Category Archives: Technology

Per Angusta: End-to-End Cross-Platform Purchasing & Procurement Project Management

When we last discussed Per Angusta last year in our post on Purchasing CRM, they were a relatively new SaaS company focussing on the workflow that ties the entire Supply Management process together.

They were building a SaaS platform to manage sourcing pipelines, track savings for organizational validation, and make Procurement’s impact visible to the organization. And, more importantly, they were building a tool designed to manage the sourcing workflow by integrating (through APIs) with Sourcing, Procurement, and Supplier platforms … out-of-the-box. At the time, they were integrated, or building integrations with, Rosslyn Analytics, HICX, Market Dojo. Today, they are also integrated with Coupa, Dhatim, D&B, and Ecovadis and other integrations are in the way.

Back then, they were mainly workflow, budget management, and great project management. Since then, they’ve added (better) ERP integration; improved alerts with rule definitions that will, in the next release, also support approval management and “toll gates” for better project management capability; added better contract management and tracking support (with forthcoming DocuSign integration); added supplier (information) management capability (that can import data from existing systems); added opportunity identification and management (with some innovative capability for those that also use Dhatim); and added an overall progress management capability … with the ability to take reporting snapshots from any point in time (in the past). In this post we are going to focus on three key advancements: opportunity management, supplier management and the progress management capability.

Opportunity Management was designed as a “scratch-pad” based application that allows a sourcing and procurement team to track potential opportunities as they are identified. To start identifying an opportunity, all that is needed is a name, an opportunity type, and a category. A short description, stakeholder, scope, implementation difficulty, and expected start date can also be defined. Once an opportunity is accepted, a potential budget impact can be defined, and once the opportunity is implemented, the expected savings can be defined and then the actual savings tracked. And all of this is summarized on the dashboard that summarizes opportunities by status, type of impact, ease of implementation, and project duration. But the great thing is that if a customer also has Dhatim, they can use Dhatim’s AI to identify the likely best opportunities that can be attacked and then feed them right into the Per Angusta platform.

Supplier Management, which can take data from the ERP, organizational Sourcing / ERP / Supply Management systems, and third party systems (D&B, Ecovadis, etc.), can be use to provide a basic Supplier snapshot independent of any given Sourcing system that can merge all the relevant data and provide consistent information to all Supply Management personnel. If they integrate a supplier discovery platform, it will be quick and easy to identify the best current and new suppliers to invite to your next Sourcing or Procurement project.

The Progress Management capability is essentially a pair of operational and financial dashboards that summarize target, forecast, and actual results for the year on top of the opportunity management and tracking capability. It’s trivially simple, but when data from all the platforms is integrated, extremely powerful and useful to the Procurement and Finance organizations.

Per Angusta has come a long way in a short time and SI looks forward to see what they do next year, especially as they are now working on “finding ways to use AI to make sourcing and procurement professionals much more productive and effective”.

Ninety Years Ago Today …

The Ford Motor Company taught us how long a product line built to last should last when it unveiled its Ford Model A as its new automobile NINETEEN (19) years into production of the Ford Model T. Can you believe it! What else lasts nineteen years (besides versions of Unix and Linux, but even then support is sometimes only guaranteed for a decade) in today’s economy?

When you look at fast moving industries like fashion, sometimes you are looking at product lifespans of 19 days! And most companies roll out a brand new mobile phone model every twelve to eighteen months and an upgraded model every six to nine months. You cannot get a laptop or computer warranty for more than three years. And you’re supposed to trade up to a new car as soon as the current model is paid off.

But products can, and should, be built to last. Will we ever remember what the Ford Motor Company taught us?

Fujitsu is Launching a Blockchain Money Transfer Service

Which is a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough.

As per a recent article, Fujitsu Eyes Cryptocurrency Trading with Cross-Blockchain Payments Tech. The goal of the platform is to allow two different cryptocurrency networks to interoperate.

Interoperable networks are the future of supply chain, as per a recent article on we need blockchain, but not for the reasons you think, as, implemented properly, it could allow supply chain partners on different platforms to securely, but openly, trade information that multiple partners need access to in an unalterable way.

But that, of course, is easier said than done. Company X might post that it has a 10 Million Renminbi receivable in China that it wants to trade for a 1.5 Million USD receivable in the USA, but even if that is the exact exchange rate, are the two debts equal? Only if both parties can, and will, pay the same amount at the same time. If one debt is due now and one is due in 30 days, there is a cost of capital if one organization has to borrow in the interim to meet cashflow requirements. Also, if both debts are due in 30 days, something could happen within 30 days that would result in one organization being unable to pay its debt for 60 days, and this again could result in a cashflow issue for one party that traded a debt.

As a result, unless both parties pay into a network and the funds can be immediately transferred, then you need a network where parties are trading at negotiated discount rates (subject to credit ratings or other agreed upon factors), and that could get tricky.

We could be left with a situation where each IOU is auctioned off to the highest bidder in one of the counter-party currencies of choice (1.4M USD, 1.0M British Pounds, etc) or the situation where each block is put up with a (set of) offer requirement(s) and the first offer takes it. In the first situation, which requires a fixed time auction over block chain, you have a lot of overhead (and blockchain’s primary application — bitcoin — already takes too much energy), and the second case this could leave trade possibilities on the table.

