Category Archives: Vendor Review

Rosslyn Analytics – Taking Analytics-Based Insights to the Masses

I have to say that I am quite impressed with Rosslyn Analytics‘ spend analysis platform and their overall approach to the problem as compared to many of the spend analysis providers in the space, especially given the relative youth of the platform. And no, it has nothing to do with their UI, graphics, or other eye candy that, as you know, accounts for zero points of credit as far as I am concerned (despite the fact that some bloggers and analysts apparently go Gaga for fancy graphics). Heck, I’m not even going to give them points for ease of use, because that’s a basic requirement of any modern supply management application.

So why am I impressed with Rosslyn? Vision. Clarity. Execution.

Rosslyn understands that sustainable results only emerge en-masse when you enable the masses, your platform has to evolve as needs evolve, every organization is different, and even if it every organization wasn’t different, you still can’t do everything yourself, and it shows in their platform and their delivery there-of.

Rosslyn believes that you don’t have spend visibility unless that visibility is available to, and understood by, everyone in the organization. As a result, they not only sell their platform using an unlimited access model, but designed the basics of their platform to be self-explanatory to the point that anyone — be it a procurement, finance, accounts payable, accounts receivable, or sales user — can load it up and intuitively find a report on the aspects of spend or organization performance relevant to them. Their vision is to provide the foundations of a platform that everyone can use to make more informed decisions.

Rosslyn also believes that you can’t make good decisions unless you have a complete set of relevant data. As a result, they have not only streamlined extract and upload for over 30 of the most common ERP and MRP systems, but they have also built a rules-based platform that allows them to integrate with new systems in under a day, on average. They are able to automatically extend your data with D&B data, other third party index data, and even your own proprietary indexes if you have them. And cleansing is built in, as it should be, because the point, as I have stressed over and over again, is analysis. As a result, you not only see an integrated view of your data, but you have the ability to augment it with non-spend data and give it context, because A/P and invoice data is just the beginning.

Rosslyn is committed to insuring that each and every customer gets rapid results, and their execution speaks for itself. Not only are they able to get even the largest companies up, running, and fully operational — with an average refresh rate less than 24 hours (maxing out at 72 hours, which compares very well with the industry average of 4-5 weeks for most of the spend visibility platforms on the market) — in two to three weeks, but most of their customers see ROI in under 8 weeks. Furthermore, while most organizations will start with only 10 to 20 users, they find that the number of users increases 10-fold within 3 months. In addition, they are constantly upgrading their fully cloud-based multi-tenant SaaS solution with new features, with major upgrades every quarter and minor upgrades every few weeks. Sometimes they add new reports and reporting capabilities “seemingly overnight” to meet the evolving needs of their user base.

And while the platform may not do everything you might want (but then again, what platform will), you can take comfort in the facts that (1) it’s as good as the majority of the spend analysis platforms on the market and that (2) Rosslyn understands you can’t do everything. Thus, while some of the platforms are trying to broaden their footprint and do everything, Rosslyn is staying focussed on spend visibility and working with third-party e-Procurement platform providers to give you a complete solution. Furthermore, while some platforms will make it nearly impossible to get your data out in an effort to lock you into their solution exclusively, Rosslyn makes it just as easy to get your data out of their platform as they do to get your data in. Recognizing that some users will always be more comfortable with Excel, that power analysts will always be trying to come up with new ways to analyze data that current platforms don’t yet address, and that some corporations have invested Millions in proprietary data warehouses and business intelligence platforms, Rosslyn supports exports to a number of standard data formats (XLS, CSV, PDF, etc.) and supports full bi-directional integration with your data warehouses. (They can extract your data, cleanse, classify, and augment it with their rules-based classification engine, and push it back in automatically on a regular refresh cycle.)

In Part II, I will describe the built in capabilities of the platform as it exists now, and some of the exciting developments you’ll see next quarter.

