Category Archives: Vendor Review

Vinimaya: Taking Their Procurement Marketplace Global, Part IV

In Part I we noted that since we last covered Vinimaya, the B2B Search Engine that was the next wave in product catalogue management, they have continued building out their base platform, adding (more extensive) auditing capability, workflow-based catalog management, quick-quote (RFX), e-Forms, deep analytics, mobile, and social integration on top of a base platform that supported content management, federated search, powerful connectivity options, personalization and customization, globalization, and an easy to use shopping cart. Then, in Part II and Part III we focussed in on their vTransport technology and their new vQuote, vRank, vCatalog, vAudit, and vAnalytics solution modules. Today, in the final part of this four-part series, we are going to talk about vSocial, vMobile, and their up-coming market indices.

vSocial
vSocial is the social interaction component of the Vinimaya platform. Taking a cue from Amazon, which teaches us that not only do people tend to gravitate to products with reviews but they also want the ability to comment on the products and services they receive and be part of the community, Vinimaya added social interaction capability to their platform. Buyers can post feedback on the goods they procure, suppliers can respond and provide additional details, and procurement can include explanations as to why certain products or services are preferred. In addition, the platform is artificially intelligent, so if there is no feedback for a 14.4 V cordless drill from a given manufacturer, but there is for an 18 V cordless drill from that same manufacturer, the platform will pull the feedback in for the 18 V drill in when a user is viewing the 14.4 V drill to give the user as much information as there is available about the potential purchase. It’s a simple platform, but it works quite well.

vMobile
vMobile is the mobile instantiation of their platform, and one of the most unique offerings on the marketplace. Not only was the Vinimaya platform the first to do real-time federated search across punch-outs, catalogs, and databases and present the results to a user through a single buying platform, but it’s now the first platform to do the same on a mobile device. Designed for a smart-phone, a corporate buyer now has access to all of the goods and services available through the Vinimaya platform on their corporate smartphone, and despite the small amount of real-estate, it is very useable. Vinimaya put a lot of thought into their solution and made search and product retrieval very easy. In addition to the standard keyword search, the mobile solution also supports artificially intelligent barcode based retrieval. If the buyer happens to have the packaging for an item of interest in close proximity (such as the box for the last printer cartridge that requires an immediate reorder when used), she just has to scan the barcode and the solution will find all instances of the product. And if an exact match is unavailable, because the solution is intelligent and retrieves the manufacturer and product description, the search application will find all related products. Maybe the Brother cartridge is currently unavailable from your current suppliers, but a third party Staples replacement cartridge is. The platform will find that option and present it to you. The results are returned in a list and choosing an option brings up a summary of the product details which has an option to add the product to the cart. The cart can be accessed at any time from the app menu bar, which also allows quick access to search, favorites, and history functionality, and checkout can be as easy as one-click as your data is pre-populated. It’s a very slick catalog-based Procurement solution.

Market Indices

Sometimes, not a week goes by where a Procurement doesn’t hear “your contracts suck — I can get the same printer cartridge 5-pack on Amazon today for 5% less” from an office manager or “prove to me that our prices are as good as you say they are and that we are beating the market average because I don’t believe you” from the CFO who only seems to notice Procurement when, a year after a contract has been cut, market prices for a given commodity drop or when the CIO complains that the organization is spending too much on hardware as it’s forced to buy from an overpriced supplier at last year’s prices that are no longer the best price.

In order to get the monkeys off its back, Procurement really needs to be able to demonstrate how good it’s doing — how the majority of it’s contracts are at, or better than, market price, how paying slightly more for that printer cartridge gives it a discount on a range of electronic products from the same provider at 5% below market average pricing, and how IT isn’t factoring in the huge end-of-year rebate the organization is expecting once it meets the million-dollar spend threshold. But to do this, Procurement needs three things:

  1. index data, to know what market prices are,
  2. pricing data, to know what it’s really paying, and
  3. deep analytics, to put two and two together and map reality to potential.

Vinimaya has the pricing data. Not only does Vinimaya manage all of an organization’s punch-outs, catalogs, and pricing databases — but they save every search result to maintain historical pricing data for all products in the database. And, with the recent release of vAudit and vAnalytics, they have the audit trails and the analytics to analyze purchases in detail. That just leave one element to go — the pricing indexes.

