Category Archives: Vendor Review

MarketMaker4: The Mid-Market’s Market Making Mezzanine

Some of you might say the e-Sourcing space is too crowded. And that certainly was the case in the mid-zeroes — platforms here, platforms there, platforms platforms everywhere. But then came the acquisition frenzy where mid-sized players swallowed smaller players and start-ups before getting swallowed up in turn by the dominant players who, in the last couple of years, themselves were swallowed up by the massive enterprise software providers. As a result, there is an opportunity, especially in the NA (North American) market for a couple of new players – provided, of course, that such players bring new and innovative solutions to the table (that address the needs of a considerable market segment).

As a result, even though the EU (European Union) vendors are starting to enter the sourcing market in a big(ger) way in NA, there is still an opportunity for someone new if they go about it the right way. So, despite the fact that many thought the market almost dead at the end of the zeroes, it was not completely crazy that a small team of e-Sourcing market veterans, including Mr. Alan Buxton who was the CTO of of Trading Partners back in their heyday, decided in 2011 to start a brand new e-Sourcing software start-up and build a new solution from scratch.

Two years later, MarketMaker4 is a strong offering for the mid-market that needs a new, modern, e-Sourcing solution. In particular, those mid-market companies that are late to the e-Sourcing game, those that are still relying on third parties to manage their sourcing events and are ready to bring those events in house, those that are trying to use ERP sourcing solutions, and those stuck on platforms that, due to acquisition, are stuck in integration limbo and haven’t been upgraded in a while.

So what is MarketMaker4? It’s a four-part sourcing solution that consists of:

  1. A modern e-Negotiation platform
    with a best of breed e-Auction and RFX solution
  2. with a built in supplier discovery engine
    built on the entire D&B database which is augmented with your own supplier database
  3. and market data indices that span commodities and currencies
    that let a buyer know current prices, historical trends, and relative market conditions (when the data is available)
  4. that is augmented with real-time product and sourcing support 24/7/365
    through online chat that connects all of the global support representatives around the world that are currently online.

The MarketMaker4 founders, who were involved in the space for over a decade and who worked for both software providers and services providers learned the following:

  1. While some companies will start with services to get going, these companies will eventually decide that pay per drink is expensive and look for software.
  2. The companies switching from services to software will typically select a best-of-breed software provider with little or no services or support beyond the product. As a result, due to limited sourcing and product knowledge on the in-house buying team, the product typically gets under-utilized and the company fails to achieve the ROI they expected.
  3. When the license expires, the company will typically revert back to a pay-per-drink, but limited to high-value categories, or put its faith in a good e-Procurement system, that will reduce maverick buying and, hopefully, with limited RFX capability, lead to better buying habits.
  4. But even if the company moves to a modern e-Procurement system, the company will typically have little insight into current prices or suppliers that they aren’t already buying from.

As a result, the team decided what was really needed for these types of companies was:

  • An e-Sourcing solution that was easy to use by the average buyer,
  • augmented with real-time support and guidance as new buyers get up to speed,
  • integrated with market index and currency index data (that could be linked into cost models), displayed in easy to understand graphical representations, that the buyer could use to understand current prices and likely trends, and
  • extended with a huge database of potential suppliers.

And that’s what they built. And in each component, they added some innovation to the mix.

  • The e-Auction product, which consumerizes the enterprise capability, is one of the most powerful on the market, with one of the most sophisticated, but yet easy to understand at a glance, interfaces out there.
  • While chat-based, they chose to build a support solution that connects all of their services and support personnel around the world who are currently available rather than use a call-center model. (And as they were just acquired by Xchanging, one of the big players in the Procurement market who are leaving MarketMaker4 as a stand-alone product and company, they now have a large network of support personnel around the world who speak multiple languages and can support their customers in their native language.)
  • Their market index solution is linked into the RFX/Auction module so that the buyer can see current component / raw material prices if there is a market index and can see current currency values as well as trends over the last year for every currency a supplier might bid in.
  • And they were the first e-Sourcing platform to integrate with D&B for the purposes of supplier discovery. Up until they did, most integrations were for risk data or data enrichment. As a result of their partnership and early efforts, they have one of the more powerful integrations and in addition to being able to search on name, location, etc. they can also filter on a variety of dimensions, including risk, size, diversity, etc. that even D&B can not filter on through their API.

MarketMaker4’s e-Auction product and supplier discovery products in particular are quite innovative, and SI will dive into them in more detail in the new year.

Basware: P2P for the Global “E”

Basware is one of the largest players in the global procurement arena. Founded in 1985 in Espoo, Finland (as Baltic Accounting Systems) to deliver enterprise finance software solutions, the company (which is now public and traded on the NASDAQ OMX Helsinki Ltd. as BAS1V) has grown from a small country player to a global platform with over 2,000 international P2P customers that collectively do business with almost 1 Million companies in over 100 countries. Basware supports its global customer base through its operational footprint that spans over 50 countries on 6 continents and includes over 100 partners and resellers.

It’s solutions span the entire P2P (purchase to pay) process, from requisition through payment and post-transaction analysis and includes the Basware Commerce Network that enables over 425 Billion of e-commerce annually. The network currently lists 1.9 Million suppliers and processes over 60 million e-invoices annually through the 60+ e-invoice formats it currently supports, including XML, EDI, and Virtual Printer formats. The network is growing and transaction growth is currently running at 60% year-over-year, and now that they have partnered with MasterCard to provide their customers access to MasterCard’s suite of payment products, it is likely that network growth will accelerate even more now that customers have even more payment options.

One of the most unique features of the platform is the fact that it spans the full AP and P2P cycles, whereas many of the smaller P2P and e-Procurement platforms are Procurement centric, with little support for AP. However, Basware started as a provider of finance solutions and migrated to the e-Procurement space with the birth of e-Commerce, and, as a result, has a firm command of the order-to-cash cycle from both organizational viewpoints.

From the procurement side, the platform contains modules for analytics, basic sourcing (RFX), contract management, catalog management, e-Procurement, and e-Invoicing. From the AP side, the platform contains modules for e-Invoice Processing, e-Invoice Matching, e-Payment, and Analytics. All modules are integrated with a consistent look-and-feel, and all modules are available on top of Basware’s new cloud-based Alusta platform which supports (multi-)enterprise private cloud instances. In addition, the collaboration capabilities and social integrations span the entire platform and all data in the platform is available to the analytics module.

Another unique feature is that Basware has decided that they are a procurement platform, and not a sourcing platform, and that their sourcing capability will remain basic. Basware recognizes that Procurement experts are not Sourcing experts and vice-versa, and have decided that they are going to partner to delivery an industry leading sourcing solution for those customers that need end-to-end Source-to-Pay functionality. As a result, they recently announced a major partnership with BravoSolution to deliver a comprehensive source-to-pay solution that covers all key steps of the sourcing, procurement, and finance process.

In future posts, SI will dive into key capabilities of the Basware Commerce Network; the e-Invoice processing, matching, and payment capabilities; and the analytics platform.

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.