Category Archives: Vendor Review

BizSlate Releases its ERP for Mid-Sized Distributors and Retailers to the Masses

Last fall we introduced you to BizSlate, an ERP for small to mid-size distributors and retailers that is bringing a useable, affordable ERP solution with exceptional supply chain support to the masses. (Basically, it’s doing what Compiere and Made2Manage did for small to mid-size manufacturers.)

As per our our introductory post, the founders, who were with Ezcom software, noticed the (utter) lack of appropriate ERP support for the small and mid-sized retail and distribution space and decided they needed to do something about it. The solution? A new SaaS based ERP system (re) built from the ground up to address the everyday accounting, inventory, catalog management, and order management/e-Procurement requirements of small and mid-sized distributors through a simple web-interface that is as easy to use as most of the new SaaS e-Procurement enterprise systems on the market.

Developed in conjunction with two dozen beta users, as per this VentureBeat article, Version 1 is now launched and is quite slick. As per our last post, the batch create function is incredibly powerful and easy to use. Not only can an administrator batch-create new products by entering all of the base product information, but he or she can select categories, suppliers, locations, terms, etc. from easy-to-use auto-complete pull-downs or from generic saved templates for product type. Extensive profiles can be created in a matter of minutes and hundreds of line items in a matter of seconds.

Order generation is as quick and painless as possible. A user can easily add items to an order through a simple-to-use but powerful search function that allows a user to search by name, code, style, or other attribute values and, as mentioned in the VentureBeat article, order generation can be done on the showroom floor on a mobile (Android or iOS) tablet. As per the batch generation, customer information, (preferred) supplier(s), terms, and other data can be quickly retrieved from pre-populated lists.

And the system even supports a sales order multi-edit capability which allows a user to update information across multiple sales orders (such as ship dates, payment terms, shipment location, etc.) simultaneously and to rationalize orders as need be. For example, if necessary, orders can be combined, split, and individual line items swapped. This is a powerful capability as it negates the need for orders to be cancelled and recreated or items to be deleted from one order and then added to another order, two very error prone processes.

And the rest of the system, which is configured around inventory, logistics, customer, supplier, and accounting management, is quite easy to use as well — and, in some instances, quit powerful. Consider inventory management — searches can include both open stock, pre-packs, and in-transit inventory and be performed with respect to any date. Thus, if a customer doesn’t want an order to be shipped for a week, you can see how many units you will have in a week after all orders scheduled to be received and shipped out over the next week are accounted for. The ability to search open stock and pre-packs together or separately is quite powerful. For example, let’s say a customer wants an order tomorrow, but you don’t have the open stock and if you don’t ship tomorrow, you lose the order. You can search pre-packs, determine that there is enough inventory in pre-packs, send someone into the warehouse to rip the pre-packs open, assemble the inventory and ship — and then replace the pre-packs with an order arriving in two days to be shipped out in the order the pre-packs were intended for that doesn’t have to ship for three days — and get a sale you would likely have missed otherwise.

With regards to inventory, customer, and supplier management — the ability to track the different SKUs used by each customer and supplier for each product and cross-correlate them across the supply chain is quite valuable. This allows you to search inventory and available suppliers off of a customer’s SKU and get complete, accurate information every time.

The document generation functionality was very well thought out — for each customer you can define what should be on the packing slip and invoice in addition to default shipment profiles to facilitate quick order entries. This simplifies the customer’s order verification and invoice processing and can speed up your payments. Similarly, you can specify what information should go on the good’s receipt to the supplier, what information should be associated with the payment, and what information should be matched before payment is issued. This simplifies transaction management for Accounts Payable and minimizes the chances of over-payment or payment for merchandise not received. And the system can even generate customized receiving forms for the warehouse personnel that makes it easy for them to check off items, and easy for whomever is doing data entry to check it off if they don’t have mobile system access.

It’s one slick SaaS solution and if you are a mid-sized retailer or distributor, BizSlate should be on your must-review list.

Hiperos – It’s So Hip To Be Square with 3rd Party Management! Part II

Hiperos provides a SaaS platform that allows an organization to manage the entire 3rd party lifecycle, which consists of registration, data collection, segmentation, control automation, assessment, management, and collaborative issue resolution.

