidence that makes the case). From this combination of approaches, these analytical solutions can accurately assess which parts are good renegotiation candidates, which parts are good resourcing candidates, which suppliers are best at each part, and other actionable findings.

This last point is key – and why you should use a basket of complementary solutions, starting with Akoya and Apriori. Akoya helps you figure out where you are likely overspending and why, and Apriori helps you figure out by how much and what you do about it, with its process-based mechanistic cost models. In other words, given the forest, Akoya helps you find the trees that need to be cut down and Apriori is the saw you use to tackle the trees.

For another perspective on Akoya, refer back to Jason’s “Spend Management Goes Upstream: Part 3 – The Akoya Philosophy” post.

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

Supplier Information Management with Aravo

Aravo is a provider of an on-demand Supplier Information Management solution based in San Francisco with the goal of enabling business to rapidly onramp all of their suppliers and corresponding information. During my last trip to San Francisco, I was fortunate enough to be able to sit down with them and talk about what makes their solution unique.

Aravo focuses on what they call the Supplier Information Lifecycle that starts with the initial engagement, proceeds through supplier selection, and continues through supplier relationship management. Aravo contends that most systems do a poor job of supplier information management and that good, centralized, supplier information management is essential
to process efficiency, error prevention, rapid supplier on-boarding, compliance, and good, actionable decision support. For the most part, I have to agree.

I’m a big believer in Supplier Relationship Management, since I believe this is the foundation for innovation, performance, and risk management. Furthermore, when you get right down to it, you can’t have good SRM if you don’t know your supplier – and that involves knowing who they are, where they are, what they do, who to contact when things go wrong, what their financials are, etc., etc., etc. To do this effectively requires good centralized data management. Furthermore, without good, centralized data management, each individual in your organization who requires such data will have to spend time searching for it when she needs it, and updating it in her own applications when she finds it is out of date, leading to a lot of lost productivity over the course of a year when you add up how much time people spend just searching for and updating supplier information.

This is where Aravo’s solution comes in. They have a suite of tools that supports a slew of data formats and a suite of tools that supports a slew of common ERP, eSourcing, and eProcurement applications. Furthermore, their J2EE-based web-services stack makes it easy for them to integrate many different systems that use many different data formats. This allows them to do true integration of all of your supplier data – and do it across your enterprise. They can suck it in from each and every system you use, and when it is updated, push it back. Furthermore, not only can everyone in your organization use the same supplier information system, but each individual can choose to retrieve just the data that they need when they need it.

Aravo also has a few other advantages compared to other supplier enablement solutions. Recognizing that every supplier has different levels of e-competency and that every buyer has differing levels of supplier information needs, Aravo has invested time in developing multiple supplier views, each with different levels of detail. Furthermore, recognizing that some buyers might prefer to have third parties manage their supplier on-boarding and data maintenance issues, the system also permits definition of third parties with different levels of data management permissions. Finally, they support role-based dashboards that allow each user to keep track of their enablement projects and determine how many suppliers are in the system, how many suppliers have their information up-to-date, and how many more suppliers need to be enabled.