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Trade Extensions Demonstrates Optimization is Not Just for the Private Sector

As I just finished my recent series on The Role of Optimization in Strategic Sourcing, I wanted to run a few recent case studies to demonstrate the power and benefits of optimization to make it clear just what you’re missing by not using this wonderful piece of sourcing technology. Since I talk with some of the people at Trade Extensions regularly, I decided to ask them since it seemed like the quickest (and easiest) way to get what I wanted.

Now, I must say that I was a little surprised by what I received, and you might be as well. Now, many of you probably know that Trade Extensions powers BidSmart by Schneider Logistics, that it is used by A.T. Kearney in many of their high-profile consulting engagements and that, like their peers, they have several of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the world as clients. What you may not know is that they also have a significant number of public sector clients in Scandinavia, including the cities of Stockholm and Gothenburg, Greater Stockholm Public Transport and The Swedish National Traffic Agency. The case studies I received detail just a few of their successes within this sector.

Even though optimization isn’t restricted in terms of applicability, when you consider that:

  • most public sector operations, at least in North America, are woefully behind the private sector
  • most public sector operations, at least in North America, require the “lowest bidder” to win the award, no matter how unattractive their bid might be or how poor their past performance was
  • most public sector operations, at least in North America, have so much red tape and politics at play that getting the cross-functional team on-board necessary for success is a pipe dream

the last thing I was expecting was a set of public sector case studies.

So what did optimization do for the very forward-thinking Swedish public sector?

  1. It reduced the cost of cleaning services by over 6%.
    This amounted to a savings of over 200,000 Euros of up-front saving plus considerable on-going administrative savings as the ability to accept a package bid reduced the number of contracts that had to be administered from 42 to 1!
  2. It reduced the cost of bus services by over 1,000,000 Euros.
    While the average cost reduction was only 2.4%, in the public sector where union wages rise every year (with the cost of petrol [gas])), that’s pretty good — especially when the routes for a bus service are fixed!
  3. It reduced the cost of road resurfacing (while reducing the risk of possible collusion between suppliers) by over 1,000,000 Euros!
    Again, while the average cost reduction was only 2.7%, since union wages and the cost of materials rise every year, this is also quite good! Also, the design of the event (a large number of contracts were split into 2 separate contracts, one for the production and delivery of asphalt to a specific site, and one for the laying of the asphalt) had the desired effect in terms of allowing smaller suppliers to participate in the event.
  4. It reduced the cost of domestic travel (w.r.t. flights) by over 55%!
    Before the Trade Extensions event, which allowed bidders to submit bids on single contracts or a combination of contracts, the average contract cost for the Swedish National Public Transport Agency for the long distance public transport system was about 13,500,000 Euros a year. After the combinatorial event which considered 27 bids from 8 bidders, the cost was reduced to about 6,000,000 Euros a year! Incredible!

If you want more information, feel free to contact Chetan Raniga, Business Development Manager (Americas) at your convenience. He’ll be happy to discuss these, and other, sourcing categories (and case studies) with you.

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BravoSolution Collaboratively Optimizes Its Way onto the doctor’s Short List

As many of you know, there are not many vendors out there that (claim to) offer strategic sourcing decision optimization, and fewer still that meet the doctor‘s basic requirements for a strategic sourcing decision optimization platform. Up until a few days ago, I could only certify six such solutions, though I suspected BravoSolution, especially with its recent acquisition of VerticalNet, made the grade as I knew both were close. However, with the recent addition of the infamous Paul Martyn (formerly of CombineNet fame) as VP Marketing, BravoSolution has been reaching out to analysts and bloggers alike and I received the demo I needed to certify BravoSolution (and it’s Collaborative Sourcing platform) as one of the doctor‘s Optimization Sourcing Samurai.

