Category Archives: Vendor Review

BizSlate, an ERP for the Small to Mid-Size Distributor

If you’re a small to mid-size distributor, with revenues under 100 M who is still running on QuickBooks (or even Microsoft dynamics), BizSlate is an ERP solution that you should be looking at — right now! BizSlate is doing for small-and-midsize distributors what Compiere and Made2Manage, are doing for small-and-midsize manufacturers — bringing usable, affordable ERP with exceptional supply chain support to the masses. And even though the official release of V1 doesn’t come out until Q4, BizSlate is already approaching two dozen distributors who are already using the solution, almost a dozen of which pre-paid for it over a year ago to be part of the usability design team.

With the sheer amount of data an organization needs to keep track of these days from an e-procurement, e-sourcing, spend analysis, risk management, and compliance perspective, it’s almost impossible for an organization with more than 10 Million in revenue to do without an ERP, but given that the annual total cost of the big ERPs still end up being in the seven figure range once implementation, training, maintenance, and infrastructure are factored in, these solutions are not affordable for the average small or mid-sized business. And while there are a number of SaaS best-of-breed solutions in each of the aforementioned supply management areas (like Coupa, iValua, Iasta, BravoSolution, BIQ, SupplierSoft, Vendormate, Lavante, etc.) that will allow an organization to collect and retain all relevant data, this data still needs to get into a centralized data store for inventory, warehouse, and logistics management; accounting; and spend analysis — a central data store that should probably take the form of an ERP solution. (And we recently pointed out how best of breed on an ERP backbone provides the best of both worlds.)

But not any ERP will do if you’re a small to mid-sized distributor. It has to be lightweight (as small to mid-size organizations don’t have the needs of large multi-nationals), SaaS (as they don’t have the IT departments either), low-cost (as they also don’t have large software budgets), and come in default configurations appropriate for distributors in different verticals (apparel, food & beverage, pre-manufactured components, etc.). And while Compiere and Made2Manage do well in the manufacturing world, and for the distributors who handle manufactured components and electronics, it can require some consulting and effort to customize them for apparel and food and beverage distributors, especially for certain organizations with certain processes.

Enter BizSlate. Before they spun it off from Ezcom software, the founders of BizSlate — who were focussed on low-cost EDI solutions for retailers — noticed the lack of appropriate ERP support for the small and mid-sized retail and distribution space, and decided to do something about it. Over the past year, they have designed a new SaaS-based ERP from the ground-up that addresses 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 enterprise e-Procurement systems on the market. And they did it with the unique needs of the retail distribution space in mind.

The importance of their focus on the retail space, and the apparel space in particular, cannot be overlooked. In this space (as in food and beverage, but to a much greater extreme), it is generally the case that each distinct instance of a product (which is often a combination of colour, size, and style) needs to be its own line item and have its own SKU. As a result, setting up a clothing line in a traditional ERP system can often require days of manual entry as a user often has to create up to 100 products just to handle one shirt (10 sizes * 5 colours * 2 styles). If an average clothing line contains six shirts, two sweaters, four pants, three jackets, etc., and four new clothing lines are being carried, it is easy to see how thousands of new product records might need to be created in a traditional ERP, making the data entry so egregious that the ERP is almost unusable. In BizSlate, an administrator can batch-create new products simply by entering all the base product information and then defining the characteristics that define different instances and the set of values for each characteristic. A user can create hundreds of combinations in a matter of minutes.

In addition, they also looked at how orders were created and came up with bulk order template functionality that allows a user to quickly generate an order form for a product group, with a line for each instance of each product in the group, and a default order quantity for each group, or product. As a result, a user can generate an initial start-of-season order in a matter of minutes as all the user will have to do is change a few order quantities.

And this focus on process support is not limited to product and order creation. They also looked at the inventory management and accounting processes and made each step as easy as they could for the average user, focussing on collecting only the information that is required and only when it is required. The entire goal of the design is to keep the user out of the system as much as possible as success in this space depends on selling and generating orders, and then optimizing the inventory levels and logistics, not on mucking around with an ERP or trying to optimize pennies when the volume doesn’t exist to achieve FTL discounts from a big carrier.