Hiperos includes your standard SIM (Supplier Information Management) functionality that allows for supplier self-service registration and profile maintenance and data integration from third party sources. On top of that it implements a user-configurable rules-based workflow that allows third-parties to be segmented into different buckets that represent the different programs that they need to be subjected too – be it FCPA, REACH, WEE, HIPPA, or some other type of compliance or monitoring program. Each bucket has its associated monitoring rules that notify the third party when more information is needed and that automatically alerts the user when a violation is detected or when information is not provided by the third party in a timely fashion. Assessments are automatically run every time new data becomes available and can be run by a user at any time. The fact that all relevant third party information is available at all times allows users to pro-actively manage third parties, and associated risks, and then either work with third parties to mitigate risks, if the potential infraction can be corrected, or cut them loose if the risk of association is too great (because they showed up on a denied party list or use child labour in their supply chain).

The application, which loads the default user-defined dashboard, allows a user to manage third parties, engagements, relationships, products, and programs and to define programs, vendor communities, reports, and analytics.

The dashboard is multi-tabbed and allows a user to define relevant views on each of the application areas defined above, as well as a default dashboard that allows the user to see the information most relevant to him or her. At the top of the dashboard is a link to current action items that allows a user to quickly see what needs to be done in third party management, engagements, programs, etc. The dashboards can be configured using hundreds of pre-defined (reporting) widgets or the user can define their own widgets by defining appropriate reports in the reporting module. And the user can bring in real-time news and data feeds from sites of interest.

The application can track any compliance, performance, sustainability, or risk data elements of interest and, like any good SIM platform, is preconfigured to track hundreds of relevant data items, depending upon the programs you define as relevant for a given compliance, performance, or risk program (which minimizes the amount of configuration required to track custom fields). And not only is all relevant data available from any view that is program or user defined, but it’s all interlinked so a user can click on a third party included in a program, see the relevant report(s), and then dive into the third party data management screen to examine the raw data elements, and then run a report on just a data subset.

Program definition is flexible and allows for any type of compliance, risk, sustainability, or performance program you can think of. In addition, the fact that Hiperos also supports contract meta-data and third-party data feeds allows financial impact reports to be generated. That way, a user always knows what the impact of a third-party falling out of compliance is to the organization. Knowing that a tier-one supplier might be buying from a tier-two supplier that might be using child labour is one thing, but knowing that the organization is spending 20 Million across 5 categories on that tier-one supplier is something else. In the first case, the supplier is put on the “investigate” list and someone gets around to it when they get around to it. In the second case, the user knows that it is a high priority and an investigation has to be started immediately as the public backlash will be extremely damaging to the organization if it gets out that 20 Million is being spent on products and/or services that were partially produced by child labour.

Hiperos has also included extensive color-coded geo-mapping capabilities so that you can quickly see, for any program, where the highest risk areas are globally and dive in. While Hiperos is not the first company to do this, they have latched on to the fact that the visual representation of risk or non-compliance by region allows one to quickly see what regions have to be monitored. This allows resources to be properly applied, especially since proper monitoring will typically require subscriptions to appropriate data feeds for those regions.

The Market Intelligence capabilites are quite extensive too, and they have pre-configured watch-lists, diversity monitoring, parent-subsidiary monitoring, subcontractor monitoring, REACH/WEE monitoring, and dozens of other feeds of interest which can be enabled as required by the client.

And the analytics piece supports the full suite of slice-and-dice capabilities found in most sourcing products today, so that you can dive into the data and find out which suppliers, categories, or programs represent the highest risk to your organization.

There’s quite a bit of data, and the application can be quite busy at times, but Hiperos has one thing right, where compliance is concerned, it’s Hip to be Square.

Hiperos – It’s So Hip To Be Square with 3rd Party Management! Part I

When we last checked in with Hiperos, they had evolved from a Risk Management platform to an “Extended Enterprise Management” platform that integrated Contract Management, Compliance Management, Performance Management, and Sustainability Management into a 360° solution platform for an organization that wanted to get these various facets of risk under control.

