Category Archives: Vendor Review

b-Pack: Packing It In for A Brave New World, Part IV

Three weeks ago, in Part I, we told you how b-pack, hot on the heels of Ivalua, had decided to cross the Atlantic and join in the conquest to bring the bohemian revolution to the world of Procurement and P2P with their extensive solution suite that actually closes the P2P loop. Then, two weeks ago in Part II, and last week in Part III, we expounded on some additional capabilities, relatively unique in the marketplace, that extended the basic value offering beyond basic P2P. Today we’re going to address one of the advanced P2P capabilities, the tightly integrated document management feature, administration, and the supplier portal. But first, a quick recap of the story to date.

Part I described the base b-pack platform that takes you from the start of a traditional sourcing cycle (RFx), through a contract, to a requisition (which may be from a catalog), against a budget, to receipt of the goods (which can include asset tracking information), and the invoice, to payment, reporting, and supplier management. It covered the requisition, approval, receipt, invoice, matching, payment, and reporting cycle in detail as well as the solution delivery options that are available.

Part II detailed some of the integrated applications that build out the core capabilities to also provide the organization with expense and travel management, asset management, dispute resolution, and procurement business intelligence reporting and Part III addressed inventory management and its integration with asset management, budget management, fleet management, and internationalization.

Invoice management, which was initially discussed in Part I, is fairly sophisticated with a built-in invoice viewer (which can handle invoices in e-mail, EDI, and PDF formats, among others), auto-match capability (at the line-item level against original purchase orders), and multi-way match capability between purchase orders, contracts, and/or good receipts. The auto-match can be manually overridden (and maintains a running total of the reconciled amount against the entire invoice amount so the user can track her progress) and an invoice cannot be approved until it is fully matched against one or more purchase orders (at the line item level) and until all disputes against it are resolved. This goes a long way to insuring that incorrect and fraudulent invoices are never paid, which happens way to often when certain commodities, like office supplies, electronics, and storage space, are being purchased regularly and in large volumes.

Like reporting, document management permeates the system and allows each document to be tracked by way of associated meta-data which includes type, creation date, version, author, language, and other information relevant to the document type. In addition, (related) documents can be organized in a tree structure and a new document can be defined as sequential merge of a set of documents organized in a tree. Contract management is then built on top of this capability and allows contracts to be built up from component documents, where each component is a distinct section or clause, with its own meta-data information that aids in searching during contract construction. Through versioning, a user can quickly build a starting contract from standard clauses and then edit them accordingly using the built in word processor. The contract can then be output to PDF or Word, and if edits are made in the Word version (by the supplier), it can be imported back into the system as a successive version.

In addition, the document management system can store e-mail templates which are sent out when an action is triggered in the system, such as the transmission of a purchase order, the formal notification of a dispute, an automatic alert that inventory replenishment is required, and so on. These templates can be stored in multiple languages, and the proper version will be selected according to the language of the recipient. Furthermore, it’s integrated with the auto-translation utility which, although not perfect, gives you a starting template in another language, which can then be quickly reviewed and corrected by a native speaker.

Administration allows the user to define global display properties, procurement specific workflows, batch processes, usage rights by user, help file additions, and log access rights. Global display properties include price display rules, date rules, fonts, and themes. Procurement workflow properties include request limits, default payment modes, templates, and terms. Batch processes include data cache maintenance, undelivered e-mail management, user session management, database optimization, and invoice file management. The buyer can add specific information to the online help files for supplier use and for internal use. Finally, the administrator can also run data integrity checks, performance checks, link and reference checks, and database optimization.

Whereas some vendors build separate supplier portals for suppliers, which can greatly limit the functionality available to the supplier as most of the smaller shops can only devote so many developer cycles to portal maintenance, b-pack chose to build the supplier portal within the core application. The supplier portal is essentially the same application, but with access limited only to what the supplier is allowed to see and do. When a supplier representative logs in, she sees the same task manager that a buyer sees, which shows her to-do list, in-progress tasks, most recent system access, and available applications and allows her to access her reports, search for relevant information, and define the application settings she has control over. If she accesses the purchase order module, she sees the full workflow associated with the purchase order, but she is restricted to altering information related to acceptance and delivery, attaching notes, and initiating or responding to disputes — buyer side information is locked.

