Category Archives: Vendor Review

BizSlate: They’re Bringing Sexy Back … to ERP!

BizSlate, first introduced to you on SI back in September, 2012 in our post about an ERP for the Small to Mid-Size Distributor, and covered again last February when BizSlate Released its ERP for Mid-Sized Distributors and Retailers to the Masses, has decided that it’s time to bring sexy back to ERP.

BizSlate, who, like the doctor, noticed a void in useable and affordable modern ERP solutions for the mid-sized distributor, retailer, and manufacturer, decided that they needed to do something about it and built a new ERP from the ground-up, that is custom-designed to meet the need of the mid-market distributors, retailers, and manufacturers that are under-served, and released it last year. But working closely with their initial customer base, they noticed a few things that typical ERP and implementation providers overlook. Among other things, they noticed that:

  1. Traditional ERP is Ugly
    Black and Green screens are functional, but belong in the server room. There’s no reason that ERP can’t be functional and appealing.
  2. Traditional ERP is Cumbersome and Boring
    Does your new product line contain 20 pairs of footwear in 7 different sizes and a minimum of 2 colours each? And does each need its own SKU? Guess what, that’s at least 280 products you need to create one at a time! With all of the coding and cross-coding required, it’s probably 15 minutes a product, or 30 products a day, or two weeks of data entry for some poor intern just to create a starting product catalog! Talk about cumbersome and boring. High-tech is supposed to relieve your burden and excite you!
  3. Traditional ERP is Unsophisticated and Unglamorous
    Do you use third party agencies to sell your stuff? If you’re a mid-sized distributor or manufacturer or even a mid-sized retailer who focusses on the core business of distribution, production, or store-front retailing, you probably do (since sales, distribution management, and e-Commerce aren’t your forte). And you probably (want to) pay based on commission. But if you’re using an old fashioned ERP, you’re probably stuck with one simple commission plan, or, if you’re really lucky, one per third party agency. What if you need multi-tier? Or different rates based on category or component (since you want to push new product lines but don’t want to pay a lot for end-of-life products where inventory is being sold off at reduced rates)? Better luck next time. But what if you could manage commission plan by agency, by product line, and even by salesperson? And what if it was easy? That’s a level of sophistication that would make your life, and the life of Accounts Payable, easy! An ERP that solved this obvious need would be glamorous.
  4. Traditional ERP Works Off the Nineties Model of a Back Office System.
    The nineties were two decades ago. Traditional ERP hasn’t kept up with the trends and can’t support the modern sourcing, procurement, distribution, inventory, and order management needs of a modern organization that has to respond to customer inquiries and adapt to customer needs on the fly — not on a weekly reporting schedule. Given the critical nature of an ERP solution, it has to keep up with e-Business trends.
  5. Traditional ERP is Non-Disruptive
    The core functionality and process flow of ERP hasn’t changed much in the last twenty years. This is a problem because true innovation that brings true leaps in productivity and generated value comes from technology that is willing to take a risk and disrupt the status quo.

In other words, BizSlate realized that ERP was ugly, boring, unsophisticated, out-dated, and non-disruptive and that it shouldn’t be this way. So they’ve spent the last year streamlining and improving the core of the new ERP that they’ve built to make it appealing, exciting, glamorous, trendy, and just a little risqué. Because that’s what ERP should be. As per our last post, we have to remember:

ERP used to be sexy. It’s time to make it sexy again!

Decideware: Taking Agency Expense Management to the Next Level!

As per our recent posts, Decideware are the Agency Performance Management Experts, having brought end-to-end agency lifecycle management (Part I, Part II, and Part III) to your agency-based supply chain.

Agency-based spend is an often overlooked spend category because it’s creative (and marketing doesn’t want to give it up), outsourced, and typically hands-off (because all marketing wants is the end product — print, radio, tv, or web advertisement, campaign, etc.).

However, ignoring this spend is costly, especially if you are doing a lot of production work — because the amount that is being spent through your agencies on production is often a lot more than the creative agency fees. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. When you drill down, you often find that if you are using a lot of different agencies for your different marketing initiatives, there will often be overlap not only in the types of production companies your agencies use to create your advertisements and campaigns, but in the actual companies themselves. This means that if you can identify common tier-2 providers used by your agencies, and identify potential preferred providers, you can negotiate with those providers for preferred rates to be on your preferred provider list that you provide to the agencies (who can be told that they can only use providers for identified services from your list).