I’ll keep this post fairly short since, by now, you all know the minimum requirements for a strategic sourcing decision optimization (SSDO) solution, and thus what the BravoSolution Collaborative Optimization platform offers by definition, which are:

  1. solid mathematical foundations,
  2. true cost modelling,
  3. sophisticated constraint analysis, and
    • capacity
    • basic allocation
    • risk mitigation allocation
    • qualitative
  4. what-if capability.

What I will point out is the following:

  • They have one of the easiest-to-use constraint definition UIs
    Not only is it wizard-driven, but they have their constraint categories broken down into four primary categories and 15 sub-categories. In addition, their capacity switches and supplier and lane filters make it really easy to define capacity constraints and supplier exclusions.
  • Their switches make it incredibly easy to construct scenarios from varied data sets.
    They have four types of scenario switches:

    1. Functional
      which let you determine whether or not you want to include bundles (to allow you to compare bids with and without bundles), volume discounts, and capacity constraints
    2. Price Component
      which allow you to select your baseline scenario data and whether or not to include (projected) fuel surcharges
    3. Demand Component
      which lets you switch between different historical and forecast volumes
    4. Filters
      which act similar to other providers’ attributes and allow you to determine whether or not you want to include suppliers, groups, carriers etc. and (automatically) define constraints that would exclude new suppliers, intermodal carriers, or suppliers without a valid contract status or force the inclusion of WMOB suppliers, etc.
  • They have a very extensive library of built in reports
    Not only do they have full-featured comparison reports (like any good SSDO vendor), award detail reports, carrier reports, but they have reports by business unit, geography, bid attribute, lane, incumbent, and scenario detail. The last report makes it easy to determine the differences between two scenarios (which is necessary to understand the cost differential) and their award reports include cost differentials that allow a negotiator to tell a supplier how much their prices would have to decrease in order to get an award.
  • They have a very extensive help library.
    The help library has information tailored to each screen, each constraint, and each option and includes a discussion of the possible ramifications of each constraint and option on the model as a whole.

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B2B Connex: e-Document Management for Small & Mid-Size Manufacturers

B2B Connex provides a web-based sourcing and procurement document management solution that is a great fit for all types of small and mid-size manufacturing organizations that need simple e-Sourcing and e-Procurement functionality at a low price tag. It’s basic portal solution, that plugs in to your existing ERP & MRP solution, can be acquired for as little as $30,000 (plus 20% annual maintenance) for a small operation. Mid-size operations are generally priced by the number of locations and users, but even their larger customers don’t pay much more than 100K. (Pure SaaS configurations and pricing are also available, but most of customers with traditional on-site ERPs/MRPs generally prefer on-site installations.)

Designed to fill the niche in the small and smaller mid-sized business market left by the big end-to-end e-Sourcing and e-Procurement suite vendors whose solutions often come with a big price tag, the B2B Connex solution allows you to easily manage the following e-Document types (among others) and efficiently conduct your day-to-day procurement operations.

  • RFQs
  • Purchase Orders
  • Kanban Orders
  • Shipment Notices
  • Payment Inquiries
  • Invoices

In addition, it can also handle the CRM side of your business and allow you to manage the following e-Document types (among others):

  • Inbound RFQs
  • Sales Orders
  • Inbound Shipment Inquiries

It’s implemented as a simple web-based portal solution, that can be accessed as needed by your procurement personnel, and it integrates with your back-end ERP and/or MRP systems. (Right now, they support about a dozen ERP/MRP systems with no or minimal configuration work, including SAP, Oracle, JDE, Intuit, Avantis, and Mapics.) And since it handles all the key document types, it allows you to do m-way matching and insure that the invoices are accurate (and represent actual shipments and agreed upon pricing) before you pay them. Since the lack of this capability is one of the two biggest reasons that up to 60% of negotiated savings never materialize (with the other being maverick spending), it’s a good one to have!