The Vinimaya platform crawls a large number of consumer sites (including Amazon, Alibaba, and other online storefronts) and has a huge database of commercial pricing in its archives. This provides the foundation for a consumer price index that will allow an organization to compare its pricing for a product in many consumer categories with the average price charged to a consumer. Vinimaya serves a large number of public sector clients and since public sector pricing is public, this provides the foundation for a market index that will allow an organization to compare its pricing for a product with the average price charged in the public sector for products for which Vinimaya has a lot of data. If you’re beating the public index, you’re doing good but not great. If you’re beating the consumer index, you’re doing okay but not that good. Better shape up. And if you’re not even beating the consumer index, better get your house in order before trying to enforce your contracts on the rest of the organization!

In conclusion, since we last covered Vinimaya, they have made many advancements to their base platform in the last 5 years, but the best may be yet to come. The market indexes are just the tip of the iceberg! More to come in 2014!

Bravo Business Center 2.0 – A Complete Category Solution for Retail Part III

As per part I, two years ago we reviewed BravoSolution’s Business Center Category Sourcing Solution that took e-Sourcing to a new level for nine common categories that provided the Supply Management organization with a considerable sourcing challenge. In addition, we noted that BravoSolution didn’t stop there and kept going until they built a solution that, capturing the years of experience and knowledge built up by their global sourcing and solutions teams (who work out of offices in ten different countries on four different continents), captured all of the common categories for entire industries. This allows a sourcing professional in those industries to use the Business Center as a complete sourcing solution and apply built-in best practices built up from decades of experience.

Then, in Part II (dot 1 and dot 2), we noted that one of the industries that the Business Center serves, out of the box, is MRO because it is a vertical that is almost tailor-made for a business centre solution. Even though, as a category, it is one of the broadest categories imaginable, MRO organizations are generally not sourcing any particular product or service in volume and success often depends not on identifying the supplier who can give you the best price at the best service level on a part, but on identifying the supplier who can give you the best average price at the best average service level of a large market basket of parts (or the supplier who can bundle the services associated with installing a related market basket of parts at a competitive rate). Part II detailed how the business centre guides a buyer through the process, automates as much as possible, and makes it as easy as possible for a buyer to take a sourcing event from conception through award.

Today, we are going to discuss the business centre solution for Retail, used by some of the largest retailers in North America and Europe. The retail solution is designed to support categories with a large number of products that need to be sourced to a large number of distribution centres which serve a large number of stores that need variable volume levels of different products. These events need to be built on sophisticated models that can fed to an optimizer because the variable demand for a product means that not only do you need to consider multiple bids from multiple suppliers and multiple lanes, but buying certain products from certain suppliers for low demand locales could result in a lot of LTL shipments that will significantly increase transportation costs and buying products that will need to be shipped great distances for repairs or warranty claims will also drastically increase TCO.

The BravoSolution Business Center Solution for Retail allows the sourcing organization to define all of it’s distribution centres, all of its stores, the stores served by each DC, markets, the markets served by each store, the warehouses for each supplier, and the DCs that the supplier warehouses are able to serve. It also allows the sourcing organization to define all of the items that it buys, all of the supplier products, the mapping from supplier products to buyer items, categories for its items, and categories for the supplier items. All of the distribution centres, stores, warehouses, items, products, and categories can be uploaded from an (Excel) datafile, and so can starting prices.

It also allows for the easy definition of a very sophisticated discount model that can capture any convoluted discount the supplier can come up with. In addition to the standard volume rebate by product, volume rebate by spend, volume rebate by category, volume rebate by category spend, and volume rebate by supplier spend, suppliers will often offer new store discounts, co-op discounts, payment discounts, EDI discounts, in-store promotion discounts, defective discounts, and cross-product discounts where a discount will be offered on X for every unit of Y purchased. The workflow, and interface, is set up to allow for easy capture of any, and all, of these discounts.

The workflow also allows for the definition of (additional) item attributes which can be used in qualitative constraints in the optimization model, which will allow a sourcing professional to create models which will only include eco-certified items, validated suppliers, etc. in the award. It also supports price targets, so that a buyer can determine the impact of a proposed price decrease in an optimization model and use this information in fact-based negotiations.

