Category Archives: Vendor Review

marketdojo – A Dojo Where You Can Walk Your Own Way

marketdojo is a company that many of you haven’t heard of and a company that I’m sure many of you who have heard of them dismissed because of the Western notion of what a dojo is. In western thought, a dojo is believed to be a training school for Japanese martial arts where students to to learn from a sensei. So when you hear marketdojo, the first thing you probably think of is a training school for (e-)commerce best practices and a services company — not a do-it-your-self SaaS e-Sourcing platform.

But that is what marketdojo is — a state-of-the-art do-it-yourself e-Negotiation suite that supports complex RFX and e-Auction events as well as integration with their categorydojo product that helps a user determine appropriate sourcing strategies for each category and prioritize those categories based on the expected size of the opportunity.

And they are appropriately named. One has to remember that dojo literally translates into “place of the way” and really means “a place for students to gather for practice, training, and testing”. Furthermore, there are also hombu dojos, which are the stylistic headquarters of a particular art. marketdojo is the hombu dojo for the do-it-yourself e-Sourcing art where the practitioners of the marketdojo way gather.

And while they were yet another me-too e-Sourcing tool when they started four years ago in 2010, they have taken great strides to differentiate themselves from the other entry-level e-Sourcing suites that revolve around e-RFX and e-Auction. These differentiators include:

  • Try-Before-You-Buy with no sales team interaction*while there have been a few e-Sourcing providers that would set you up a demo environment and let you take it for a test drive, SI doesn’t know of any that put their full platform up on a demo box where anyone could log in and test out all of the features without first engaging with the sales organization, sitting through the pitch, and proving their interest; To give marketdojo a test-drive, you go to the Sign Up page, fill in a short form, click on the link in the activation e-mail, and then click on Try Our Sandpit at the top of the home screen. No credit card required. It takes about 60 seconds. (You do, of course, have to pay before you can run a live event, but not before you’ve verified that it will work for you.)
  • Toggle View
    In the marketdojo platform, it’s a one-button click to toggle between your buyer view and the view of any supplier. No logging out and logging in as a separate user or trying to watch two views in two different browsers at the same time on a split screen.
  • Easy Public and Private Sector Event Creation
    In many economies, and the EU in particular, there are a lot of rules around public sector tenders, and the platform, with a single checkbox, can insure that all of the proper information is provided, questions are asked, and procedures are followed or, if the company is a private sector company, the buyer can go through a streamlined process and only provide the information she needs to provide and only request the information she needs to conduct the event.
  • Easy Pay as You Go
    You can pay per drink or buy an unlimited subscription on a monthly or yearly basis. To pay as you go, which starts at £500 for a single event, you purchase credits as needed on your credit card and go. There’s no limit to event size or event duration — and if you want to run an event on a category that’s under £50,000 of annual spend, they’ll even give you a discount!
  • Complex Lotting and BasketsNext month marketdojo will be releasing their new version which allows you to create complex lots and market baskets where each item can have a user-defined number of cost components and a formula that defines the total, or weighted, cost for the item and have the supplier provide their starting bids at whatever level of detail you desire. Then, when the auction is run, you can choose whether suppliers modify their bids at the cost component level, item level, market basket, or entire lot level — and do so as a fixed quote or discount off of their previous bid. This helps a buyer get a good understanding of what the cost drivers are but yet run easy events.

In addition, like other providers, they also offer:

  • Excel Import and ExportThis is especially useful with complex lots — you can create the desired matrix, and a supplier can export it, fill it in, and upload it at their leisure. You can also output reports and awards in Excel for further analysis or imports into other systems.
  • Easy Integration with their Other Tools
    They have two other tools — categorydojo, which we will cover in our next post, and innovationdojo, that you can read about on Spend Matters UK. While SI is, of course, a big fan of Innovation, and innovationdojo is innovative within the e-Sourcing space, these types of tools have existed in IT for quite a while now so the doctor isn’t all that excited about the shiny new e-sourcing friendly wrapper they put on what was an IT / product management tool (which, the doctor will admit, are as typically as ugly and unfriendly as you can get, but when you grew up with a green command prompt on a blac screen, you just get used to ugly UIs).
  • Award ExportOne click export to Excel OR their categorydojo, where you can compare your sourcing event plan and projected savings to actual savings and increase your accuracy year-over-year!

And since this takes us into Part II, we’ll end our initial discussion of marketdojo here.

