Category Archives: Vendor Review

Decideware: Agency Performance Management Experts

DecideWare, an Australian Company (with offices in the US and the UK) that dubs itself as a Supplier Performance Expert with a Scorecard Deployment Service, offers a niche Vendor Management Solution that excels in managing certain types of vendors. Specifically, their niche solution, which started out as a niche play in HR Management, is used globally by a number of Fortune 500 Multi-Nationals — which include P&G, Dell, Pfizer, Target, and Wal-Mart — to manage their vendor relationships, and their Agency relationships in particular.

Their uniquely designed solution — which allows for simultaneous 360° degree assessments and self-assessments between buyers, agencies, and vendors (which allow a buyer to rate an agency who can self-assess while it rates the buyer and a third party vendor, such as a print shop, which can rate the agency in turn) — is built on the ultimate application of the KIS(S) (Keep It Simple, Stupid) philosophy. Knowing that their target market are not very technically sophisticated, they opted for the 80% solution, free of bells and whistles, with easy SaaS deployment and an easier-to-follow step-by-step methodology for building vendor capability repositories, scopes of work, vendor assessments, and reports that allow vendor performance to be quickly determined, performance gaps immediately identified, and a vendor’s relative performance graphed against their competitors.

While the base capabilities may not exceed the capabilities of a standard RFX tool with extensive survey creation (which they have), process management (which the tool is built around), and reporting capabilities (which are fairly extensive), the extensive amount of industry knowledge they’ve built in for their niche markets is impressive. They understand that organizations have units, geography, account structures, account types, locations, functions, and accounts; that profiles need criteria, contacts, priorities, questions, and documents; that accounts have definitions, assessors, and reviews; and that business people in non-technical areas of the business like lots of ready-to-use pre-packaged reports and easy-to-use drop down interfaces for drilling into performance data and performing gap analysis. The tool literally walks an administrator through the definition of a vendor capability database, a scope of work, and an assessment step-by-step. (And the tool is even more streamlined for the assessors.)

All of these tools have all of the basic capabilities, and a few advanced ones, that you would expect in a scorecard-based on-demand performance management tool. The vendor capability database, which is a streamlined Supplier Information Management (SIM) tool, allows you to approve supplier (agency) representatives to manage their supplier profiles. The scopes of work (or, for us in North America, statements of work) module allows you to define the services, initiatives, and deliverables that are required, broken down by organizational unit, type, and geography, as well as the details of the quotes required (line items, fees, expenses, etc.), with fees that can be broken down by type and include overhead rate, profit margin, and total hours and benefits for FTE quotes. And the assessment creator, which is part of their Relationship Optimizer, includes all of your standard RFX Survey creation features including configurable variable weight scales, the ability to include quantitative measures, and the ability to define weightings to each section and each component question. The tool contains significant support for comments and detailed explanations for questions as the goal is to take the qualitative and fuzzy and generate numeric scores that are quantitative and precise which can be used to generate actionable intelligence for semi-annual, or quarterly, performance reviews.

In summary, while a number of providers might offer more powerful Supplier Information Management (SIM), RFX, Reporting, or Supplier Performance Management (SPM), the tool is exceptionally well defined for the niche Vendor Management Spaces DecideWare is going after. And their client list, most of whom have rolled out the solution globally, speaks for itself — as will the case studies from Pfizer and Dell that they will be releasing in the near future.

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EC Sourcing Makes Sourcing Easy and Affordable

Today I’m going to briefly introduce you to yet another e-Sourcing company that you just might want to consider if you’re a mid-market company who has yet to adopt a sourcing solution and wants to get started with something that’s easy to use, easier to manage, and easier still on the budget. With pricing starting around 3K a month (depending on the size of your company and the number of licenses you need), you can get full access to a basic e-Negotiation suite with RFX, Auctions, Project Management, a Contract Repository, and Corrective Action Reporting with the EC Sourcing Group solution. And while it may not have as many features as some of the other platforms on the market, it doesn’t have the price tag either. (A number of companies quote twice as much for fundamentally the same functionality.)

In fact, EC Sourcing made a conscious decision to keep the platform as lightweight, straight-forward, and obvious as possible. Designed by sourcing consultants, they wanted a no-fuss, no muss, no training required platform that was comfortable to people familiar with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Project. They studied the process, did their research, and decided to build the 80% solution which would include everything you need and everything you would want 80% of the time. Rarely used, complex features that only cluttered the screen or confused the average user were purposely not included. As a result it’s smooth, slick, and surprisingly effective in their target market.