Once all of the stores, distribution centers, warehouses, items, products, and categories are in the system, project definition is extremely easy and, as with MRO, the sourcing specialist is walked through the project which starts by identifying the categories being sourced, verifying the dc-store structure, uploading the projected demand, selecting the suppliers, verifying the supplier-warehouse buyer-distribution center and supplier-product buyer-item mappings, defining any bidding requirements the supplier has to meet, sending out the RFX, verifying the responses, and pushing the responses into multiple pre-defined optimization models, which will include base-line and incumbent models. The sourcing specialist can then create additional what-if models, including what-if models on target pricing, go back to the suppliers for a subsequent bid round, and continue the optimization (and bid-rounds) until the specialist is ready to make an award (and push the award into the contract management module).

As with MRO, the Business Center for Retail is optimized to make sourcing, and re-sourcing, of all of the retailer’s categories as easy and painless as possible so that, if needed, less critical categories can be driven by a junior buyer (under the guidane of a senior buyer) and free up the senior buyer to focus on the high-value and strategic categories. In addition, BravoSolution’s Global Team has the experience to get this solution up and running for even the largest of retailers in a matter of weeks. It’s a quick way for a large retailer to start advanced sourcing and get it’s costs under control.

IQNavigator Navigates You Through Statement of Work Creation

Since we last covered IQNavigator and their IQ-based Navigation of Contingent Labour Sourcing in 2008, IQNavigator has been hard at work extending their platform and its capabilities to go beyond temporary and contingent labour and also handle project and SOW (Statement-of-Work) sourcing events and the full SOW life-cycle.

Project and SOW sourcing projects, even if they consist primarily of contingent labour, are different from standard contingent labour sourcing events in that a third party is managing the project, payments are (typically) on a different schedule and have to be tracked against a budget, and named resources need to be tracked. The entire process, from RFX, through contract generation and award, to project management and delivery is different.

The customizations in the IQNavigator platform start with the initial RFX creation, which begins with a wizard-based decision-tree workflow. This Decision Manager is customizable by the organization for each type of SOW project that it undertakes, that, based on a series of questions, will configure the proper RFX for the project in question. This series of questions (that can be customized by each client organization), which could be as simple as asking the user to identify the location where the services are required, the category of the work (IT, engineering, advertising, etc.), the length of the project, the expected budget (range) required, and the approvals required, will, once completed, initiate an RFX workflow that will incorporate the necessary elements of the SOW project. The Decision Manager solution was designed to focus on two things:

  1. Delivering the end user to the correct channel (or category) based on Procurement’s operational and/or vendor preferences and
  2. Placing the end user at the optimal point of the defined category workflow based on the end user’s responses

Depending on the answers given, the RFX will include sections for the definition of milestones, budgets, rate tables, (open) supplier selection, support for named resources, questionnaires, and / or required submissions (such as insurance certificates) from the supplier to be considered for the project. The user will then be walked through the definition of the RFX for the SOW project step-by-step (by way of a pre-configured RFX or SOW template).

Milestones are up to the individual who creates the project, can be tied to a budget line item, and associated with one or more deliverables. Budgets can be as simple as an overall budget for the project, or as detailed as a budget category for each deliverable associated with each milestone (if the project is being paid for on a deliverable basis) or by (named) resource if the project is being conducted on a time-and-materials basis.

Suppliers can quickly be selected from a drop-down search box if the organization has (pre)approved suppliers for the SOW project in question, and if the suppliers have provided rate tables, these rate tables can be automatically pulled in and presented back to the supplier (to verify) during their bid. In addition, if the supplier has previously specified named resources, these named resources can be pre-populated as well. Depending on the project, they buyer may also have the option to add additional suppliers (which will be invited to bid on the project as well).

Questionnaires can also be selected from a set of standard pre-existing questionnaires associated with the type of project being sourced. They can be distributed as-is or modified as required. In addition, the user can create their own questionnaire if one doesn’t exist that fits the bill.

When the RFX is complete to the user’s satisfaction, it is sent to the supplier who logs in and completes a bid to their satisfaction. If the supplier has already defined their rate tables and named resources and uploaded their insurance certificates, bidding on the project by the supplier could be as simple as identifying the resources who will complete the work, providing work estimates and proposed fees, and accepting the (automatically calculated) budget.