In addition, the supplier (vendor) master is tightly integrated with the core platform and allows the buyer to add and deactivate suppliers as required. For each supplier, the buyer can define basic identifying information, contacts, catalogues, currency, a description of the supplier’s product and/or service offerings, and portal access. The administrator can not only grant access to one or more supplier representatives, but choose what authorizations each representative is granted (in terms of invoice management, dispute management, catalog management, packing slip generation, invoicing, etc.).

In summary, the b-pack platform, which has been under development for ten years and which is very well thought out with respect to its goal of optimizing your back office procurement, provides a comprehensive P2P e-Procurement solution that also includes some very useful capabilities above and beyond the basic procurement cycle requirements that can provide significant additional value to many buying organizations, including the invoice management, document management, and supplier management capabilities described in this post.

Share This on Linked In

Sometimes Old-School Works Just Fine: An EC Sourcing RFP Case Study

It’s still a buyer’s market. Many suppliers are desperate for business, supply (capability) still exceeds demand in many markets, and even though prices are starting to rise in some markets with expectation of recovery, they haven’t risen much yet. According to many strategic sourcing professionals, it’s the perfect market for an (e-)Auction because suppliers will compete for your business. And while that may true, it does not guarantee that you’ll get the best result.

An e-Auction carries a number of risks. The result can be higher prices than a traditional negotiation. For example, if the auction was limited to a small number of suppliers, who are in contact, they may collude to keep prices high — or they may all adopt a strategy of delayed bids and minimum bid decrements which could result in higher prices. The result could be unsustainably low prices. A supplier, desperate to win business, might hope to make up losses in future volume, bid a razor thin margin, and then risk bankruptcy when its costs rise. At this point, the only choice for the organization would be to accept higher prices (through surcharges) or risk an interruption while a search for a new supplier was conducted. And the result could be strained supply base relations. A poorly conducted event can instill animosity in winners and losers alike, which would result in poor service from the winners and lack of response in future bid requests from the losers.

As a result, sometimes the best approach is an old-fashioned multi-round RFX with feedback between each bid, as it was for a certain mid-size apparel retailer, who we’ll call Apparel-For-You, who was new to e-Sourcing and just wanted a way to streamline their ocean freight bidding efforts (for their 25M ocean freight category) and communicate with suppliers in a consultive way. Specifically, Apparel-For-You, not realizing the significant savings opportunity before them, had the following goals in their search for an e-Sourcing solution:

  1. Understand Supplier Willingness to Bid on a Per Lane BasisHistorically, Apparel-For-You had been surprised a number of times not only with respect to bids that came in, but with respect to lanes carriers were willing to bid on individually
  2. Reduce Analysis and Reporting TimeApparel-For-You’s supply base, which provided them with over 2,200 individual SKUs, was spread across 30 ports of origin, 4 major ports of destination, 9 carriers, and 4 container types — which equals 4,320 bids to be collected and analyzed before the 120 lanes can be divided among the carriers. While certainly not impossible to do by hand, that’s still 10 (9 carrier plus 1 integrated) fairly large spreadsheets to manipulate and analyze in a time consuming and error-prone manner.
  3. Communicate with Suppliers in a Consultative and Regular FashionWithout a dedicated sourcing tool, it’s difficult for all team members to know when a carrier was last contacted and what was discussed. The ball could be dropped, and this could lead to a damaged relationship. Given the importance of relationships in Apparel-For-You’s supply chain, as apparel has a short product life-cycle, this is something Apparel-For-You wanted to avoid.

Given these requirements, and Apparel-For-You’s lack of e-Sourcing sophistication, EC Sourcing recommended that Apparel-For-You use a multi-round RFX, starting with an RFI to find out which carrier was interested in which lanes, with analysis and feedback between each round. The carriers were all informed up-front of the new process, and Apparel-For-You consistently followed-through after each round.

Using the built-in templates, Apparel-For-You was able to easily create an RFI that allowed it to create the right pricing matrix for each supplier as well as clarify important T&C’s with each. The process of collecting bids from carriers, who were used to Excel, was simplified by way of Excel integration. This integration also simplified the amalgamation of the bids into a single matrix for analysis purposes, as the integration was automated and free from human error.

Using built-in reports and advanced analysis models provided by EC Sourcing, Apparel-For-You was able to quickly analyze the bids after each round and provide the supplier with feedback on their relative ranking, which included how much they’d have to lower their bids to improve their rank and take the #1 spot. Using this information, the carriers were able to adjust their bids accordingly and focus on the lanes they could perform the best on with respect to the buyer’s needs.