Unless a truly global currency facilitation fund where a number of entities establish a global bank, each funding in their own currency, and agree to pay out debts in the local currency in an established timeline for each IOU placed on the network, the dream could stay that, a dream. But with a global organization, the global organization would do its own risk checks, insure the risk is acceptable, and then take a cut just like supplier networks and payment networks take a cut. It would be like a bank or an invoice factoring network, but could offer lower costs as it wouldn’t need to exchange currency all the time, could weather currency storms, minimize global transfer (and global transfer costs), and generally improve global trade efficiencies. Just like the Knight’s Templar did when they effectively established one of the first global banks.

What we’re asking is not an easy network to design, but one we need to be thinking about.

AI Can Certainly Identify Relevant Case Law, But Can It Predict Judge’s Decisions?

We are all familiar with the use of AI in contract (lifecycle) management to scan contracts, decompose them into clauses, identify the type of clause, index the contract against the clause types, and identify entity and attribute types in those clauses. This is common practice for best-of-breed CLM providers like Icertis and Exari and standalone best-of-breed contract analytic providers like Counselytics and Seal Software.

But not all of these are designed to evaluate a contract, and more precisely, a contract dispute against existing law and case law to determine the likelihood of a ruling in a party’s favour. But that is apparently what the new AI entrants are shooting for.

As per this article in The Globe and Mail, a new AI entrant is offering simulation software that predicts how a court might rule in a given case involving tax law. The software, which takes client details, arguments, previous case law, and current law into account, crunches this, and other inputs, and delivers a simulated judgement claimed to be 90% accurate.

And now the company in question is turning its attention to labour law and hoping to offer a product soon that will offer the same type of predictive accuracy in this legal area. This will obviously be more difficult than tax as there are more grey areas as to what is a violation, but it may be achievable.

But is 90% accuracy enough? That’s 1 in 10 wrong predictions. But maybe it’s enough. If the software predicts that the plaintiff will lose, with 90% or more reliability, a case that could easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the damages for pleading guilty are less than a million, the right legal strategy would obviously be to seek out a good deal and not risk losing it all in court.

Plus, if both sides of a pending legal battle had access to simulation software that always showed one side losing with significant confidence, then at least one side will always be up for negotiation, and that’s almost always cheaper than a costly court case. Plus, it gets a resolution quicker, and sometimes the biggest cost of a dispute is the lost time.

So while it will never be truly accurate, as you can’t truly predict how a judge will rule in any given situation (as a human interpretation of a grey area can always be different than what might be the typical interpretation), this might just be the software that lawyers, tax accountants, and, soon, HR professionals need to come to their senses and resolve the dispute before wasting time in court.

And if it works in these areas, maybe soon it can ingest global law and treaties and be applied to Procurement disputes …

The Big Bad Blockchain is Here … Well Almost … Well, Maybe …

Blockchain, originally developed to support bitcoin (which heralded the digital currency revolution), is being considered, or at least proposed, for a plethora of uses as a result of the continual promise of the Internet of Things (IoT). It’s one of the most hyped, and to be honest, the most over-hyped technologies out there. (As the doctor originally ranted in his initial post on The Big Bad Blockchain back in March, the blockchain has huge potential, but the reality of the blockchain in today’s supply chain is proprietary proposals that are akin to the most “open” supplier networks, which, as we all know, aren’t that open. In fact, one such network is famous for “having prisoners, not customers”.

But, as the doctor pointed out in We Need BlockChain, But Not for the Reasons You Think, we do need blockchain, and, in particular, a truly open, truly decentralized, truly open blockchain auditable by anyone and everyone (probably operated by a truly global non-profit conglomerate). Because, with that block chain, we could realize the secure transfer of IOUs between multiple supply chain parties. (And that would allow a return to a modern form of barter where supply chain partners could trade debts until they were ready to collect. [After all, one way to hedge currency exchange losses is to trade debts until you can buy or sell in your currency.]

But until we get there (as this is apparently very forward thinking even though trade started with barter), in the meantime there are three very good uses for a proper, open, block chain.

1. Transportation (Cost) Management

All affected parties in a supply can see who has what, when, what charges were applied, when, and how the total landed cost is affected.

2. E-Document Management Between Partners

In addition to the standard fare of purchase orders, acknowledgements, shipping notices, goods receipts, invoices, and payment notices, you also have e-Contracts, e-Agreements, dispute resolution communications, and other documentation critical to regulatory compliance and future lawsuit prevention.

3. Open Innovation Management

Right now we have a lot of crowd-sourcing networks and innovation management platforms where all sorts of parties can post and respond to all sorts of challenges. However, while they have their advantages, they have their disadvantage — in that not everyone wants to give a solution away without some confidence that, if their solution is best, they will get paid and, most importantly, even if it is not, their solution will not be stolen or used without renumeration or, at least, without acknowledgement. But with blockchain, the origin of each submission can be uniquely identified and verified throughout the network, which will help an organization maintain confidence as the ownership of IP can be proven and access can be tracked.

The big bad blockchain is coming, let’s just hope that it the right instantiation of it appears.