Category Archives: Technology

Significant Sourcing Supplier Management Synchronization

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been laying the foundations for the significant changes coming in the upcoming Q2 release of Spend Matters Solution Map, with the new common-foundations and the Sourcing, Supplier Management, and Analytics Maps designed by yours truly, the doctor of Sourcing Innovation.

While the biggest change was the introduction of a new common platform section, which evaluates solutions based on the underlying platform (which is becoming more and more important now that more players are offering “suites” and the longevity of a platform without a good platform is limited), the next biggest change is the introduction of a new common section that overlaps sourcing and supplier management because you can’t do sourcing without suppliers and you don’t manage suppliers without the ultimate goal of doing business with them. (And while this is not yet common to e-Procurement, it may soon be a common requirement for any catalog providers as more and more such providers offer enhanced supplier management and interaction.)

So what are the common elements that one needs to consider?

  • Enhanced Information Management for discovery and onboarding
  • Performance Management for tracking performance
  • Relationship Management for managing the relationship
  • Risk Management for keeping tabs on, and managing, the risk
  • Enhanced Portal for information management and collaboration

And why are these important cross application elements?

  • Suppliers are the life-blood of your organization, but they don’t consistently perform over time and new suppliers are sometimes vital. That’s why discovery and on-boarding are so vital.
  • The key to good performance from your suppliers is monitoring and managing that performance.
  • The key to correcting performance and preventing problems in the first place is often the result of good relationship management.
  • The key to preventing unexpected supplier-based disruptions (which affect a significant number of supplier chains every year) is to keep a tab on risks and prepare for the significant ones with mitigation plans ready to go.
  • They key to keeping information up to date is to let the supplier help you with a portal that is built to do so (and that they want to use).

So what should you look for? While we won’t dive into every detail (but you will be able to with a custom Solution Map if you want to (just contact Spend Matters to find out more), we will highlight some of the more important details ( so you can know that when we evaluate a vendor’s technology, we truly evaluate the technology from the point of view of a technology analyst, not an industry analyst (see our recent post on Industry Analysts vs Technology Analysts) and this is absolutely critical if you want to select the right technology.

Digging into the S2P Tech Foundations

In our post yesterday in what makes a good foundation for S2P Tech, we noted that if you wanted to have any hope of “future-proofing” your platform, then it was critical that you acquired a platform with the following four capabilities.

  • Configurable Workflow preferably with RPA support
  • Open / Extensible API that supports integration into and out of your platform
  • Dynamically Extensible Data Model that can be extended by the customer
  • Globalization Support for language, currency, data location, and more!

And we gave some preliminary reasons, but today we’re going to dig into some of the issues that really concern us.

  • Changing Governmental Regulations as governments introduce e-commerce, they are introducing e-invoicing requirements that can change your P2P flow (like requiring invoices to be sent through government servers or payments sent through government servers) and as governments introduce more regulatory compliance, the ability to report the complete origin story of a product, to the source of each raw material, is going to require more cross-platform and cross-enterprise data collection
  • Data Bifurcation as more and more platforms proliferate across the supply chain, the data will continue to proliferate as well … and without the ability to connect all the platforms, the data will exist in separate islands
  • Increasing Supply Chain Segmentation across more and more companies across more and more companies across more and more global users
  • Platform Obfuscation because the platform can’t keep up

These issues are the main drivers for the foundational platform requirements we outlined yesterday. Without

  • Configurable Workflow
    the platform won’t keep up with changing government regulations as it won’t be able to adapt the process
  • Open/Extensible API
    the platform won’t be able to manage the data bifurcation or prevent platform obfuscation as it won’t be able to adapt as required to manage the data tracking or integrate with new modules as they come online
  • Dynamically Extensible Data Model
    as future data requirements dictated by future regulations and future applications can’t be predicted in advance
  • Globalization Support
    as your next supplier could be in a different country, on a different continent, with a workforce whose primary language is one you haven’t dealt with yet … and that could be tomorrow!

Now, these aren’t the only issues we’re worried about, but they are big ones and they are guaranteed to materialize — soon (and before your contract comes up for renewal) — which is why we’re really concerned about them, and about insuring you get the right platform for the long term.

What is a Good Foundation for S2P Tech?

A couple of weeks ago in our posts on What Elements Should You Be Looking For In A Platform (Part I and Part II) we outlined some of the key platform requirements we are looking for in the new Spend Matters SolutionMap (where Sourcing, SXM, Analytics, and the vast majority of Common Platform requirements were defined by the doctor) to give you a hint, but it’s a lot to take in.

And might be more than you need today when you just need to solve a few major pain points and advance on your S2P journey, especially if you still don’t have any dedicated modern technology or are still on Procurement 1.0 when most of your peers are on Procurement 2.0 and the leaders are starting on the Procurement 3.0 journey. (As per another recent post, while there’s a lot of talk about Procurement 4.0, we won’t see it for another 8 years based on history. 1.0 started around 97 with FreeMarkets and the emergence of stand-alone players. 2.0 started around 2007 with the first mini-suites [S2C or P2P]. 3.0 began around 2017 with the rise of the true [mega] S2P suites and integration that allowed for the pursuit of value where the whole is greater than the parts. 4.0 will began around 2027 based on the rate of historical development.)

But it’s not necessarily more than you will need in time. Especially if you want to reach the height of Procurement 3.0 with your peers when it materializes later next decade.

But we do recognize that you won’t need it all today. So what do you really need to look for in the first go-round? Especially if you can’t have it all or can’t become enough of an expert to evaluate it all?

While the most important capabilities do depend on the specifics of the technology you’re buying and the problem you need to solve, there are a few general capabilities that need to be there regardless, and these * capabilities in particular must be there in every solution you buy if you want to have any hope of “future-proofing” your platform.