However, as they have continued to roll-out their platform and work with clients in different verticals (beyond finance, which was their initial core strength and where they appear to be dominating the market), they have found that as enterprises get their internal(ly controlled) risks under control, their clients realize that typically the biggest risks they face are from their suppliers and vendors who provide then with all sorts of direct and indirect product and services. As a result, 3rd Party Management (3PM) has become critical to their operational success. How critical?

Consider these statistics. Forty-four percent of data breaches involve third parties, and the most expensive data breach has cost 35.3 Million dollars to resolve. And while this is atypically high, a data breach will cost an organization millions to resolve (as even the cheapest data breach cost $780,000). And if there turn out to be traces of blood money or drug money in your supply chain, it could cost you as much as $160 Million to settle the resulting probe. In short, 3rd Party Risk, if not properly managed, is likely to end up costing your organization millions. The only question is when.

And if you believe that preventative spending to manage risks that might not happen is unwise in this economy, consider this. Organizations that implemented Hiperos 3rd Party Management saw a 75% reduction in customer impact incidents due to sole sourcing. One organization was able to eliminate a seven-figure spend of 4 Million in annual subscription fees that it was paying just to insure that it wasn’t using blacklisted or banned suppliers (and that it wasn’t working with suppliers who were known to bribe and/or be involved in anti-corruption investigations) as the Hiperos 3rd Party Management solution contained all the functionality they needed. And, overall, Hiperos’ clients saw a 300% increase in the assessment of 3rd parties with a high-breach potential — allowing them to be vetted or eliminated before a costly incident occurred.

And this is jus a short-list of costly compliance and reputational risk facing an average organization that operates globally and has to deal with ISO, SAS 70, Anti-Bribery, Anti-Money Laundering, FCPA, SOX, OCC, CFPB, REACH, WEEE, OSHA, HIPPA, and W9 security and reporting obligations, just to name a few. A third party management solution tracks all of this, and more.

So what does Hiperos do to help you with your 3rd Party Management? Stay Tuned for Part II.

Iasta: Smart Source-Style! Part II.

To the tune of Gangnam Style.

Sourcing Smart-Source Style.
Smart-Source Style.

Sourcing platform for users and bosses too. Sweet.
SaaS on the cloud, always on, real-time reporting complete. L33t.
Analyze this. Auctions, Performance. Real time data.
Optimize It. Contracts, and vendor schema.
One. Two. Smart-Source Success!

In Part I, we covered the first three significant changes to the Iasta platform since we last covered Iasta in depth on SI three years ago. Today, we cover the remaining significant changes.

Extensive Support for Third Party Data Feeds
Realizing that no analytics platform is complete without the ability to enhance the data with supplementary data that makes it meaningful (like index data for raw materials / components, inventory cost data from an ERP, services spend from a third party management [3PM] system, etc.), Iasta has developed native in-house capabilities to pull in data from a plethora of ERP/MRPs, e-Procurement/P2P systems, and third-party data feeds (like D&B, etc.) as well as custom feeds from sources you already use.

P2P Integration Capabilities
Iasta knows that the best sourcing event is all for naught if the sourcing plan, ultimately embedded in a contract, is not properly implemented and followed through and 40% of the negotiated savings leaks and goes down the drain. Thus, they have developed powerful P2P integration capabilities in-house and can suck in all of the transactional data from your e-Procurement and/or P2P systems, map it against your contracts, and let you monitor spend in near-real time as the contract progresses. This way, if the contract is being neglected, the buyer can detect that after the first or second purchase, and not three years down the road during the re-sourcing event when all of the negotiated savings have been lost due to maverick spending or dishonoured discounts and/or rebates on the part of the supplier.