In the end, Apparel-For-You not only accomplished their goals of

  1. Understanding Supplier Willingness to Bid on a Per Lane Basisas this information was known before the first bid was collected
  2. Reducing Analysis and Reporting Timeas the project time-frame was reduced by 35%
  3. Communicating with Suppliers in a Consultative and Regular Fashionas they were able to inform the carriers of their rank and potential awards promptly after each bid, and track when the last discussion took place

but Apparel-For-You also reduced their costs by 19%.

This just goes to show that, sometimes, old school works just fine. The full case study is available in PDF form.

Share This on Linked In

b-Pack: Packing It In for A Brave New World, Part III

Two weeks ago, in Part I, we told you how b-pack, hot on the heels of Ivalua, had decided to cross the Atlantic and join in the conquest to bring the bohemian revolution to the world of Procurement and P2P with their extensive solution suite that actually closes the P2P loop. Then, last week in Part II, we expounded on a few additional capabilities, which are relatively unique in the marketplace, that extended the basic value offering beyond what a standard P2P application delivers. Today, we’re going to dive into a few more value-adds, some of which are also relatively unique in the marketplace. But first, a recap of the story to date.

In Part I we described the base b-pack platform that takes you from the start of a traditional sourcing cycle (RFx), through a contract, to a requisition (which may be from a catalog), against a budget, to receipt of the goods (which can include asset tracking information), and the invoice, to payment, reporting, and supplier management. We dove into the basic P2P cycle and covered the requisition, approval, receipt, invoice, matching, payment, and reporting cycle in detail as well as the solution delivery options that are available to you.

Then, in Part II we detailed some of the integrated applications that build out the core capabilities to also provide the organization with expense and travel management, asset management, dispute resolution, and procurement business intelligence reporting.

Today, we’re going to address inventory management and its integration with asset management, budget management, fleet management, and internationalization. Then, in the fourth and final post of this initial series, we’ll tackle some of the advanced invoice management and viewing capabilities, document management, administration, and the supplier portal.

Inventory management, which is tightly integrated with asset management, allows you to track not only how much product you have at each (warehouse) location, but where the product is stored. The tool can handle multiple locations, which can each belong to a different (management) company, multiple rooms at each location, and assign multiple departments, managers, and clerks to each room. In addition to tracking the products (and counts) in each room, it can also track all of the inventory moves associated with each product into, within, and out of the warehouse. Like any good inventory management system, it allows for the creation of manual and automatic replenishment orders, which generate purchase orders against existing contracts and which are pushed through the appropriate approval channels if desired. The replenishment workflow is detailed and allows for multiple states, including fill, approval, standby, warehouse, in order, received, and shelved (put away) states. Finally, in addition to the basic inventory, asset, budget, and catalogue information, the user can also define custom fields, notes, and documents to track against each item.

Budget management is very powerful and allows the user to define budgets at the invoicing company, department, or user level and assign them to a manager and a chief. Each budget can be assigned a budget code, a group code, and a cost centre for accounting purposes and the administrator can define individual purchase authorizations, monthly purchase authorizations, and / or annual purchase authorizations. Approvals can be against global budget amounts, monthly budget amounts, individual purchase amounts, or always and automatic rejection rules can be defined for requests that are obviously unreasonable against the budget. Finally, budgets can be rolled up for reporting purposes.

Fleet management, their newest module, was built at the request of a customer who wanted a way to track their fleet vehicles in a manner that was tightly integrated with asset management and invoice management (to insure that vehicles were properly tracked, serviced, and that payments were at contracted rates). It lets you quickly retrieve vehicle records, fuel utilization statistics, and maintenance contracts and allows you do define alerts based on (fixed) budget utilization, kilometres, taxes, department utilization, preventative maintenance rules, and suspect expenses (with respect to predefined rules). It comes with a number of built-in reports, including total vehicles by type (gas, diesel, hybrid, electric), owned vs. leased summary, manufacturers and lessors, and make and is integrated into their global reporting engine that allows you to create your own reports. For each vehicle, it tracks the original order information, unique asset ID, VIN, type, category (sedan, SUV, truck, etc.), manufacturer, manufacturing location, make, description, grey card info, kilometrages, financing information, insurance information, fuel consumption, service history, maintenance schedule, trip history, and costs per kilometer as well as the division, department, and manager it is assigned to — and every field is searchable to allow you to quickly find the record(s) of interest. The detail of information that is tracked allows for a very deep analysis which will not only tell you which vehicles are the most expensive to operate, but why (fuel, insurance, service, etc.). This will allow you to make much better fleet decisions in the future.

