Category Archives: Vendor Review

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.

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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.

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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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