Category Archives: Vendor Review

Integration Point Takes Trade Compliance to a New Level

The last time we reviewed Integration Point, one of the twenty-one stops on the 2008 Sourcing Maniacs Vendor Tour, we discussed their global trade solutions and told you they provided another way to get your trade data in order. In that post, we told you about their extensible modularized web-based platform that has effectively solved the core customs, security, and classification challenge as well as the free trade / secure trade zone challenge with solutions that address import and export classification (HTS codes), import documentation requirements, export documentation requirements, C-TPAT, AEO, denied party screening, FTA qualification, duty deferral, customs warehousing, customs control processing, and advance security filing – they have most of what your average multinational based in the US or the EU needs. With regards to three main challenges of global trade — customs, security and classification; free trade / secure trade zones and agreements; and regulatory compliance — they had two nailed.

Since that post, and the Maniacs’ post that followed, they have tackled, and introduced a rather comprehensive, and flexible, solution for compliance and risk management that provides a secure communication channel between you and your supply chain to gather any information you require and apply a risk-based assessment to it. And while the feature set is not yet as rich or as deep as the vendors who tackle compliance and risk as their primary focii — like Aravo, CVM Solutions, Hiperos, Rollstream, SupplierSoft, and others — it is more than sufficient for the majority of global trade organizations that do not yet have an appropriate solution at their disposal.

Like many tools on the market, the solution is survey-based, and allows the user to construct their own surveys for C-TPAT, AEO, SSER, PIP, EMCP, Product Safety, Export End Use, Internal Compliance, Training, or any other compliance initiative, regulatory or otherwise, that they want to track. Each question can be yes/no, multiple choice, check-box list, or list, and lists can have attachments. Each question can be categorized, departmentalized, regionalized, assigned to an industry, given an importance, assigned to a port, assigned a vulnerability, as well as given a type. The questions can be combined into sections, which in turn can be combined into surveys, which can be sent to suppliers, who can then assign each section, or each individual question, to an authorized representative with access to the appropriate information. They can be set up as recurring (as some initiatives, such as C-TPAT have to be re-affirmed yearly), and previous answers can be provided, or hidden to insure a supplier doesn’t just “check the box” without reading the question. In addition, the questions can be formulated in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, or five flavours of Chinese as well as English to support your global supply base. And the system can be configured to send automated reminders to suppliers if they don’t answer in a timely manner, and buyers to let them know that a supplier may need to be contacted.

The solution is integrated with Integration Point’s Supplier Master which allows you to maintain a complete profile for each partner in your supply chain. Each partner, which can be assigned multiple types (such as distributor, freight forwarder, manufacturer, trucking carrier, etc.) can be associated with the compliance programs relevant to it. As a result, your survey can be distributed to all appropriate partners with a single click as well as to predefined partner lists. E-mail, and templating capability, is integrated, and a buyer can choose, and customize, the e-mails to send on survey launch, on reminder, and on completion.

The reporting, which consists of six types of built in reports, is basic, but gets the job done. It allows you to query the status of each survey, against each supplier, to determine which suppliers responded to questions in a manner that implied risk, which questions elicited the most responses of a risky nature, and the overall risk score (determined via user-defined weightings) by survey by supplier, by supplier, and by survey. And if you don’t like the built in reports, you can roll your own with their open query feature that will allow you (or a member of their services team) to define any report you want by way of custom select statements.

Finally, the configurable entry screen allows you to customize the dashboard to insure that you see the relevant data that you need to address, and not data that will lull you into a false sense of security. You can configure it to display the partners with highest risk, the partners who have not answered the most recent survey(s), the risk rating of the most recent surveys, etc. in addition to recent answer activity, sending activity, and a generic statistics summary.

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AECsoft: SIM-Powered e-Negotiation, Part II

In our last post, we discussed AECsoft’s Supplier Information Management platform, which is one of the oldest and most mature solutions on the market (with R&D starting on some aspects five years before CVM Solutions hit the scene in 2002). It stacks up very well in terms of basic SIM capabilities, although some of its competitors like CVM Solutions and Aravo, which chose to stay SIM-centric and to integrate more data feeds (which may or may not have value to your organization, as these feeds will get very specialized after a certain point and have no value to the vast majority of businesses) or more customized program management around SIM-based programs (like compliance, sustainability, and risk), are deeper in terms of specialized SIM applications. However, it’s the only major SIM player that also offers a complete, tightly integrated, e-Negotiation management suite as well which makes it a compelling solution for the mid-market in particular who may not have the money for a best-of-breed SIM platform and a best-of-breed e-Sourcing platform and who can do without decision optimization (or do it on a project basis when needed with a vendor that has a project model) and a pricey data warehouse driven spend analysis solution. (And while I would argue that no-one can do without good spend visibility, for some companies, who don’t have the data and analysis skills in house, sometimes the best solution is a consulting firm who has access to the best spend analysis tools and who does an spend and opportunity assessment for you on a quarterly basis.)