Customizable Reporting and Dashboards for Users and Executives
While Iasta, like other (e-)Sourcing and (e-)Procurement providers has always had sourcing dashboards, by module and by suite, it has developed the ability for users to create their own dashboards using pre-configured reports and widgets, custom reports (which can be created by its custom reporting engine), or existing dashboard templates. Most clients don’t, choosing to have Iasta do it for them, but the extensive reporting and dashboard configuration capabilities allow Iasta to create extensive summary dashboards to meet any need or desire in a matter of hours. Buyers can see what they need to see to be most effective on a daily basis, supervisors can see what they need to see to make sure all of their buyers’ programs are progressing appropriately, and high-level executives can get their traditional 6-gage 30,000 foot view dashboard and see that everything is, or is not, under control.

A Broader Services Offering
Iasta is finding what many other software and services providers are finding, that most organizations that (still) don’t have a (modern) (e-)Sourcing platform don’t have the resources to manage one, the skills to fully apply one, or the support to acquire either. The fact that an average organization still is not hiring or putting money back in the training budget means that a new supply management software acquisition is not beneficial to an organization without vendor or third party support. Due to the lack of talent, and training, most of the advanced functionality ends up being shelf-ware unless it’s used by an appropriately knowledgeable third party. So, like BravoSolution, Iasta has extended their suite of services and are now doing as much, or more, services work than software support. In addition to being able to fully manage events, they can fully manage sourcing programs, spend analysis efforts, integrations with P2P or ERP systems, and training efforts.

Other changes include enhanced category management and sourcing pipeline management capabilities, built-in trend reporting and variance analysis, geographic reporting, enhanced project management with milestone-level tracking, and built-in supplier scorecards.

It’s an extensive suite, and exemplative of why Iasta is now a clear-leader in the e-Sourcing mid-market.


We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx
Our great computers fill the hallowed halls!

Iasta: Smart Source-Style! Part I.

Iasta: Smart Source-Style! Part I.

It’s 2012 and your fiscal year is coming to an end.
It’s time to get a handle on organizational spend.
Because if you don’t, you will find that the Mayans were dead on.
And in 2013, your organization will be gone.

But there’s no need to worry because, Iasta’s got (To the tune of Gangnam Style)

Sourcing Smart-Source Style.
Smart-Source Style.

Sourcing platform for users and bosses too. Sweet.
SaaS on the cloud, always on, real-time reporting complete. L33t.
Analyze this. Auctions, Performance. Real time data.
Optimize It. Contracts, and vendor schema.
One. Two. Smart-Source Success!

So what’s changed since we last covered Iasta in depth in 2008/2009? Especially since the solution footprint looks the same from a cursory review of their web site? If you’re taking a thirty-thousand foot view, not much. But if you take the time to get down in the weeds, everything!

The biggest changes are:

  1. Native Analytics Capability
  2. Improved (Native) Contract Management Capability
  3. Better, Integrated, SIM and SPM Capabilities
  4. Extensive Support for Third Party Data Feeds
  5. P2P Integration Capabilities
  6. Customizable Reporting and Dashboards for Users and Executives
  7. A Broader Services Offering

Native Analytics Capability
A few years ago, Iasta was dependent on third parties like BIQ, now part of Opera Solutions and Spend Radar, now part of SciQuest for their spend analytics capability. And while they still make use of third parties for initial cleansing and classification in new initiatives, they now have the same slice-and-dice reporting capability that you’ll find in any other sourcing suite on the market. (And while it doesn’t have the data analytics power of best-in-class solutions like BIQ, it is the 80% solution for most sourcing departments, especially in the mid-market, which typically have very little insight into spend.)

Improved (Native) Contract Management Capability
A few years ago, Iasta’s contract management capability was limited to the definition of a few meta-data elements. Now, it’s a fully featured contract management offering that allows for storage and indexing of all your contracts, authoring of new contracts, and automated reporting for SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) to keep you out of stripes like Fox.

Better, Integrated, SIM and SPM Capabilities
You wouldn’t know it from their web-site, but Iasta has developed some fairly extensive built-in SIM/SPM capabilities that your organization can use to track compliance, performance, sustainability, and risk data elements that can have an impact on your sourcing events. In addition, this is integrated with the supplier data that has always been collected in the RFX module and the contract data in the contract module and all of this data can be sliced and diced by Iasta’s built-in analytics and reporting modules.

In Part II we’ll cover the remaining significant changes.