Plus, because Decideware’s new Production Management Module allows you to track all costs down to the individual project and provider level, you can make sure that the preferred rates are actually being offered to you. And if the project is large enough, or the volume of work increases, you can ask for an additional discount and track the negotiated savings as well. It’s a great way to identify cost-savings opportunities when you don’t need the absolute best provider. After all, just about any print house can do a print job and any production studio can film an advertisement. This allows you to save on the “commodity purchases” and spend those dollars on the “creative” side instead, where you are likely to receive the most value for your money.

The new Decideware Production Module is a great complement to their existing Statement of Work module (discussed in Decideware: An End-to-End Agency Lifecycle Management Solution Part II) and now, for the first time, you can truly undertake multi-tier end-to-end agency-based cost management and really get your advertising and marketing spends under control.

The Production Module, currently in beta and scheduled for full-release at the start of next quarter, is similar to the scope-of-work module in that it walks the user through the full production RFX and cost estimate workflow. After the user defines the project metadata (type, scope, timeframe, org unit, etc.), she selects the users who will participate (in editorial, view, or approval mode), defines the work products (and who is responsible for overseeing their definition), selects the vendors who will be allowed to bid, defines the desired cost breakdown (by phase and element), defines the contract terms, and then, finally, defines the approval process. Then the project is launched and vendors provide their bid package with the desired cost breakdown, which includes an identification of the sub-tier suppliers who will be used to complete the work.

It’s an easy to use and well-thought out solution for getting your rampant advertising budget under control.

MarketMaker4: A Great Foundation for Successful Sourcing in the Mid-Market

Our last post in our four-part series that posed the question as to what the key ingredients to a successful e-Sourcing strategy are ended with an introduction to Market Making and MarketMaker4, one of the newest arrivals to the e-Sourcing party. However, unlike a number of vendors that sprung up during the latter half of the last decade, their solution is more than another me-too sourcing platform with modules and features almost indistinguishable from the platform that came before.

MarketMaker4’s new and distinct platform is buit around 4-key solution elements:

  1. State-of-the-Art e-Sourcing Platform,
  2. Integrated Company Intelligence,
  3. Integrated Market Insights, and
  4. Market Making.

This is because MarketMaker4 believes that all of these components are vital to a successful sourcing event, and it is not alone in this belief. Despite the fact that the solution was only launched a few years ago, MarketMaker4 already has over 75 global clients! Not bad for a new e-Sourcing start-up that was bootstrapped by its founders until it was acquired by Xchanging last year, which, realizing its significant potential, intends to keep MarketMaker4 as a standalone holding.

MarketMaker4’s modern e-Sourcing Platform is focussed on e-Negotiation support and the core functionality is e-RFx, e-Auction, and Reporting, with all of the standard features you’d expect from such a platform plus a few enhancements compared to the base platforms of the noughts. The most significant of these are the matrix-style bidding, which allow bids to be placed across three dimensions (such as lot, item, and [ship-to] location) and analyzed across different metrics (best price, best price by lot, best total price, best total price by lot, best weighted price, best weighted price by lot, etc.), and the custom weighting formulas that allow a sourcing manager to create custom rankings that can take all elements of a supplier’s bid into account — base cost, transportation, turn-around times, etc. — and all elements of a buyer’s assessment — quality, reliability, brand value, etc. — into account when calculating a total cost of ownership or bid ranking, by item, lot, or auction.

The platform is easy to use and integrates wizard-like walk-throughs for setting up new events. If a user is setting up a (reverse) auction, it walks the user through general settings, matrix design, uploading file attachments, design of the pre-event RFI, initial supplier identification, bid invite creation, and event launch. Progress indicators are included on each step (so a user knows how much is left to do), and all settings are defaulted whenever possible — allowing small events to be setup in minutes. When designing an auction, users have full control over the time and time extension rules, post negotiation override settings, minimim bid increments, ceilings and floors, bid notifications, the matrix view, displayed graphs, and the amount of competitor information displayed (and whether or not it is masked). Creation time can be streamlined by starting with one of the built in auction topics for common categories or by copying an existing event (for a similar category or the same category the last time the event was run).

The integrated company intelligence, which builds on a D&B license for detailed company intelligence through the MarketMaker4 tool (and which will soon be augmented with additional data from Lexis Nexis), allows a company to search for new suppliers in the MM4 database that could meet their category and product needs and then view detailed data that includes company data, financial data, key employees / managers, and contact information. It’s like a supplier network on steroids, as not only do you have a large list of suppliers, but you have aggregated, researched, third-party data on the suppliers, which even includes corporate citizenship ratings (for the sustainability-focussed). It’s easy to use, and allows you to do competitor searches on any company, which makes it really quick to find potential sources of alternate supply to invite to a sourcing event.