As they are only in the process of releasing V1, there are still a few week areas, such as reporting which is limited to canned reports and accounting which only supports GL integration with QuickBooks, but even the functionality in these areas supports 80% to 90% of the needs of a typical distributor in retail or a related channel. V2, slated for Q2 next year, will have a fully integrated report writer, a (punch-out enabled) shopping cart, and support for carrier integration. But from an efficiency perspective, which was their goal, they’ve hit the nail on the head. The manpower savings alone will more than pay for the solution, and the value that a company will be able to generate through even the most basic spend analysis effort after deploying the solution for a year will be substantial.

In summary, if you are a small to mid-sized distributor, with revenues under 100M, in a retail vertical, and you don’t have an ERP, BizSlate is one company that you have to check out. They’re on the right track, and once you have your data in a centralized data store, bolting on a best-of-breed e-Sourcing or Spend Analysis engine will be a breeze, and your savings will multiply. (And yes, the doctor hasn’t been this impressed with an ERP effort since the early days of Compiere.)

Robbie and the Coupa Factory

Oompa Loompa Doom-pa-dee-do
We’re still building great products for you!
Oompa Loompa Doom-pa-dah-dee
If you are wise you’ll try it for free.

What do you get when you get lots of cash?
Filling coffers and enlarging the stash?
Teams of developers coding like mad!
Making the app work on your iPad.

You’ll like the look of that!

It’s been a long time since Davie ran the Coupa Factory, and while there may have been a number of notable changes in management, one thing hasn’t changed at Coupa — and that’s the original product direction (and the heart of the development team*). Coupa’s goal is still to make the best P2P platform out there that’s so easy to use that even your grandmother and three-year old can use it and get all your spend under management (SUM).

In terms of progress since our last major review of the platform in 2009, which focussed on QuickStart, there has been a flurry of development — of a very interesting sorts. Having built one of the richest web-based P2P platforms on the market in three short years (with everything capable of being custom configured by an administrative user), Coupa made a very important realization — 90% of P2P is simple, straightforward, and limited in terms of required functionality. Find what you need, put in a requisition, get approval, cut the PO to the vendor, accept delivery, accept the invoice, queue it for verification and approval, issue the goods receipt, and make payment within the agreed upon timeframe when the invoice has been verified and the goods accepted. There’s not a lot of inventory management, logistics, payment structuring, etc. in an average corporate purchase made by an end-user outside of the Supply Management organization.

What there is, in fact, is a lot of bypassing of e-Procurement systems that make the process of getting your printer, paper, or widget for your production line more troublesome than going to the Best Buy website, the Office Depot website, or just calling up the supplier and asking for another shipment. So, if you want widespread adoption, which is the key to maximizing your SUM (Spend Under Management), you have to make it at least as easy to use as Amazon. Whether you’re using vendor catalog, punch-out, cXML, or an in-house catalog, searching, shopping, and requisitioning is seamlessly integrated. And it’s all accessible through their new Super Search Bar that seamlessly integrates Google search for what you need, Amazon browse by category, and free-form item/service search (which also allows product/service retrieval through internal or vendor product/service numbers) which can be global, by commodity, category, or vendor — depending on your configuration. Plus, their new dynamic shopping cart, which integrates accounting and budgeting data (so you know against what budget item a requisition will be charged, how much is left on the budget item, and how much will be left when the requisition is approved the minute you add an item to the cat), allows for split-billing and overrides in the cart in a process that is as easy as Amazon’s “one-click” checkout. And, policies can be linked to each item and service that allow for additional information within a search to be “popped-up” so the user can get full information (which can include budgetary and billing information) before an item is even added to the cart. Supplier taxes can be imported and validated against your own tax tables, fending off future nightmares for finance down the road. And when all is said and done, payments can be recorded and integrated with you ERP (and Coupa now supports out-of-the-box integrations with a couple of dozen major ERP and e-Procurement platforms).

Upon checkout, the system will automatically create the necessary requisitions (which will be sent to each individual who needs to approve an item in your master requisition), and, upon approval, the necessary POs for each vendor will be automatically generated and delivered — and all are easily accessible from your order history page with a single click.

The other big developments since our last major review are their Expense Management Solution, which was still in its infancy, and their new Spend Optimizer Solution, which could more accurately called a 360° Spend Visibility solution (which you can use as a starting point in spend analysis and spend optimization). Their Expense Management application is a great way to get your T&E under control (as iPhone integration allows expense reports to be automatically generated by users who simply have to take a picture of their receipt and import it into the application). They’ve taken usability to a new level with this one.