* They are based in the UK, so if you try it out in the evening in North America, the sales team will be at home and won’t be online to ping you to even see if you want to chat.

 

Keelvar: Are They Right For You?

As a preamble, in today’s post we’re not going to discuss whether or not optimization is right for you because the answer is an unqualified “it is” because there does not exist a vertical that is unable to benefit from an appropriate optimization solution that supports the right model. If you are a 100M+ company, you should be using optimization. Maybe not on all categories, because you don’t source categories where the return doesn’t exceed the cost of the effort, but on the large and strategic ones.

Instead, as a follow-up to yesterday’s post, we are going to discuss whether or not Keelvar is right for you.

Right now, most of the companies that use optimization are in the high-end of the market, with a few leading companies at the high-end of the mid-market dabbling in it. Furthermore, most of the optimization solution vendors out there are focussing on this market. As a result, as per a previous post, most of the mid-market is not using optimization because they see it as too costly and too difficult. Seeing this, Keelvar decided that what was needed was a solution that was focussed entirely on the mid-market and, more specifically, at the lower end of the mid-market. That’s the solution they built.

This has advantages, in that they have a large market they can go after, and disadvantages in that the simplifications required to make the solution useable by that market limit the solution’s flexibility and power for large problems that require complex models and powerful solutions capabilities. But since the high end market already has good solutions, that’s okay. Given the different needs of the lower mid-market, the higher mid-market, and the global multi-nationals that need almost customized solutions, and the different needs of well-staffed and well-educated Supply Management organizations and poorly-staffed organizations that need to augment their solutions with a lot of services, there is still plenty of room in the market for a new entrant as even the six market segments just defined (3 tiers, without services and services required) aren’t adequately covered by the current players.

So if you’re in the lower-end of the mid-market and you’re ready to start optimizing your sourcing, you should head on over to Keelvar’s site and check them-out. The solution might just work for you, and with event pricing starting in the low five figures and unlimited annual licenses starting in the extremely low six figures, it won’t take long to see an ROI — especially since Keelvar makes optimization affordable on an event basis on categories as low as 500K to 1M and on an unlimited basis on categories as low as 100K to 250K (because if you have an unlimited license, why not use it on every event — it doesn’t take long for 10K savings to add up!).

Keelvar: Strange Name. Uncommon Results.

In our last post we talked about a new entrant to the Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization arena that was about to take up the education gauntlet. That new entrant is Keelvar. A spin-out from the 4C research laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork that raised 750K Euros in 2012, it was formed as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company to help purchasers establish a balanced and cost-effective outcome between large and small suppliers, which can be critical to indigenous industry by way of a price-gathering mechanism that supports communication of creative ways in which waste can be removed, helping government departments and multinational companies reduce costs. (Source: Silicon Republic)

It does this by augmenting its auction and RFX-based technology platform with true strategic sourcing decision optimization technology, but doing so in such a way as to hide the inherent complexity from the average buyer. Unlike many competing solutions on the market, the Keelvar UI is designed using a wizard-based workflow that guides the user in the setup of a combinatorial auction that is then solved using an optimization engine that uses a mix of solver technology developed at the 4C research laboratory and commercial solvers.

The solution walks the user through a simple process that even an average buyer can handle. The user needs to only:

  • Define the event typeThe solution comes with a number of pre-configured event types, each of which has appropriate corresponding bid templates.
  • Select the products and services and define the lots (contracts)The bidding sheets can be auto-generated off of these templates.
  • Select the suppliersWho will be bidding? The system then sends out the appropriate auto-generated bid sheets, tagged to each supplier.
  • Accept the bidsWhen the bids are returned, the user has to specify what bids are accepted and are to be used in the scenario.
  • Define the constraints.For each pre-configured event type, the system supports a number of pre-defined constraints. These include:
    • Supplier Limits (Risk Mitigation)
      where the buyer specifies a minimum or maximum number of suppliers
    • Award Splits (Allocation and Capacity)
      where the buyer can dictate that a supplier, or the winning suppliers, get an award split, minimum, or maximum award
    • Quality/Delivery Requirements (Qualitative)
      if the model is a freight model, the suppliers can specify lead times and the buyer can insist upon a maximum lead time, etc.
  • Run the ScenariosThe solution then runs the unconstrained scenario, the constrained scenario, and outputs a report that summarizes the constrained scenario cost, the number of bidders, and how much more it costs than the unconstrained scenario.
  • Define What-If Scenarios (Optionally)The user can specify constraints to add or drop, run the scenario again, and compare it previous (and the unconstrained) scenario.
  • Output a full award reportOnce the user is happy with a scenario.