The integrated market intelligence is a combination of market intelligence (like you would get from a Mintec or Denali subscription) augmented with category briefs, a currency heat map (that lets you quickly identify the relative strengths of different currencies and trends, as historical currency data is tracked by MM4), and market indicators. The commodity indices cover North American, South American, Western European, Middle Eastern, and Asian marketplaces and more are being added this year.

And, finally, as introduced in our last post in our four-part series that posed the question as to what the key ingredients to a successful e-Sourcing strategy, Market Making is 24/5 project support from an experienced sourcing professional who is an expert in the platform, and the sourcing process it supports, and who is always a quick chat or call away. These professionals, based in North America, Europe, and Asia, are always there and always able to help you in one of the thirteen*1 (13) languages that MarketMaker4 supports.* Furthermore, since an online negotiation tool is useless if suppliers don’t use it, your suppliers also have access to full MarketMaker4 support — at no charge — in addition to bidder training sessions and monthly seminars.

MarketMaker4, which started with a belief that it’s not just what to source, but who to source from (Company Intelligence), when to source it (Market Intelligence), and how to get it right (Market Making), held on to that belief until they built a solution that realized their vision of what modern e-Sourcing should be. And it works. Their customers’ average savings is north of 10%, even without decision optimization (which demonstrates the power of integrated and properly applied market insight) and their average number of e-Sourcing projects is more than three times what it was before their acquisition of MarketMaker4). MarketMaker4 is another great option in what was becoming a dwindling e-Sourcing marketplace with all of the recent solution provider acquisitions.

*1 MarketMaker4 currently supports English, Mandarin, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, Polish, Russian, Turkish, and Korean. In addition, because the platform is a modern platform that supports the full Unicode character set, new languages can be added quickly.

*2 While MarketMaker is able to offer support in each of the 13 languages it supports in the product, not all languages are supported 24/5. 24/5 support is only available for English and any language specified in your solution contract.

Is MRO Inventory Bogging You Down? Maybe You Need a Bit of Xtivity? Part II

Yesterday, we finished Part I by asking What is Xtivity?

Simply put, Xtivity is a solution for your MRO Inventory Optimization Needs and only your MRO Inventory Optimization Needs. If your organization is regularly managing tens of millions of dollars of inventory, or more, you probably know that MRO Inventory is costing you Millions and your current ERP/MRP/CPG Inventory Management systems aren’t helping you curb these costs while making sure that the part is always there when you need it. (Because, in the MRO world, unlike the CPG world or back-office world, availability always trumps cost savings. If you’re a retailer and you are out of stock on 2% of your catalog, no big deal, especially when the average stockout rate is 8%, and if your supply cabinet runs out of toner when the CFO wants to print out 500 pages of financial reports, you can just send a low-wage employee to the local office supply store to pick up a replacement. It’s annoying, but the most it’s going to cost the organization is an hour of someone’s time and maybe a 20% markup on a $50 cartridge. Big whopping deal, NOT! But if it costs 1 Million a day to run the production line and the company’s entire factory workforce sits idle for three days while your repair technician waits for a part to be express shipped to the Brazil factory from a supplier in China, a single stock-out can be the difference between the organization turning a big profit and suffering a big loss for the quarter.)

Accepting this reality and realizing that traditional ERP/MRP/CPG Inventory Management systems weren’t going to solve this problem (which is typically solved by the average company by significantly overstocking a critical replacement part in multiple locations), ten years ago, Xtivity formed to do something about it and nine years ago launched one of the first SaaS solutions to address the issue.

The xIO Software-as-a-Service platform is a 100% web-based MRO Inventory Optimization Solution that can plug into your current inventory management and procurement solutions, suck in your inventory (related) data, pass it through a number of proprietary and statistical models and algorithms, developed by Dr. Stephen Pearce (formerly of Texas A&M and author of Strategic MRO: A Roadmap for Transforming Assets into Competitive Advantage) and refined over the last decade for optimal performance across all of the major MRO industries (including Pharmaceutical, Oil & Gas, Automotive, Power Generation, Pulp & Paper, Automotive, Food Manufacturing, and Transportation), and output, on a monthly basis (or any other regular interval that makes sense from an operational perspective) the optimal order point, order quantity, and average lead time required for each MRO inventory item (by location) — taking the client’s business rules into account. The net result is increased part and material availability and fill rate, accurate lead time calculations, and cash-flow savings from reduced inventory across the board. Based on this information, the xIO solution then generates reports that recommend the suggested changes to future orders and calculates the expected savings both in inventory carrying costs and year-over-year cash outlays for MRO inventory.