RFX allows you to create the RFI, RFP, or RFQ you need on a section-by-section basis, from scratch or from a template, define scoring, customize supplier views, add attachments, collectively score responses as a group, view supplier attachments, re-calculate scores based on alternate weightings, generate supplier scorecards, and view a number of different response and/or scoring based reports. As with your standard RFX, each section and question can be weighted independently, and it will even generate the weights dynamically if you would rather define priorities than try to insure that all of the weights add up to 100. You can define auto-scoring rules for questions based on predefined response selections, score manually, or score based upon the weighted average score assigned by the RFX team. You can also use formulas. With respect to RFQs, it has a number of built-in features to make bid collection and validation simple. You can define pricing formats, which can be based on custom formulas, bid validation rules, and bid tables for complex bids that involve multiple plants, currencies, or volume breaks. You can then view the bids using a number of built in reports and formats that let you see just what you need to see the way you want to see it. With all of your standard capabilities, it gets the job done.

In addition, RFXs can be multi-round and you can create custom feedback reports that each supplier can view between rounds which can let the supplier know their rank, quartile, and variance range with respect to each item or lot. And everything can be exported to and imported from Excel. Auction is built on top of RFX and includes the ability to define custom baskets (lots), sessions (for each basket), and settings (time limits, time extension rules, stopping rules, etc.). You can also configure what the supplier sees or doesn’t see. Reporting can be table based or graphical.

Project Management includes the ability to define projects — which include suppliers, users, RFX’s and/or Auctions; message with users and suppliers — through integrated message boxes and e-mails; and define notifications in addition to standard project management features — such as timelines, state tracking, and document management. And the platform includes all of your standard RFI (comparison and scorecards), administrative (suppliers, users, statutes, etc.), and bid analysis (baseline spend, pricing summary, item level comparisons, round comparisons, etc.) reports and most of the reports allow filtering on any entity row or column.

And even though they are primarily serving the US market at this point, they are expanding into Europe, currently support 4 languages, are almost finished translating languages 5 and 6, and will support 10 languages in the near future (including Unicode languages). They are also in the process of updating and streamlining the UI to keep it as simple and easy to use as possible (and beginning R&D on a brand new module).

In summary, there’s nothing you haven’t read about before on SI, except the price tag. I’ve only demoed one other solution in the last year with the same breadth of capability in a self-service SaaS model that starts in their quoted price range. And while it might not have the same depth as many other solutions, or include more advanced sourcing modules, for many mid-sized companies just starting on their sourcing journey (and many more without complex categories), it will meet their needs.

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RollStream: Steamrolling Your Compliance Problems into Submission

Just before the last summer solstice, I introduced you to Rollstream, a provider of a new SIM-centric Enterprise Community Management platform you can roll out to your community. Since then, they’ve been hard at work extending the capabilities of their Enterprise Community Management platform to be more useful and solve new problems.

Specifically, after listening to their customers, they decided to tackle the recurring problems of dispute management and compliance management, the latter of which is becoming a big issue with the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act that came into effect on January 15. (That’s right, if you’re importing consumer goods you have to worry about the 10+2 security filing and CPSIA because violations of either can result in six figure plus fines. That’s right, a single violation of either can result in fines in excess of $100,000!)

Building on their new workspace capability that was launched last fall, which is conceptually similar to Salesforce Chatter, Microsoft Sharepoint, and business-focussed social networks like Linked-In (but implemented in a manner more conducive to their unique ECM platform), these new applications allow these often difficult and time-consuming problems to be solved simply and efficiently in a collaborative on-line environment where all parties can participate.

The workspaces capability, which builds on their base platform that allows you to manage suppliers and partners, their profiles, and associated data, attempts to bring together the best capabilities of modern social networking sites to allow you to hold, manage, and keep track of online conversations that, without the platform, would need to happen offline. It incorporates forum capabilities that allow for conversations, multimedia — which allows you to include audio and video for training purposes, survey capabilities, task and project driven event calendars, file management capabilities, and activity state tracking capabilities. It enhances the supplier on-boarding experience as your supplier can feel like it’s part of the initiative and interact with your global team on-line, 24 hours a day.

Based on this new workspace capability, Rollstream has built it’s new dispute resolution management solution, which will hit general release in a month or two. Based on the repeated observation from their customers that there are millions to be saved if shortages, damages, and mis-shipments can be identified immediately on delivery and resolutions reached before an overpayment is made, Rollstream has developed a collaborative environment where a warehouse worker can raise an issue as soon as it’s noticed and kick-start a resolution process before a payment is made. While it won’t solve all overpayment issues (since off-contract pricing — especially in “best price” contracts, prohibited substitutions, and downright fraud can be difficult to detect at time of delivery), a number of their customers expect to save a few Million a year simply by preventing overpayments for short, damaged, or incorrect shipments. The solution is built around a configurable dashboard that allows you to automatically sort and prioritize issues according to your rules (which can be based on status, merchandise disposition, issue date, and / or value and other attributes) which can be searched on any attribute. All affected parties can query, see, and comment on issues until an owner or administrator determines that the issue is resolved. It’s quite simple in implementation, but getting an open dialogue on the issue started as soon as possible is a powerful tool in the quest for a successful resolution.