With respect to internationalization, not only is the product multi-lingual and multi-currency, but the tool includes an integrated translation feature that allows text to be translated, automatically, between English, French, and a few other European languages. The buyer can define which currencies are supported, which countries they are supported for, the display properties, associated tax rates (at the country and state level), the conversion rates, and the (auto) update rules (when and from what data source).

In summary, b-pack provides a comprehensive P2P e-Procurement solution that also includes some very useful capabilities above and beyond the basic procurement cycle requirements that can provide significant additional value to many buying organizations, including the inventory management, budget management, and fleet management capabilities described in this post.

Share This on Linked In

b-Pack: Packing It In for A Brave New World, Part II

Last week, in Part I, we told you how b-pack, hot on the heels of Ivalua, had decided to cross the Atlantic and join in the conquest to bring the bohemian revolution to the world of Procurement and P2P with their extensive solutions that actually close the loop.

As noted in Part I, b-pack brings with it a suite of solutions that take you from the start of a traditional sourcing cycle (RFx), through a contract, to a requisition (which may be from a catalog), against a budget, to receipt (which can include asset tracking information), and an invoice, to payment, reporting, and supplier management. Plus it has a number of supporting modules that are unique compared to most of the competition (but that will be the subject of the next post).

Since Part I described the core procurement cycle support in detail — requisition, purchase order, receipt, invoice, payment, and budget update — this part will detail the integrated applications that build on the core capabilities to provide the organization with expense and travel management, asset management, dispute resolution, and procurement business intelligence reporting.

The expense management solution allows you to create a requisition for a trip before you take it, and before you incur the first expense, and have it, and associated expenses within budget, pre-approved. Then, as expenses are incurred, they can be added to the report. When the expense report is complete, it can be submitted for reimbursement. In addition, not only can it be exported to excel for printing or manual submission for a third party, but it can be imported from a predefined template that can be exported from the approved requisition. The expense management solution supports dates, cost centres, invoicing companies, multiple currencies, and notes at a line item level.

The integrated dispute resolution solution can be launched on the receipt of goods, on the receipt of an invoice, or later when an issue is encountered and the dispute can be related to a purchase order, goods receipt, invoice, asset, and/or contract. The dispute can be assigned a type and a level. The supplier is notified by e-mail and alert next time they log into the system. In addition, it appears in the appropriate supplier representative’s todo list until it is addressed. (If they choose to respond by e-mail, the response can be recorded by an individual with the appropriate authority to certify the response came from the supplier.) Once the supplier has responded, the appropriate buyer representative(s) is (are) notified, who can choose to either respond to the supplier, and continue the dispute, or close the dispute.

The asset management system, which is deeply integrated into the system, is also one of the most extensive non-standard modules in the platform. As a result, it’s a considerable value add for organizations that make a considerable number of expensive purchases for internal use that need to be tracked and managed. Asset management starts with the requisition when the user selects a commodity from the integrated catalog where it is assigned a pre-defined asset type. Each asset type is associated with specific properties. Then, when the commodity is received, the receiver can define the asset specific properties — such as serial number, internal tracking number, and assigned user — in addition to overriding the automatically defined fields — such as description, manufacturer part number, and assigned corporate unit. In addition, assets can be linked together. This is especially relevant when assets need to be used together, such as hardware and software. The module also supports specific approval rules, and chains, based on the type of asset … so that IT can review computer purchases, marketing can approve local printer selection, and engineering can approve widgets. In addition, the software maintains a complete assignment history, which is useful in tracking the lifespan of a product — such as a demo unit that gets reassigned to multiple teams over its lifespan. Finally, the asset database is searchable on every attribute, which makes it easy to find assets by type, assignee, department, etc.

This brings us to the procurement business intelligence reporting capability. The reporting module is tightly integrated with the base system and allows you to build your own reports across any data elements in the system using their own visual query builder. Using their application, you can define your own queries that will generate any list or cross-tab report of your choice, with sub-groups and rollups. The visual query builder, which also includes filter support against any pre-defined data grouping built into the system, allows you to select the rows of interest, calculations to be applied against the rows, and functions to be defined. The filters are and-or boolean clauses of arbitrary complexity and any where clause that can be defined in SQL can be defined as a filter. This gives the report builder a significant degree of power. The results can be presented as a table, or, where calculations or formulas are defined, as a chart or graph. The business intelligence is provided by way of built-in trend analysis that allows the user to track trends and define comparisons against baselines, predefined expectations, floors, and ceilings. This allows the user to determine when budgets and spend under management aren’t tracking against expectations and then create custom reports to determine why. Finally, every user can build custom dashboards using any built-in or custom defined report. If the dashboards are designed to identify unexpected trends, this can also be a useful feature.