When all of the supplier responses have been obtained, the buyer, who can choose to analyze each response individually, can also evaluate the responses side by side in a comparison report that includes the (budget) elements of interest and then select one of the responses as the basis of a project award. At this point, the application can generate a draft contract based upon a template that pulls in all of the collected information, and includes any necessary documents in appendices. And if the supplier has signed a MSA (Master Services Agreement) with the buyer that authorizes password-based named-login approvals in the IQNavigator SOW platform as e-Signatures, the contract can be accepted online and work can begin immediately.

The entire SOW application is streamlined to make the sourcing and approval of SOW projects as easy as possible for the project manager, while incorporating as many best practices as possible, which allows the project manager to focus her time on what she does best — managing projects and not running sourcing events.

Then, once the SOW project has been awarded, the project manager can use the rest of the IQNavigator platform to track project progress against milestones, collect time sheets, approve time sheets and expenditures, make payments against project budget categories, and track overall supplier performance. The reporting engine can be used to run reports at any time and the dashboard can be used to monitor current action items and outstanding project milestones and deliverables.

The inclusion of SOW capability makes IQNavigator an end-to-end platform for managing all types of contingent labour required by your organization, whether such labour is managed in house or by a third party. The IQNaviagor approach to SOW is unique, and it is the most thorough solution for generic SOW sourcing events in a contingent labour solution that SI has seen to date.
The IQNavigator platform is a great way to get all of your labour-based spend under management in one platform.

Vinimaya: Taking Their Procurement Marketplace Global, Part III

In Part I we noted that since we last covered Vinimaya, the B2B Search Engine that was the the next wave in product catalogue management with their ability to do real-time federated search across all of your supplier databases, catalogues, and punch-outs through a single consumer-like search and shop interface, they have continued building out their base platform, adding (more extensive) auditing capability, workflow-based catalog management, quick-quote (RFX) capability, e-Forms, deep analytics capability, mobile capabilities, and social integration on top of a base platform that supported content management, federated search, powerful connectivity options, personalization and customization, globalization, and an easy to use shopping cart. Then, in Part II, we focused in on their vTransport and their new quick-order and e-Forms functionality, known as vQuote. Today we’re going to dive a little deeper into five of the new capabilities added since our last major review, starting with vQuote.

vQuote
vQuote was specifically designed for the time when multiple bids is the right, or only, option but the situation does not warrant a full-scale sourcing event. For example, unless the organization is bundling the printer cartridge spend with the printers (which is generally NOT a good idea, by the way, since most printer manufacturers make their money off of ink that costs more than blood), running a full sourcing event to award next year’s printer cartridge buy is not worth the effort. Also, many small projects in the public sector, such as network support services at a small local government office, have to go to bid, but aren’t worth full scale sourcing events either. In this case, a quick quote — often to known suppliers already in the system, is typically the way to go. The Vinimaya vQuote solution was designed to make this process as quick, easy, and painless as possible — whether the request for quote was going to existing suppliers in the system or to new suppliers.

Since it was designed specifically for those categories of buys that fit between spot-buy from a catalog and full-fledged sourcing event, Vinimaya was able to streamline the solution significantly. Creating a quote request is as easy as giving a quote a name, specifying line items, selecting suppliers, and providing a due date – which can all be done on a single screen. If the line items are services, a SOW can be attached and quickly sent off. The buyer can see the status of the quote requests on a summary screen, review each quote as it is returned, compare them side-by-side in a summary report, and select a winner just by marking a quote, or line item from a quote, as awarded. It’s as quick and simple as a quoting solution can get and meet the needs of the quoting category they designed for.

vRank
vRank is the ability for a senior buyer or contract manager to ensure that contract items always appear first in the search results, that items from preferred suppliers always appear before items from non-preferred suppliers, and that prohibited items never appear. Basically, the administrator has the ability to assign each item that appears in a search result a rank between 1 (do not include) and 4 (show first), where 3 is (show ahead of other items) and 2 is (normal rank). It’s pretty simple, and it works based on the simple fact that almost half of all people who use search functionality click on the first link that is returned. (Recent Google statistics indicate that a whopping 47% of searchers click on the first search result.) The ranks can be applied to individual items or suppliers, with item ranks overriding supplier ranks). In addition, these ranks can be defined in real-time on every search and will take effect immediately on all future searches. This allows an administrator to define priorities as needed based upon what users are actually searching for and buying, saving a lot of up-front configuration to define ranks for products that might not even be searched for!