It’s as easy to use as an auction tool, which is something that cannot be said for many of the optimization solutions out there, and no math or understanding of optimization is required. Plus, it’s a true SSDO solution as it is based on solid mathematical foundations (as the scenario can be built and solved as a MILP model), supports true cost model (as some of the templates allow different cost factors to be defined), supports reasonably sophisticated constraints (and enough to meet the minimum requirements of a SSDO solution), and has what-if capability. It’s definitely not the most sophisticated or powerful tool out there, but it doesn’t need to be.

For your average mid-size company at the lower end of the range, the solution gets the job done and does it in a way that the buyer can understand. There are thousands upon thousands of companies out now that don’t need more than this.

So if you’re in the lower-end and you’re ready to start optimizing your sourcing, you should head on over to Keelvar‘s site and check them-out. The solution might just work for you.

HICX Solutions Wants To Buy You A Shiny New Pair of Shoes! Part III

In Part II of this series we not only noted that HICX, which stands for Harmonize, Integrate, Control, and eXchange, is a relatively new SIM offering on the market (even though it has been in development since 2004), addresses the classic SIM sweet-spots, but also hits a few new ones. Not only does it include on-boarding and an integrated supplier portal like classic SIM, and more than adequately address Performance and Compliance Management — mainstays of current SIM platforms, but also goes beyond to offer a complete Master Data Management (MDM) solution for your Supply Management operation.

But that isn’t the only trick it offers. As hinted at in Part I, it not only allows a user to define, and redefine, data models as necessary but define, and redefine, workflows as necessary to allow an organization to not only accommodate new product demands but adapt to new technologies and new business requirements as they arise. These new tricks are not to be underestimated. While a number of platforms allow you to extend and augment the data model, most do not allow the data model to be extended after the fact, and those that do require all existing elements to have the new property defined, or at least defaulted (to a default or a value that represents a not-yet-defined value).

In contrast, the HICX platform allows the data model for any element to be updated at any time by any user with authority, and since the HICX platform supports versioning with all data elements of the data model, no existing elements are impacted or need to be updated since the data (element) model is loaded with each data element and each data element is validated against the (element) model it was created with. (Once the data element is loaded, the user can add any additional elements required to update the associated data model, if desired.)

But that’s not the best trick that the HICX platform has to offer. The best trick is that the platform allows the workflow to be updated at any time by any user with the authority to do so, even if the workflow is being used in an initiative currently in progress — such as an on-boarding, compliance, or performance improvement initiative. This is because the platform not only versions data models, but workflows that drive the product and initiatives. If, during an event, the event administrator notices that that the workflow is causing problems for the suppliers and can be simplified, or notices that the information being collected is not what was expected, the administrator can simplify the workflow or add additional, mandatory, data requests. Suppliers who have already started the workflow will be able to finish the current workflow, and can then be sent a request for additional information by the administrator (who can limit the request to suppliers on the older version of the workflow) but suppliers who did not begin the initiative before the update will start on the new workflow.

But the real power of the workflow management capability is the ability to change registration, data collection, and performance measurement workflows (and associated data element models) when suppliers change, products change, and evaluation methods change. Traditional SIM platforms decline in usage because they can’t keep up with changing business requirements and user needs. But with the ability to update workflows to match the business needs at any time, using an integrated visual workflow designer, the HICX platform insures that SIM is always relevant and current. It’s the new trick that most SIM platforms have been missing.

Other tricks include:

  • Dynamic Dashboards

    like any good SIM product, the HICX platform supports user dashboards, but doesn’t stop at one dashboard per user — the user can create as many dashboards as he or she wants and customize them to specific purposes — compliance, performance improvement, on-boarding, insurance, etc.; the tool includes a sophisticated dashboard designer that allows a knowledgeable user to design a dashboard that is actually relevant to the initiative at hand (which can be focussed on non-compliance, non-performance etc. — since we all know that dashboards that report success are dangerous and dysfunctional)

  • Advanced Search

    that allows the user to search for any data element using any fields, and filter using any set of fixed values (lists) and related elements; these searches can be used to define supplier sets for initiatives, using as many dimensions as necessary to get it right

  • User Defined Escalations

    that allow the user to define multiple levels of automated escalation during initiatives, where each escalation can occur at a different interval and be targeted to a different group or individual

These aren’t all the tricks the platform has to offer, but they are most of the tricks of note that serve to distinguish the HICX platform from the other SIM products on the market. If you’re on the market for a SIM solution, you should definitely take a look. The name and website might be a bit non-descriptive, but the tool certainly isn’t.