As with most suites on the market, the entry point is a management dashboard that gives you the status of all of your RFX’s (draft, pending, open, closing), auctions (draft, pending, open, closing), vettings (AECsoft’s terminology for compliance [verification] projects), and projects (which is AECsoft’s terminology for any SIM or sourcing project).

The RFX is workflow driven, and guides you through the process. It starts with configuration (title, number, currency, standard payment terms, project dates, etc), description, details, and contact information; moves on to user (buyer representative) selection, supplier invitations, prerequisite definitions, and document attachments; then to actual RFI/RFP/RFQ construction (which can include internal components); and finally to supplier delivery, response evaluation, and (scorecard) summarization. The advantages of the platform is that it can automatically pull in all supplier and product information related to any invited supplier, which makes construction simple and minimizes the pre-qualification and supplier survey effort (as the supplier will simply have to verify that the relevant data is still current and accurate), and automatically push any updated information back to the repository or into an e-Auction if the RFX is being used as a pre-qualification for the reverse auction. The auction tool, which is basic, is similarly straight-forward. One of the big advantage that both tools have is that all RFXs and Auctions can be scheduled, repeated as many times as you like, and fully automated. Some of their clients hold in excess of 40,000 sourcing events a year! Every day they’ll automatically push out a group of items in a category to a pre-qualified set of suppliers (with which they have standing offers) for updated bids. Some items will be pushed out weekly, some monthly, and some quarterly … depending on the category and how often prices tend to change. This allows them to focus the majority of their time on those few dozen to few hundred events which are truly strategic. As you can imagine, this feature is particularly useful in a vertical which does a lot of spot-buys to get best market pricing in categories where prices tend to fluctuate regularly or where prices tend to drop continuously (such as in electronics and computers).

The platform also includes decent library management functionality which can be used to easily track and find projects, documents, templates, vetting groups, and currency exchange rates. The master document library, which tracks all of your documents through meta-data, supports versioning and full meta-data search, and also forms the basis for the limited contract management capabilities offered by the platform. The platform can track your contract templates, contracts, and all relevant metadata, associate the contracts with suppliers, and generate alerts at renewal time.

The platform contains basic scorecarding functionality, built on the same capabilities used to weight and score RFXs. Scorecards can be on suppliers, on buyers, and filled out by buyers or suppliers. They can be filled out by a single individual, or by a team, and the results averaged. Each section can be weighted separately to compute the final score.

Finally, the platform, which can be extensively configured by the AECsoft development team, supports a decent amount of configuration by the administrator within the product itself. Administrative buyers can define and alter workflows, system settings, (SIM) menus (and data categories), permissions, user accounts and roles, category and sub-category questions, commodity codes, dashboard displays, and basic report configurations.

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AECsoft: SIM-Powered e-Negotiation, Part I

AECsoft, a Houston-based provider of Supplier Information Management (that also has offices in Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Shanghai), Supplier Data & Diversity, and e-Negotiation solutions, is a unique platform offering as they have a very competitive (and very configurable) Supplier Information Management (SIM) platform (that can be augmented with third party supplier [diversity] data) as well as a solid e-Negotiation platform that will meet most of the needs of many mid-market companies. Most SIM companies focus mainly on SIM, SRM (Supplier Relationship Management), SPM (Supplier Performance Management), and when they branch out they root into extensive, customized, risk, compliance, or sustainability solutions. Furthermore, most e-Negotiation platforms, once they have gone as deep as they can in terms of surveys, score-carding, and multiple auction formats, branch out into (stronger) spend analysis, contract management, optimization, and (corrective) action management. In comparison, AECsoft has taken a dual approach in its efforts to create what it calls a 360° Supplier Management solution that allows you to discover suppliers, manage their information, use that information in sourcing events, and then manage their performance during contract execution — in a manner that can be customized for each client. Given that they have over 200 customers, including some of the most progressive sourcing organizations in the world, it’s obviously paid off for them to this point, but I have to wonder how they are going to fare going forward given the divergent messaging in the SIM and e-Negotiation spaces and the number of best-of-breed players now competing in each. However, that’s a question for the analysts as we’re concerned about what they have and what they can do for you.

To this end, we’ll start with a review of the Supplier Information Management capabilities, which are used by over 400,000 suppliers that are managed by over 30,000 buyers at over 200 large corporate clients, around half of which are large multi-nationals (and many of which belong to the who’s who of supply chain innovators). SIM is their most mature platform, with development dating back to company inception in 1997 and production dating back to their first implementation in 1999, as well as their most extensive. The platform is setup to let new suppliers self-identify, buyers pre-qualify (before an e-Negotiation event, so the event can focus on negotiations and not discovery), and evaluations to be conducted in a 360° manner if necessary. Compliance can be enforced during the on-boarding process (as registrations will not be marked as complete and ready for review until all fields are filled out and necessary documents uploaded), status can be monitored (as alerts indicating expiring certifications can be set-up at any time and continuously monitored), and reviews can be scheduled in advance and pushed out at any time.