vCatalog
vCatalog updates the capability Vinimaya has always had to manage local catalogs in a manner that pushes all of the work back on the supplier. With vCatalog, a supplier that is not technical enough to, or that does not want to, maintain a punch-out or other on-line catalog can upload their entire catalog to the buyer through a web portal. The catalog file is completely validated, and any errors are pushed back to the supplier, with specific details on the error, for correction before it is allowed to be pushed to production.

vAudit
vAudit is what allows a buying organization to take advantage of vendor managed catalogs with confidence. It continuously monitors products and pricing from punch-out, vCatalog, and web-db suppliers to make sure that prices are compliant with contracted prices or original quotes. As soon as a price is detected that is above the contracted price, the appropriate buyer representative is alerted to the issue. The system can be configured in three different ways:

  1. block a purchase for a product over the contract amount
  2. allow the checkout to proceed, but don’t send the PO to the supplier until the price is corrected
    (and alert an administrator to contact the supplier to get the price fixed)
  3. allow the checkout to proceed at the current price, but tag the item for proactive cost recovery

With the vAudit solution, it’s quick and painless to retrieve a report of all items bought above contract or quoted price in a given timeframe, and just as simple to break it down by supplier to allow the AP department to go after suppliers for money owed.

vAnalytics
vAnalytics is Vinimaya’s new reporting engine that was designed to provide Procurement Directors with an understanding of what people were buying and how they were selecting the items they were buying. With the understanding that the purchase process cannot be optimized without a good understanding of shopper behaviour, Vinimaya built a platform that allowed a Procurement Director to understand not only the the top purchases, the top suppliers, and the top buyers, but also the top search terms, the items they led to, the failed search terms, and the actions the buyer took on a failed search.

vAnalytics, which includes a report builder, has all of the standard reporting package features you would expect in a Procurement reporting system and allows reports to be created by supplier, buyer, item, and even checkout process. Common report types include unique users, spend by supplier, line items by supplier, utilization by search time, and out of compliance check-outs (if they are permitted). Since these reports are against real-time data (and not cached in an OLAP system), some can take a few minutes to run, but those restricted to a single-user or supplier will typically be quite responsive. And, of course, all data in the entire Vinimaya platform is exportable.

Vinimaya has also made advancements in mobile and social, but these enhancements will be the subject of a future post on the Vinimaya Global Procurement Marketplace.

Arena – Taking PLM Deep Into the Supply Chain Part II

In Part I we noted that Arena, since we last covered The Arena Solution in 2007, extended their PLM solution that was built around BOM (Bill-of-Material) Management, Item Management, and Change Management to support (better) Document Management, Quality Management, and Compliance Management. We also noted that they added more enterprise integration capabilities to ensure that their PLM solution integrated with all of the major ERP and MRP solutions on the market. We briefly covered these solutions before noting that, on top of these additions, they just released four new capabilities on top of their existing platform that we are going to cover in depth today.

Arena Projects
Arena Projects is a fully-functional project management solution that is fully integrated with the rest of the Arena suite which adds the dimension of product data to Project Management and allows for product-level production schedules to be defined and integrated with the master project schedule. Like every other project management solution, every project can be attached to a program, given a manager, assigned a start date, given milestones (composed of tasks) and target dates, and updated when a task is completed or milestone is reached. In addition, as it was developed on top of a PLM solution to support NPD/NPI (New Product Development / New Product Introduction), projects can be broken down into the conception, planning, development, manufacturing release, and launch phases. Statements of work and other supporting documents, can be attached and participants can leave notes on projects and issues as the project progresses. And, most importantly, all of the schedules associated with all of the projects in a program can be rolled up to provide a program manager a master view of status. In addition, there is a user view that allows a user to see all of her assignments across projects, recent notifications, documents she has access to, and actions she has to complete.