Spend Optimizer is their mega-dashboard reporting solution that is completely configurable and allows for the creation of just about any spend report you can dream up. Done right, you can have it display off-contract spend; late payments; budget overruns; high-spend categories, commodities, and vendors; and other spend hot-spots that could get you or your organization into hot-water down the road if not proactively managed by exception. It’s still a dashboard (which can be dangerous and dysfunctional), but you have the option to see green, see red, or see where the black holes are. It’s this last capability that makes the real difference between useless reporting tool and powerful spend miner, because, generally speaking, off-contract is where the trouble starts.

And brand-spanking new functionality is lined-up for fourth quarter. Their recent announcement that 9.635 Billion has passed through their platform is impressive, but when they pull off their next round of application development, that will be more so. Coupa is still a company to watch, so don’t take your eyes off them for too long.

Oompa Loompa Doom-pa-dee-do
They’re still building great products for you!
Oompa Loompa Doom-pa-dee-dar
They have the goal to take your spend far.

* Dave and Noah may be gone, but David Williams is still there as VP Technology, overseeing day to day development.

Three Questions for Job Seekers in the Supply Chain Space


Today’s guest post is from Sudy Bharadwaj, who has been analyst extraordinaire of Aberdeen Group, a VP of MindFlow Technologies (who innovated the sourcing optimization space), CMO of Informance (who brought intelligence to the manufacturing floor), and a Sales Superstar at Inovis (who was one of the largest B2B eCommerce players). (Note that all of these companies made successful exits by way of acquisition.) Sudy is currently the CEO of Hound Technologies and JackalopeJobs.com, a new Web 3.0 job search start-up that is looking to revolutionize the job search process for the average job seeker (and not the average recruiter).

Since I have been involved in the supply chain industry for 20+ years, I thought I would share some observations for job seekers in this space. One interesting fact about supply chain jobs — they are all over the map in terms of qualifications and experience. Some high-end jobs require advanced degrees and lots of experience, while others can be entry-level positions.

Regardless of level, there are some common issues all supply chain job seekers should think about:

Are you a cost center or a profit center/revenue center?
Many supply chain professionals, while knowing they have an important role, do not do as good of a job of fully understanding and articulating their overall role in their ecosystem. Think of what revenue or savings you contribute to the company. By optimizing your supply chain, how have you contributed? Can you describe some customer satisfaction metrics? Cost savings metrics?
One famous example of where you fit in the supply chain: when interviewing an assembly line worker installing seat belts at an automobile plant, the line worker told an executive “I not only install seat belts, I save lives”. That’s a great way to look at the job.

How are you managing, building and maintaining your network?
In any job search, networking is crucial, however, in the supply chain space, it can really improve your chances. In addition to connecting to your former co-workers, how about customers, suppliers, partners, etc? You were part of a supply-demand web, which looks like a large network; treat it like your job seeking network. Rather than looking for roles within your exact industry, can you work with customers and/or suppliers?
When discussing his job with a job seeker in the demand-side of the supply chain (read: sales), the main points were selling of products. The first question I asked was “tell me about your customer”.
Job seeker: “They are a distributor of XXX products”
Me: “What else do they distribute”?
Job seeker: “Numerous products, including ABC and XYZ”
Me: “Can you sell those?”
Job seeker: “Of course”
It may not be so easy, but phone calls were made to the distributor, new introductions were made, interviews ensued, and a new job was started with very different products than the sales executive sold before.

Are you addressing your skills gaps?
If you are an aspiring supply chain professional, or returning war veteran, you can find help from your local workforce office or VA representative. A great example in the Dallas/Fort Worth area is what the Workforce Solutions of North Central Texas has done — they acquired funding to develop certification programs — Certified Logistics Associate (CLA) or Certified Logistics Technician (CLT). Don’t live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area?

Try hitting Google and searching for some common phrases. Just for fun, I Googled “supply chain certification program in north Dakota” and got some interesting hits. Some are online programs from out-of-state schools while others are state sponsored programs.

These are three different questions any job seeker in the supply chain space needs to ask themselves as they embark on a new job search.