The system can be configured to track any kind of information you want — general, business data, contacts, classifications, safety & insurance, quality, certifications, product & service information, risk and so on. In addition, category/answer specific questions and workflows can be configured for any category, sub-category, or question which is answered with a certain option. For example, if a supplier indicates they supply laboratory equipment, you can ask what kind — balances, centrifuges, pumps, valves, piping and tubing, and if they indicate piping and tubing, you can bring up questions on pressure, diameter, etc. Basically, it’s your standard workflow-driven SIM where the supplier, who can access and update all of their information at any time, maintains its own information, by way of one or more authorized delegates. In addition, when the supplier logs in, the supplier sees all of the outstanding information requests that need to be completed — new requests, certificate updates, data confirmations, scorecards (self-scoring or buyer scoring), and so on. AECsoft put a lot of work into their supplier portal to make sure it was at least as easy for the supplier as it is for the buyer and it shows.

And, of course, the platform can be integrated with multiple external data feeds which capture diversity data, financial/risk data, and OFAC data, among other data sources, and which can automatically check SSN and EIN data in the US.

Finally, the platform is Hybrid SaaS, which means that AECsoft can deploy and host it for you or you can deploy it inside your own four walls. Unless you’re in Finance, Gambling (Casinos), or Pharmaceuticals, and are ultra-concerned about security and have top IT security pros in-house, I would recommend you follow the lead of most of their clients in other verticals and go SaaS. However, should you choose to go in-house, you can take solace in that the current version of the platform is built on .Net 3.5, MS SQL Server, and XML … and there are tens of thousands of developers out there familiar with the technology stack (which is 100% web-based in delivery).

In our next post, we’ll discuss the e-Negotiation platform.

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MCA Solutions – Bringing the Aftermarket Forward, Part II

In Part I, we re-introduced you to MCA Solutions, a Philadelphia, PA company that specializes in after market service (and service parts) optimization, and noted that they were still going strong despite some recent shake-ups in the market (and the noteable acquisition of Servigistics and Click Commerce by Marlin Equity Partners, who also acquired Emptoris not too long ago). We noted that, in addition to completing a strong SAP integration, they’ve also added a considerable amount of new functionality in the last two years around reporting, plan analysis, and reporting management.

Since we covered their new reporting and plan analysis solution in the last part, today we’re going to cover their performance management solution. Since you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and the best way to measure is often with a balanced scorecard, it’s based on scorecards, but since managers don’t like columns of numbers, it’s implemented using a dashboard, but since MCA agrees with me that traditional dashboards are inherently dangerous and dysfunctional, they realized that the only way the application would be truly useful was if it clearly identified not what was right, but what was wrong (since a goal of after-market service is exception-based management so that you only expend resources where needed). More importantly, the scorecard dashboard would only be useful if it allowed you to quickly discern what was wrong and do something about it. So what MCA built is a dashboard scorecard that not only highlights any metric that is out of bounds in red, but an interactive graphical scorecard that allows you to drill down into the metric retrieve all of the data associated with that metric in a single click.

Just like you can drill into a spend cube, you can drill into any metric on the scorecard. The first level drill will bring up all of the metrics the high level dashboard is composed of, and highlight which metrics are a problem. You can then drill into those metrics and bring up all of the associated raw data. So, if you brought up the scorecard and saw on-time delivery was only 80%, when anything under 90% is unacceptable, you could drill in and see the problem ports are LA and New Orleans and that San Diego, Washington, Vancouver, Boston, and Halifax were all meeting or exceeding their on-time delivery targets. You could drill in again and see that at these ports, most of the late deliveries were from West Coast Warblers and East Cost Easies and instantly know that either these suppliers have performance problems or that you’re not allowing them enough time in your inventory network design to transport the parts require to replenish your North American stock from your foreign suppliers. But since you can also drill into the application and the underlying model associated with any part, location, or supplier you can quickly determine if it’s a performance problem or a network design flaw. For instance, lets say you only allow 14 days for replenishment of goods in your LA warehouses from Shenzhen. Considering that sailing time is typically 12-15 days, and that it probably takes at least a day to get your goods unloaded at the port, and another for them to clear customs, get loaded onto the truck, and transported to your warehouse, there’s no way you’re going to get that part in less than 14 days by sea and it’s probably going to take at least 17 days on average, especially if these carriers are running slower ships. Then you know you need to adjust your model, and measure the supplier against a more reasonable delivery time. But if you are allowing 21 days, and your third party carrier is consistently late, then you have a supplier performance problem.