The new compliance solution, which will be released next quarter, is based on their new Certificate Exchange Network which solves the major problem with most current compliance solutions. In most SIM platforms, a buyer ensures compliance by having their supplier upload their compliance certificate. This sounds fine until you realize that large CPG suppliers have thousands of customers that need compliance certificates for dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of SKUs. With a buyer-focussed solution, a supplier needs a team of data entry clerks who do nothing all day but upload copies of compliance certificates until they start the process all over again when the compliance certificates are renewed. To try and solve this problem, some larger CPG suppliers have created their own compliance certificate portals that their customers can log into to search for compliance certificates on their own, but since CPG suppliers are not software companies, this solution usually isn’t any better. Customers don’t always know the right SKU or search term, the supplier’s compliance team is not automatically notified when a certificate expires, and poor processes often result in compliance certificates not getting included in a timely fashion. Customers waste time, don’t find anything, and still have to contact the supplier team to help them find, or, in many cases, upload the certificate. And since not all suppliers have this portal, the customer still has to maintain their solution, download the certificate from the supplier, and include it in their own portal to track status, receive expiry notifications, and generate accurate reports.

In the Rollstream solution, it’s a certificate exchange network and a buyer can simultaneously see, and search, all certificates from all suppliers it does business with (who only have to set a flag to give a buyer access) and a supplier has single-point access to all buyers it does business with (to which it can push updates or check the existence of any compliance certificates a buyer might need to import the product into a country). Like the dispute resolution management solution, it’s a very simple solution built on profiles and dashboards that is easily searchable at the global, supplier, and item level across all company, product, and component fields. But sometimes, that’s what’s needed.

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Bravo: Analysis and Supplier Performance Management for Contract Compliance

Last month, I told you how BravoSolution Collaboratively Optimized Its Way onto the doctor‘s Short List. Today, I’m going to discuss their (Spend) Analysis, Supplier Performance Management, and Contract Compliance Solutions to give you a broader view of their solution suite.

To get straight to the point, their spend analysis (console) solution, which takes a standard reporting-based approach, and which includes over 60 standard report templates, is nothing special, but their analysis administration tool, the Transformation Designer, is one of the most powerful administration interfaces I’ve seen in a web-based analysis solution. Most providers tout their “leading auto-cleansing, auto-classification, and auto-enrichment” solutions as if they’re the be-all-and-end-all, but those who truly understand spend analysis realize that you can’t auto-cleanse, auto-classify, and auto-enrich everything, no matter how many rules are in your repository or how many billions of transactions your provider has classified. (And those who fall for that line are lucky if mapping accuracy even approaches 80%.)

Every company is different, every department is different, every employee is different, and every transaction is different. That’s why you have 19 different representations of IBM in your supplier master. Furthermore, you don’t buy the same SKUs from the same suppliers with every order. So even if you had a “perfect” set of automatic mapping rules today, they’d be broken tomorrow. You have to continually manage and maintain your data or your reports will be useless. And Bravo’s Transformation Designer allows your data administrator(s) to do all that.

Bravo’s Transformation Designer allows you to select your data sources, define the raw data tables, capture the raw data fields, profile the data, and define custom mapping and transformation rules on the data before it populates your repository. You can also define a bevy of checks (null, range, date, acceptable values, duplicate, etc) and define your rules based on transformations (that can use substrings, calculations, and lookups). The rules can be layered, with higher priority rules taking precedence and lower priority rules kicking in when there are no higher priority rules. (So you can start with the classic “secret sauce” of map the vendors, map the GL codes, map the vendors + GL codes, and map the exceptions and have the rules applied in reverse order.)

In addition to supporting your standard “knowledge base” of auto-classification rules (which includes mappings, and families, for tens of millions of suppliers and even more standard items), which you can use to start your mapping journey, it also supports automated text classification methods based on advanced statistical algorithms. A proper combination of all three rule types — knowledge base for standard vendor and GL code mappings, statistical rules for automated mapping of unrecognized transactions (that can be mapped with high statistical accuracy), and custom hand-coded direct mapping rules for the exceptions — will get you very high classification accuracy with very little work. Especially since you can use their rules engine to quickly identify exceptions and define direct mapping rules that take care of them. And any time you identify a mis-mapping, you can define a new rule to re-map it. (New rules are immediately added to an asynchronous mapping queue and the queue is processed continuously, which allows for near real-time updates. No waiting for the monthly refresh.)