  • Configurable Workflow
    Preferably with RPA support. Let’s face it, whatever process you use today won’t be the process you use tomorrow, especially as you mature in your processes and best practices, the partners you work with change, and governmental regulations continue to change the way you have to report.
  • Open / Extensible API
    that supports both 3rd parties integrating with your platform and the development of interfaces to integrate with third party platforms through their open API. Your platform will never do everything, no matter how much you want it to. It’s software, not sorcery. So the ability to extend it with ease is critical.
  • Dynamically Extensible Data Model
    that you can do, not a third party or the provider. Because you never know every piece of data you’re going to need until you need it.
  • Globalization Support
    including the ability for a user to select their language and overrides, the organizing to define new currency exchanges and projections, and IT to define where the application instances are hosted and where the data is stored (which may need to be segmented for a global organization)

This is not to say that other technical requirements are not important, but that without these, the life expectancy of your platform is limited, to say the least.

What Elements Should You be Looking for In a Platform? Part II

That’s a very hard question and, to some extent the key elements will, at least in many views, revolve around what you are looking for the platform to support, but there are some elements that should be part of your S2P platform regardless of where your solution focus is.

What are they? Where can you find some hints? For starters, you can loo to the new version of Solution Maps, designed by the doctor, with initial results releasing in less than two months, which have refactored all of the maps to have a new Common *platform* section (as well as a new common section for Sourcing – SXM due to the large overlap between the requirements and today’s platforms) which focuses on areas that are critical to S2P success regardless of your focus.

This new Common section is broken down into five categories

Analytics
Configurability
Supplier Portal
Foundational SXM
Technology

And they key requirements for any platform can be found in these four categories

Analytics
Technology
Configurability
Supplier Portal

In our last post we analyzed analytics and technology. In today’s post we are going to look at configurability and the supplier portal, both of which are also vital to ANY S2P application, whether best of breed, mini suite, suite, or next generation platform.

Let’s start with configurability. It has five critical sub-categories:

Globalization

Sourcing is done over global supply chains so global support for languages, currencies, data exchange, and data protection is absolutely vital.

Organizational Modelling

The application needs to support accurate organizational modelling to allow for selection of proper delivery addresses, identification of appropriate personnel associated with a location, identification of the right accounting structures (for the local country), etc.

Personalization

When it comes to usability, there is no one size fits all view. The CPO needs to see summaries and critical issues when she logs in, the category buyer needs to see a snapshot of current category performance, current projects, related issues, and so on. The CFO only cares about the financial summaries and impacts. And so on. And no one wants to click around for 5 minutes to find the information they need – they want it in their face when they log in. A good measure of a modern application is not how long the user is in it, but how long they aren’t in it. From a user’s viewpoint, as Weird Al so eloquently put it two decades ago, “it does all my work without my even askin’”.

Project Management

These days, users don’t have tasks to do, they have projects to manage. RPA was built to do mindless, repetitive tasks. And that’s what the system should do, guiding the buyer through the project to allow her to focus on the strategic decisions and relationships.

Workflow

A modern S2P application needs some workflow support that allows it to adjust to the needs of the user and the senior administrators to pre-define common workflows to optimize user productivity.

Similarly, every application that collects or stores supplier data needs to provide great capabilities around

Document Management

Business is captured in documents of all shapes, sizes, and types … and these come from both parties, not just the buyer – it must be easy for the supplier to get and put these with ease

Profile Management

A supplier must be able to maintain, or at least easily submit updates and corrections to, their profile. The whole point of a portal is to enable the supplier and ease life on the buyer.

And, of course, as we dive into each of the main areas of S2P, there are other core features, but these foundational elements need to be addressed before any vendor can offer a great best-of-breed point based solution, mini-suite, suite, or platform.

What Elements Should You Be Looking For in a Platform (Part I)

That’s a very hard question and, to some extent the key elements will, at least in many views, revolve around what you are looking for the platform to support, but there are some elements that should be part of your S2P platform regardless of where your solution focus is.

What are they?  Where can you find some hints?  For starters, you can loo to the new version of Solution Maps, designed by the doctor, with initial results releasing in less than two months, which have refactored all of the maps to have a new Common platform section (as well as a new common section for Sourcing – SXM due to the large overlap between the requirements and today’s platforms) which focuses on areas that are critical to S2P success regardless of your focus. 

This new Common section is broken down into five categories

Analytics
Configurability
Supplier Portal
Foundational SXM
Technology

And they key requirements for any platform can be found in these four categories

Analytics
Technology
Configurability
Supplier Portal

Let’s start with analytics.  This has four sub-categories, all of which are vital:

Data Schema

  As today’s information economy runs on data.  Big data.

Data Management

  As this data is constantly expanding and changing.

Metric Management

  As you can’t manage what you can’t measure

Reporting

  As we need to extract the data we need to do our jobs.

Now let’s look at technology.  Each of the seven sub-categories it contains are vital:

Data Management Support

  Which looks at foundational technology requirements to handle the data needs of today and tomorrow

Document Management Support

  Which looks at the additional technology required for document management (as the business world runs on documents and contracts)

Core Platform 

  Which looks at the architecture and software stack designed to support an evolving system

Automation

  As efficiency is about automation, usually accomplished by RPA and, in some cases, assisted intelligence (the first level of AI, which is where most companies are)

Standards and Integration

  As one platform can’t do it all.  Just like the internet does not support the One Ping. 

Emerging Technology Support

  As platforms must keep up

UX Layer

  As the platform must be usable. By the average user, not just the PhD with years of esoteric knowledge. 

Tomorrow we’ll outline the other categories and then in future posts we’ll dive into some of these key areas and define what they might mean in plain English. 

Stay tuned.