The solution was also designed to support CAPA (Corrective and Preventive Action) projects and has a built-in understanding of the process that consists of team establishment, problem definition, interim containment actions, root cause identification, corrective action identification, corrective action implementation, best practices to prevent recurrence, and project closure (with the recognition of team efforts). This built-in template makes setting up a new CAPA project, which can be linked to products already in the system, a breeze. The Project module is also integrated with their new Reporting module that can access any and all data in the system, so it is easy for a manager to get a handle on all projects under her purview or for an engineer to see the status of all projects on which he is assigned tasks and prioritize his work appropriately.

Arena Demand
Arena Demand is their demand management solution. Like other demand solutions, it allows a user to enter a forecast against multiple BOMs, aggregates the total demand for required parts or materials against multiple products, and presents the user with the total demand for each part or raw material along with any cost and sourcing information in the system. It’s an obvious feature that, for the longest time, was missing from many PLM systems. And while basic demand management capability will often exist in the MRP that the PLM provider will assume the organization has, the PRM provider is actually making two assumptions here that aren’t always true. The first assumption is that the organization has a higher-end MRP (which isn’t always the case for mid-sized manufacturers with limited IT budgets) and the second assumption is that the customer can easily get the relevant PLM data in the relevant format out of the PLM solution and into the MRP (which can require IT expertise the manufacturing organization does not have). Plus, sourcing doesn’t want to deal with an MRP — they just want a report that, for each product or raw material, presents them with total aggregated demand for the relevant time period, historical cost data, and known sources of supply.

The Arena Demand solution is quite easy to use — for each product, the manufacturing (or marketing) organization can input the expected demand by month or quarter and the solution spits out a report of demand by component part or raw material for the same time period, augmented with known supplier part matches and historical costs, if desired. In addition, since the solution is also tightly integrated with the Reporting platform, the sourcing team can filter in to specific programs, categories, or parts, or even suppliers of interest (if the sourcing team is looking to potentially aggregate volume to preferred suppliers for additional savings).

Arena EI
Arena EI, short for Arena Enterprise Integration, as we noted yesterday, is a new Open RESTful API that can be used to push data into Arena from any system and pull any and all data out of the Arena solution that needs to be pushed into other organizational systems. Supporting JSON data transport over secure https with session ID authentication, the API is flexible, powerful, and secure. And since it has access to all of the data in the Arena platform, it is a powerful, complete solution for data interchange into and out of the Arena platform.

Arena Exchange
Arena Exchange, which is the most revolutionary of the new Arena offerings, introduces the ability for real-time supply chain collaboration to include all impacted parties across multiple tiers of the supply chain during new product introduction, and the solution does so with unprecedented ease. It paves the way for a paradigm shift in the way manufacturers can manage the design and development of new products in an inclusive, but still secured and controlled, fashion.

In the Arena Exchange solution, any one can invite supple representatives to view, comment on, and approve bid packages, sub-packages, or even individual components — as each user can limit the data that the invitee sees to only the data she needs to see. In addition, if the invitee doesn’t have all of the input required for her part of the bid-package, she can carve out a chunk and send that off to someone on her team or to her supplier representative if needed. The relevant parts of the PLM can go all the way down to the tier-3 supplier shop floor for rework if need be, and the business impact of this up-front visibility and collaboration will be better DFM (Design for Manufacturing), faster TTM (Time-to-Market) due to fewer errors, less scrap and rework, lower cost, and higher quality.

The platform, which can be put on top of any PLM solution (not just Arena’s) that stores its files in standard PDX (Product Data eXchange) format (an international electronics manufacturing initiative standard), has a very simple interface that allows the user to access the specifications, bill of materials, sourcing information attached files, and (change) history by item, manufacturer item, and vendor item. The user can then add comments, send (selected portions) of the BOM to an existing (or new) user, add reviewers, define due dates, submit approvals, and ask questions. Drill-down is easy, so the user can quickly get to the appropriate sub-assembly, component, part, or raw material. At any time, the user can see the (rolled-up) status of the raw materials, parts, components, sub-assemblies, and assemblies within her purview as well as which users didn’t respond. Arena Exchange is the solution the PLM industry has been missing and should be evaluated by any manufacturing organization wanting to take their NPD and NPI processes to the next level.