The Analysis Console also works on their supplier performance data. Bravo Solution is a mature provider of SPM, having been offering a solution since 2001. While it might not be broader or deeper than any of the newer pure SPM solution plays (SupplierSoft, Aravo, Hiperos, etc.), they have a history of successful implementations. (And more importantly, how deep is a SPM solution anyway? As long as it captures data, calculates metrics, allows you to create month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year, and trend reports on the metrics, allows you to share that data with your supplier(s), and allows you to collaborate on action plans in a virtual collaboration environment, what else is critical to your average organization just starting on an SPM journey?) With regards to SPM, Bravo has your bases covered. It’s nothing fancy, but it will more than get the job done.

This brings us to Contract Compliance. Their solution can automatically load cleansed GPO contract data, normalize the data based on supplier families and parent-child company organization relationships, and extract line-items and SKUs. If you integrate with your purchasing system, the solution will automatically match purchases to contracts and flag exceptions. It also supports deep embedding with your e-Procurement system and can be used to identify contracts, price levels, and exceptions before a PO is issued. But the best part is the deep integration that is currently being developed between the Analytics Console, SPM Module and Contract Compliance Modules. You’ll be able to analyze contract compliance against supplier performance at any time, over any time period, and see if you’re getting the value you expected from the contract — and then use this information at contract renewal / resourcing time.

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iValua: Tackling End-to-End Sourcing And Procurement, Part II

In my last post, I described how iValua, a ten year old French software and solutions company, has one of the broadest supply management suites on the market today. From RFX to payment, the majority of the key steps in the sourcing and procurement cycle are covered in one of iValua’s many solution modules. And while it is true that most of the modules aren’t very deep, it’s also true that many small and mid-sized companies, and even some of the larger Global 3000’s that don’t have that many complicated buys, don’t need deep functionality where sourcing and procurement is concerned. Over thirty of France’s largest companies use the solution, including Air France Industries, La Poste, and Arcelor Mittal, the largest steel company in the world.

In this post, I’m going to describe some of the capabilities of the product in more detail. But first, some global capabilities. The platform, which is built on .Net, is delivered via SaaS through your browser. As a result, it is accessible anywhere. Many of the screens are built using a widget-based architecture and, like dashboards, the layouts are customizable by each user. The user can sort by, show, and hide any column of any table. Quick search and advanced search is available for every screen (and table), a navigation history is maintained for quick back-tracking, and the user can customize a favorites link for quick access to specific screens and reports. Finally, all data can be exported to Excel and all supported objects (bids, contracts, purchase orders, invoices, payments, reports, etc.) can be imported from Excel as well.

But the best platform-wide capability is the ability for the platform to be integrated to any ERP, Database, or external data source (due to the existence of appropriate abstraction layers in the platform). Before iValua decided to become a provider of a SaaS supply management platform, they were a custom software development shop. As a result, they had deep development skills and broad experience with a number of platforms. Thus, when they decided to focus on supply management, they were able to do custom integrations for each client. Now that they have over 100 customers, they have integrated with almost every major ERP and Relational Database in France, most of the major ERPs and Relational Databases in Europe, and some of the major ERPs and Relational Databases in North America. If they haven’t integrated with your environment yet, it probably won’t take them long to do so. Plus, using their partnerships with Bureau Van Dijk, D&B/Altares, Vigeo, and EcoVadis, they can enrich your supplier related data when they pull your data in.

Sourcing

Sourcing starts with the definition of a project. Once basic information is defined (type, process, owner, dates, and scope), the owner can define a team, create a message center, define currencies, outline a schedule, and keep track of relevant documents. Then the user can invite suppliers, create RFXs with selection and evaluation criteria, track responses, save analysis, create awards, and create an implementation plan. RFXs and Auctions support multiple lots and multiple rounds and the buyer can determine whether or not suppliers can see bids, whether or not the bids are displayed anonymously, and when they can see the bids.

Procurement

In addition to requisitions, budgets, purchase orders, expense reports, invoices, goods receipts and recurring receivables, the procurement application supports catalog-based buying. The system can be integrated with any EDI, XML, or punch-out catalog, which can be augmented with user-defined items (which could include custom items or services defined in contracts). The expense reporting module supports p-cards, advance requests, standard expense, and travel expense reports. In addition, a supplier evaluation form can be attached to every purchase order (in addition to every award and contract) and reports can be run at the purchase order level, award and contract level, and global supplier level.

Reporting

They have a very extensive reporting tool that allows you to look at data over the time periods of your choice (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly), in the organizations of your choice, in the spend category families of your choice, for the suppliers of your choice, along the dimensions, or axes, of your choice in a wide variety of tabular and graphical formats. Basically, the application builds a master spend cube and allows you to view any sub-cube, or sub-cube summary of your choice. While it might not allow you to do arbitrary spend/data analysis, it will more than satisfy your average procurement professional and manager. (And you could always augment the suite with off-line analysis for your senior analysts if you needed.)

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