Thanks, Sudy. And if you are looking for a new Supply Chain job, try JackalopeJobs.com.* It’s still in beta, so this means there are still some kinks to work out, but it’s the first site that combines the power of a meta-aggregator with the power of multiple social networks simultaneously. Not just a LinkedIn or Facebook app, it can utilize your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Plaxo social networks simultaneously to tell you who in your network might be able to help you with a job on all of the major job search sites. And, unlike most job sites that just do simple title search, it uses Natural Language Processing and Semantic Search to find other jobs that might be relevant to you. For example, if you searched for “inside sales” you would not find an “account executive” job at Oracle on other job sites, which is almost the exact same job, just titled differently in a different organization. And if you searched for Procurement, you might not find Supply Manager — but the Jackalope Jobs engine will. Of course, since NLP and Semantic technology are not perfect and still in refinement, not every result will be a 100% match**, but the majority of the results will be very appropriate matches and this approach furthers the the goal of the site which is to expose you to more opportunities that you might be qualified for and able to get as a result of your network than other job sites give you. And if you search different, you might get surprising results. Sudy’s next post will describe how you use the platform to search different.

 

* Full disclaimer: the doctor is currently serving as CTO of JackalopeJobs and has a vested interest in the site’s success.

 

* For example, the phrase “human resources” causes the platform no end of grief because not only does almost every job description mention it once (which is easy to filter out), but poorly written job descriptions mention the phrase more than once when the job is not a human resources (related) job, which leads the NLP keyword analyzer and/or semantic engine to sometimes believe the job might actually be related to human resources. So this search will often turn up more false positives than others. However, these jobs typically get weighted down as you will not likely have as many, or any, connections to jobs in a different industry if you are a HR professional.

Open Up Your Supply Chain With E2Open

Today is the official launch of E2Open‘s new Collaboration Center, E2Open Version 8.0. The focus of this release are their new supply dashboards with real-time KPIs, predictive analytics and exception notifications designed to allow an organization to manage its global trading network across multiple supply tiers.

E2Open was founded in 2000 with the vision to provide supply chain managers visibility into their entire supply chain network — beyond just the first tier of suppliers because problems often start with your suppliers’ suppliers and your suppliers’ suppliers’ suppliers. Getting visibility into a late shipment or raw material shortfall as soon as it happens gives an organization time to find an alternate supply or alternate go-to-market strategy, as opposed to finding out the day after your supplier was supposed to ship. Since then, E2Open has gone through multiple versions of its platform and its E2open Business Network (8 to be precise) and now offers solutions in Collaborative Supply Planning, Demand Management, Logistics Visibility, Order Management, Inventory Management, and B2B Managed Services with a customer list that includes Blackberry, Dell, FoxConn, Hitachi, Motorola, and Seagate to name a few.

However, today we are only going to focus on its new collaborative platform and its supply management dashboards to be precise. Why would I do such a thing, especially since I repeatedly claim that Dashboards are Dangerous and Dysfunctional in full agreement with Robert D. Austin? Because the reason they are dysfunctional is that they lull you into a false sense of security when you see a lot of green. As I said in SI’s now classic post:

a dashboard can not tell you how well you’re doing … the best it can do is capture the data it’s been programmed to capture, roll-up the metrics it’s been programmed to roll up, and do the built in calculations of efficiency based on those roll-ups.

As a result, even if it tells you that 90% of spend is “on contract”, that doesn’t mean it is. It won’t tell you that 10% of spend has been misclassified under the wrong code and is being reported as on-contract when it’s really, really not. The truth is that:

a dashboard can only provide an upper bound on how well you’re doing, and this is useless. Reporting that my efficiency is at most 98% when it is in fact 92% is useless and unactionable.

However, if the goal is reversed from trying to tell you how well you are doing, and giving an inaccurate upper bound, to how poor you are doing, and give an accurate, minimal lower bound, it becomes useful. And if you can then define metrics such as inspected orders, reviewed invoices, verified shipments, etc. and report on the uninspected orders, unreviewed invoices, and unverified shipments (etc.), then you not only know everything that’s wrong but how many dark corners could be holding problems waiting to materialize but where to look when the problems you know about have been solved.

And that’s why E2Open’s new dashboard, developed in HTML5 and available through your browser, is useful. Not only does it provide deep, near real-time insight into your global supply network, with data aggregated across the multiple tiers of your supply network as fast as the platform can get access to it (which is real-time if the suppliers are using a modern supply management system with real-time query / export capability or once a day if the supplier is still on an old ERP/MRP that does a daily export in CSV to a secured FTP directory), but the drill-down dashboard can be configured to display whatever KPIs and metrics you want, however you want.