In addition to document status (such as new, acknowledged, reviewed, accepted, etc.), the system also supports state management, and a supplier can, for example, accept, reject, or mark each line item for negotiation on a purchase order. This is a useful feature for spot buying, which is common for MRO, SG&A, and low dollar spending in smaller organizations. Also, each e-Document can have an unlimited number of e-Document attachments, so your RFQs can contain detailed item descriptions and sample contracts and your purchase orders can contain detailed specifications and shipment terms and conditions, etc.

If you’re a small or smaller mid-size manufacturer still on EDI and holding off on an e-Procurement system because you think it’s too extensive for your needs, or you think it won’t integrate with your ERP/MRP, or you think you’re too small for such a solution, it’s certainly a system you should check out. Plus, they have an ROI guarantee. If the system does not pay for itself in a year, they’ll refund the purchase price. However, considering the implementation of even a basic e-Procurement e-Document management system such as this generally comes with at least a 25% productivity improvement across your Procurement department, it’s pretty hard not to see savings (especially since the automatic matching will reduce payment errors and the built-in e-Negotiation capabilities on spot buys will help you get price reductions).

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SupplierSoft and its Supplier Process Management Solution

Last year, the Sourcing Maniacs introduced you to SupplierSoft, a provider of Supplier Data and Process Management solutions as part of their vendor tour.

SupplierSoft is a unique solution not only because they’re one of the few companies that understand the importance of centralizing all of the supplier process management solutions in a common platform (because supplier management is more than just supplier information management and supplier risk assessments, two prominent directions that their competitors are moving in), but because they decided to build their solution on the #1 CRM platform, SalesForce.com. As noted in the previous post, there is a lot of similarity between CRM and SRM, since both require extensive information management and the ability to capture and organize the data against relevant business processes.

Despite its recent market entry, the SupplierSoft platform is one of the most extensive Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) and Supplier Information Management (SIM) platforms on the market with supplier management, audit management, corrective action management, product compliance management (PCM), environmental compliance management (ECM), bill-of-material (BOM) analysis, and end-to-end reporting modules.

Over the past year, they have significantly extended their regulatory compliance capabilities in their PCM and ECM modules with extensive customizable BOM and (PDF & web) forms support. You can collect data at any level of the BOM, which rolls up into higher-level components and reports, which can then be drilled into as required. This allows you to focus only on exceptions and non-compliance, which is a must when you have thousands of parts that collectively use thousands of compounds that you need to track to maintain compliance with RoHS, WEEE, and REACH (which is about to get a lot more involved as it works its way through the SIN List). The solution allows you to define custom forms, with defaults, that allow you to only collect the regulatory data relevant to you, which can then be (automatically) customized (by the system) for each supplier with respect to the products they supply you (and the declared components and/or raw materials). SupplierSoft’s clients have found that by creating easy-to-use custom forms, they get better responses to their regulatory compliance efforts with less work on their part. In one customer’s case, the compliance manager was able to free up half the staff to work on initiatives more important than just ensuring the supplier provides all of the necessary information.

A good compliance management solution, which SupplierSoft provides, is becoming very important because:

  • it significantly reduces data collection, review, and reporting costs
    which are becoming more and more significant as a flurry of global regulations are forcing many companies to keep electronic mountains of data
  • it reduces time to market for new products
    which can get delayed due to regulatory reporting requirements if you can’t fill out all of the forms and provide the necessary supplier documentation on-demand
  • it reduces risk
    as manual processes can allow non-compliant raw materials and parts to “sneak” through, which can result in forced recall and significant revenue losses; it also provides you with a “due diligence” defense should you be accused of recklessness in your regulatory compliance efforts
  • it contributes to a 360° view of suppliers
    which is very important to your SPM program

So if you’re looking for an SRM solution and you’re looking at Aravo, CVM, or another big name SIM/SPM/SRM solutions vendor, you might want to give SupplierSoft a look as well. Like their competition, they’re currently getting a lot of attention from a couple of Fortune 100’s and I expect they’ll be getting more attention as time goes on. You won’t know what option is truly right for you unless you look at all of the relevant ones.

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