Moreover, the scorecard dashboard is completely customizeable. Each component is actually a dashboard report, and with their new flexible reporting capability, you can build any report you want. So you can design the dashboard to focus only on reporting problems. That way you can ignore the 90% of your network that is running smoothly and dive right into the 10% that isn’t running right, analyze the situation, revise the model, analyze the revision, implement an improvement, and see if the situation improves over time. If not, you can dive right in and try again. And if everything looks too good, you can define more metrics, more sanity checks, and find new problems to work on. Which is precisely what an actionable scorecard should allow you to do!

And your suppliers in China and Japan can use it too. The product is double-byte Unicode compliant and, in addition to a number of European languages, has also been translated into Mandarin and Japanese. With these recent improvements, you should be able to plug it right into your follow-the-sun operation and, once it’s configured and your data is complete, close the loop on your end-to-end after market service (parts) operation.

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MCA Solutions – Bringing the Aftermarket Forward, Part I

MCA Solutions, a Philadelphia, PA company that specializes in after market service (and service parts) optimization, is still going strong despite the recent struggles of a few of its direct competitors (namely Click Commerce and Servigistics who were recently acquired by Marlin Equity Partners). If anything, the recession (although it did considerably lengthen the sales cycle) only bolstered the need for after market service (as no one could afford new equipment) and optimization thereof (as everyone is strapped for cash and every penny counts).

As I indicated in my first post on MCA Solutions and their strategic service parts management platform, many large manufacturing, semiconductor, high-tech, aerospace, defense, and oil & gas companies often have tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars tied up in inventory in their attempts to meet specified service levels, and every dollar in inventory costs them money in overhead. Since many of these companies typically have 10% to 20% more inventory than they need, they’re tying up tens of millions of dollars in working capital needlessly as well as throwing away millions of dollars in inventory holding costs — a situation which is easily remedied by a service level optimization platform that can optimize your multi-echelon parts inventory storage network such that your contracted service levels are met but your costs are minimized. Furthermore, as per the value of after market service in a down economy, done right, this optimization will also improve cash flow by roughly 10%, reduce inventory by 15% to 50%, and even improve service levels by 5% to 20%.

Since the last time I covered MCA in depth, which was almost two years ago, they’ve made a number of significant enhancements to their platform, the most notable being flex reporting, performance management, and plan analysis. Of these, flex reporting and plan analysis excite me the most, because the former lets you construct any report you can imagine (if you’re willing to write some SQL*) and the latter lets you build, optimize, and compare as many what-if scenarios as you want, which is the (one of the) most powerful feature(s) of any good optimization platform.

Their plan analysis tool not only allows you to define your service parts strategy (fill rates, inventory/investment caps, number of echelons to consider simultaneously in stock planning, etc.) and run an analysis on that strategy (to determine total cost and inventory distribution), and not only allows you to compare one strategy against another (how much do I save by sacrificing 1% of fill rate? how does inventory distribution change? etc.), but also allows you to define a rules-based sanity check that can be run against every model and the resulting inventory solution. For example, if the inventory levels change by more than 20%, the overall investment changes by more than 10%, shortages or excesses at any location exceed pre-defined maximums, etc., the product will immediately warn you that the new model might not be an acceptable replacement over the current one. Also, each of these rules can be defined by location, SKU (or family), or segment (or lane), which gives you a lot of flexibility in your analysis and sanity checks. (Other checks can include replacement rate, forecasting model [parameters], export mode, horizon, manual overrides, time factors, intermittence, thresholds, and other relevant measures tracked and/or computed by the platform.) Furthermore, they’ve also added the ability to generate plans by Average Customer Wait Times, which is becoming important in aerospace and defense, oil and gas, and other sectors where you have equipment that can’t be unavailable for more than a very short amount of time and service (availability) levels aren’t good enough.

While we’re talking analysis, they’ve also added a new multi-period budget report which is a system generated report that is very useful as it not only calculates total forecast, condemnation forecast, repair forecast, overall metrics, TSL, average inventory position, scheduled demand, new buy, and cost across your entire operation to anywhere between 12 and 36 months in the future, but does so using a successive series of automated optimizations where the output of one period is used as the input to the next. It will take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to run, but it clearly allows you to see the long term effects of any change to your aftermarket service (parts) strategy.

In the next post, we’ll talk about their new performance management solution.

* Yes, I’ll admit that I’m not your average user but I have to applaud them for acknowledging their expertise is not in the creation of report builders, that no set of canned reports, no matter how extensive, will please everyone, and that the right thing to do is expose the schema and let power users do what they want — which isn’t dangerous when you also give them the ability to make as many copies (partial or full) of the database as they want and to mess around with the copies, and not the production data.

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