You can choose the standard indicators that show that 98% of your orders are expected to ship on time, based upon tier-1 and tier-2 suppliers shipping their components and raw materials on time, or you can invert it and show that 2% of your orders are late. Every metric can be reversed and you can filter what is displayed. So, if you want, you can set it up to show ALL RED and just show you

  • all the problems the system has identified that need an investigation and/or resolution and
  • how many records, products, shipments, etc. have not been manually reviewed, tested, verified as this will tell yo exactly where problems could be lurking and, if the count is high, where more oversight might be required to prevent new problems.

It’s not the standard configuration, but it is supported — and the ability to razor sharp focus into issues two levels down into your supply chain within 24 hours of your supplier’s supplier reporting a delay is fantastic. And, unlike most “dashboard” products, they support the creation of multiple public and private “dashboard” pages, at different levels of visibility and granularity, to allow each user to track all KPIs, metrics, and issues relevant to them. It’s not trying to be a one-size fits all solution because E2Open recognizes that, in supply chain, one size does not fit all.

Furthermore, 90% visibility at each tier is possible very quickly as they have done over 400 ERP / MRP / Supply Chain system integrations to date and can on-board suppliers on all of the major platforms very quickly. And they even have the ability to do trending and predictive analytics to identify where problems might occur — which is useful when you know that somewhere in a certain data blackhole there is likely an issue but are unsure where to start.

E2Open’s new release is worth checking out. The platform strives to give you a single version of the truth across your supply network and does a good job at doing it. And the inventory management / collaborative forecasting drill down capability is just as detailed as some of the best inventory solutions on the marketplace.

GoTradeLive: A LinkedIn eBay on Steroids for Small Business Procurement to Groupon To.

GoTradeLive is launching its new, global, trading platform targeted at small and medium businesses in the US today. Its new free social commerce and commercial trading platform is poised to be as disruptive to the small business Procurement market as Coupa (Cabana) was when it was launched back in 2007 on Procurement Independence Day. This is not something the doctor says lightly.

So what is GoTradeLive? It is, simply put, a power-auction platform for small businesses on steroids. And what’s so great about that, you astutely ask because there are dozens, and dozens, of auction platforms out there ranging from free to seven figures in cost? It’s social. It’s networked. It’s mobile. It’s easy to use. It’s global (and multi-currency). It’s Free. It can be branded. And it’s proven — as it’s already been tested in Australia, New Zealand, China, and the UK, where they have offices.

Let’s take the benefits one-by-one.

  • It’s social
    You can create your own trading networks using a Facebook / Linked-In type interface and these can be public or private for public or private sales or trades.
  • It’s networked
    While the build-your-trading network ability of the Ariba or Ketera networks are not yet there, the building blocks are and you can see it’s coming. But the ability to define custom trading networks is unique.
  • It’s (a) mobile (platform)
    Like the consumer social networks and e-Commerce platforms, they have a mobile app that allows you to monitor your trades and bids from your mobile device.
  • It’s easy to use
    It’s as easy to use as Facebook, eBay, and other consumer sites.
  • It’s global.
    It has already been launched in Australasia and the UK and further global launches are already planned. It supports automatic currency translation for global buying and selling.
  • It’s Free.
    It’s using the Freemium model pioneered by sites like LinkedIn, DropBox, and BaseCamp. It literally costs nothing to use. No registration or account fees. No listing fees. No transaction fees. (However, if you don’t pay, you are subjected to ads and there is nothing to prevent an advertisement for a competitor’s product or auction appearing on your listing page.) Given that the cost of some platforms include transaction fees of up to 15%, this is a great deal.
  • It can be branded.
    For as little as $15 a month, which gives you one-user access, you can brand the site into your own trading platform (with your logo, colour scheme, etc.) and eliminate advertisements. Small Business Pricing is coming soon, and will start at less than $100 / month.

It’s a great social commerce platform for quickly moving slow, excess, or end-of life inventory and a great platform for many small businesses, especially those in retail, construction, and similar goods-based verticals, for spot-buying product needed at irregular intervals. And it has a lot of promise. This is one platform the doctor will be watching closely.