In summary, b-pack provides a comprehensive P2P e-Procurement solution that also includes some very useful capabilities above and beyond the basic procurement cycle requirements that can provide significant additional value to many buying organizations.

Share This on Linked In

b-pack: Packing It In for A Brave New World, Part I

Who says the French aren’t revolutionary anymore? Last year, Ivalua decided to cross the Atlantic to try and conquer the North American procurement market. Now, short on their heels, b-pack, a company that’s also been around for 10 years, and which also has a large number of clients (across 20 industries they have over 80 clients), has also made the crossing in their effort to conquer what they call the “purchase-to-pay and process optimization” marketplace. But, most importantly, like Ivalua, b-pack also has one of the broadest e-Procurement suites on the market.

Just when you thought the e-Procurment market was getting stale (and with the exception of Coupa — who seem to have their head in the clouds lately, it has been pretty unexciting for the past year or two), along come the French who are determined to bring another bohemian revolution to the world of Procurement and P2P with extensive solutions that actually close the loop!

Realizing that it’s more than just requisitions, catalogs, and invoices, and that standalone systems that do not take you from procurement through purchase through receipt, payment and supplier management to begin the cycle anew, offer little in the way of value, b-pack brings with it a suite of solutions that take you from the start of a traditional sourcing cycle (RFx), through a contract, to a requisition (which may be from a catalog), against a budget, to receipt (which can include asset tracking information), and an invoice, to payment, reporting, and supplier management. And it has a number of supporting modules that are unique compared to most of the competition (but that will be the subject of the next post).

The solution can be delivered as a traditional behind-the-firewall solution, as a traditional hosted ASP solution, or as a cloud-based service (new version only) and can be deployed out-of-the-box or it can be custom configured (and extended) by b-pack, who have designed the solution on top of a configurable workflow management engine and who have a decade of experience customizing solutions for their clients, which include La Poste and Danone (Blédina).

We’ll start with the foundational modules — catalogs, requisitions, budgeting, receiving, invoicing, and reporting — since that’s the functionality that you need day in and day out, and since everything else depends upon the raw data collected in the basic P2P process. All of the functional modules are tightly integrated and accessed through the user’s home page, which maintains the user’s to-do list.

Requisitions are straight forward. You create a new document, give it a priority, define a needed-by date, select the company, cost centre, and ship to location, and then select your items. Items can be selected from commodity catalogs, custom catalogs, or user defined entries, and can be bought against a contract in the system or off-contract. If the requisition is within the buyer’s spending limit, a purchase order is automatically generated, if not, it goes to the designated approver. Once approved, a PDF purchase order is created which can be automatically sent to the supplier if e-orders are permitted, and, if not, printed and faxed. If the supplier is e-enabled, the system will automatically record the supplier’s confirmation of receipt. When the goods arrive, receipt can be recorded against the purchase order, and when all the goods have been received, the purchase order can be marked as closed.

When the invoice is received, it is recorded in the system. It can be received electronically if the supplier supports the right protocol, or manually entered by the recipient. The invoice is then automatically matched against the PO, and if discrepancies are detected, the user is immediately notified (who can initiate a dispute to correct the invoice). If not, the invoice can be marked for payment, and once paid, closed.

Once a payment is made, the user’s budget totals are updated, which tracks the total amount the user has spent, invoiced, ordered, and requested against her budget for the period. All of this information is immediately available to the user and her supervisor(s) through the budget reports.

Reporting allows the user to query purchase orders, invoices, budgets, and contracts (which are indexed by metadata and record relevant product and service information) at any time (and for any time period, or set of) at user, department, and company level. And in addition to tracking all of the users, departments, and company units (NA, Europe, Asia, etc.), the system also maintains all of the relationships which allows it to automatically generate workflows (for approvals and routings) and rollups for financial reporting purposes.

In other words, the foundations are precisely what you’d expect from a modern P2P solution that attempts to close the loop. In the next post we’ll dive into b-pack’s supplementary models that offer some more powerful, and unique, features that bring value above and beyond that which is normally offered through a basic P2P platform.

Share This on Linked In