But it doesn’t stop there. For each individual item it creates a detailed inventory report that shows the trend over the last 36 months, the projected trend, the expected savings from the initial change to the order frequency, and the expected MRO inventory savings over time. All of the data that go into the summary reports and report by inventory category (defined by inventory velocity) can be drilled into and all of the data (and reports) can be exported to Excel (if desired). And once the suggested changes are accepted, the Xtivity solution can push the new order points, order quantities, and lead times back into your inventory management solution which will take over the ordering, tracking, and classic inventory management functions.

Xtivity, which is well known in the reliability, maintenance improvement, and big MRO space, if not in the broader supply chain management space as a whole, has become so good in its niche that they are at the point where their average client sees a ROI in 90 days or less and 10x ROI over time. Plus, 99.99% of clients can use their solution out of the box. They support so many inventory systems and data formats (in addition to being SAP and Maximo certified) that they only had to do a custom data conversion project for 2 out of the last 1,000 global companies (of a solution that supports, and supports users in, 6 languages) that have tried their platform.

When Xtivity says xIO is a true SaaS solution with no hardware, software, or integration requirements that plugs the MRO optimization hole with virtually no effort (beyond an inventory manager reviewing the order point, order frequency, and lead time recommendations and approving them for push-back into the inventory management system), Xtivity means it. The entire application has been streamlined to not only optimize MRO inventory management and free up as much cash as possible without increasing operational risk, but to minimize the amount of effort required to get results. This is important because you generally don’t generate business value by wasting time on software support, you generate value by implementing and maintaining better (MRO) inventory management policies. And the Xtivity solution allows you to focus on operations, not software, and thus get a quick return. It fills its niche very well. So if you are looking to improve your MRO inventory management, and potentially free up Millions of dollars in cash-flow, check out the Xtivity xIO solution, it’s easy to try and very easy to use.  (For more information on Xtivity, they can be contacted at optimize@xtivity.com.)

Is MRO Inventory Bogging You Down? Maybe You Need a Bit of Xtivity? Part I

Inventory optimization is tough, but maintenance, repair, and operations inventory management is even tougher because the parts just sit there until they are needed — and sometimes, either due to proper maintenance or just good luck, the critical part you are stockpiling for your production line sits on the shelf three times longer than expected while other times the critical part has to be replaced twice as often as the vendor who sold you the machine told you it would have to be.

The last thing you want to do is get the stock levels wrong because inventory is expensive. In addition to the capital that is tied up in the inventory, there are the facility storage costs (which include rent, overhead expenses for services like security, and property taxes) and the possession costs that include, but are not limited to, clerical costs (to track the inventory), insurance (to insure the inventory as a whole), theft (as the insurance policy will have a deductible and a maximum claim), taxes (when the organization takes possession), deterioration (as some inventory will get damaged or spoil), depreciation (as most components decrease in value over time), and obsolescence (if the inventory cannot be used in time). Having inventory sit idle is very costly.

To make matters worse, many of these parts are very expensive and often have no residual value if unused. Whereas unpopular consumer packaged goods can often be sold at fire-sale prices which will allow you to recover some of their cost, this is not always so with MRO. This is because the parts are typically only useable within a particular machine on your production line and by the time you shut it down, chances are that the supplier is no longer selling the machine and most of the suppliers’ other customers are no longer using the machine as well. In addition, many MRO parts and supplies, especially in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and high-tech industries, have specific storage requirements (cool, dry, etc.) and this makes the storage cost even pricier than for regular (consumer) goods.

With typical inventory carrying cost eating up approximately 25% to 40% of a company’s annual inventory investment, the last thing you want is too much inventory, especially since certain MRO categories with special storage requirements and a high risk of obsolescence can have amortized inventory carrying costs that are close to the total value of the inventory! Unless you like having millions tied up in inventory, you need to make sure that you optimize your MRO inventory to the best of your ability. If you can’t do that, don’t rely on creativity — that won’t be enough because just one wrong JIT (Just in Time) decision can bring your entire production line down for days and cost you Millions of dollars. If you don’t have a suitable platform and the expertise in house, don’t rely on creativity. Apply a little Xtivity instead.