HICX Solutions Wants To Buy You A Shiny New Pair of Shoes! Part II

In Part I we noted that, despite the fact that SIM (Supplier Information Management) was old news and a mature Supply Management solution offering (as the early leaders in this space were formed as early as 2000), it may still have a few tricks up its sleeves and the acquisition of the right technology platform might just get the acquirer a shiny new pair of shoes that are as coveted as Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers. (Of course, the acquisition of the wrong technology might get the acquirer a pink slip.)

We also noted in Part I that HICX, which stands for Harmonize, Integrate, Control, and eXchange, a relatively new SIM offering on the market (even though it has been in development since 2004), not only addresses the classic SIM sweet-spots, but also hits a few new ones that can bring significant value to your organization if properly implemented and utilized as it brings with it a new bag of tricks. How does it do this?

Let’s start with the five major areas of SIM covered in Part I:

  • Onboarding

    The HICX platform not only allows the entire process to be automated, but allows the workflow to be customized to each supplier according to the supplier type (sub-contractor, one-off vendor, product, service, importer, government agency, etc.), the region the supplier is in, the business unit(s) the supplier deals with, the products or services the supplier offers, the languages the supplier uses, and the data that is required for performance, compliance, or other initiatives that involve the supplier. The customized process insures that the supplier is only asked for data that is needed, and that the supplier can designate the appropriate personnel to provide that data. The portal can be configured to include a significant number of data checks to not only make sure that the data is of the right type (numeric, alpha-numeric, attachment, etc.) but that the data provided makes sense (is in range, is from a pre-defined set of answers, etc.) — which prevents a lot of typos (which can result in bad scorecards and unnecessary alerts in an exception management setup, which the platform also supports). In addition, known supplier data can be pre-populated for review, and can even come from supplier directories (including the D&B directory). It’s very easy for the user doing the onboarding to customize this process as that user can customize the process by simply selecting the supplier type, region, business unit, products, services, languages, etc. of relevance to each supplier and the system does the rest. The user then has the option to add or remove additional requirements for individual suppliers, and override any and all defaults (that they have the authority to override as per the fine-grained permissions and securities models).

  • Master Data Management

    Not only does the MDM solution provide you with numerous “out-of-the-box” data models, standards, and validations that you can customize as needed, but it recognizes that MDM systems have to integrate with downstream ERP/MRP systems, upstream sourcing and procurement systems, and even overarching BI, Spend Analysis, and Reporting systems that cross and connect the streams. (Supply Management streams are not dematerializers — sometimes it is beneficial if the streams cross.) As a result, it has out-of-the-box integrations with a number of upstream, downstream, and mid-stream systems and can push, pull, and sync data as required according to any number of user-defined rules. Plus, it allows certain aspects of master data, including bank master data, to be handled separately (and stored in separate, heavily encrypted, and highly secure data sources).

  • Performance Management

    The performance management component, as expected, allows the user to build scorecards around business goals and use whatever information is required, whether it is supplier provided, internal or third-party and whether it comes from the SIM solution, upstream solutions, downstream solutions, or cross-stream solutions. It also supports a very dynamic and flexible scoring mechanism that can support whatever formulae the user feels is necessary to construct an adequate scorecard.

  • Compliance Management

    The compliance module allows the user to create and manage compliance initiatives across one or more suppliers for one or more projects. This can be as simple as collecting raw material data to insure that the products your suppliers are manufacturing do not contain any restricted substances under RoHS or other directives, or as complex as collecting all data relating to sustainability initiatives to directly and indirectly support your organization-wide Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative.

  • Integrated Supplier Portal

    As per our coverage of the on-boarding solution, the portal is streamlined so that the supplier is only asked for data that is needed, all aspects of the portal provide the supplier with a consistent experience, and the supplier can designate the appropriate personnel to provide and maintain the data that is needed on a data type, product, or initiative basis.

But this is not all that the HICX solution has to offer. Come back for Part III.