Category Archives: Vendor Review

Is it Time to Get Hip with Hiperos?

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Hiperos is a relatively new entrant in the space focussed on what they call “Extended Enterprise Management”, which is their term for what you get when you amalgamate (what I call) Enterprise Contract Management, Compliance, Performance, and Sustainability into a single 360° solution platform.

The goals of the platform are to provide you with:

  • Supplier Information Central
    • collect all supplier information in one application
    • allow it to be entered and reviewed by suppliers, third parties, and internal staff, according to roles and permissions
    • allow for the creation of quick and easy monitoring reports that can be displayed in a dashboard
  • Cross-Enterprise Supply Chain Risk Assessment
    • allow risk to be evaluated against any supplier or service provider
    • allow risk to be evaluated by category / product line
    • allow risk management programs to be created based on whatever supplier / risk segmentation criteria you select
  • Supplier Performance Management
    • allow for the easy definition of surveys and scorecards
    • allow suppliers to be evaluated based on the type of product being delivered or service being performed
    • allow for internal and external feedback, subject to approvals
  • Regulatory Compliance Management
    • support any and all compliance regulations your organization is subject to (RoHS, HIPAA, ITAR, etc.)
    • allow requirements to be easily communicated to suppliers
    • monitor responses and flag non-compliance for exception based monitoring and resolution
  • Sustainability Initiative Support
    • allow sustainability guidelines to be captured
    • allow them to be communicated across the supply chain
    • monitor adherence to implemented programs

For those of you in a rush, I’ll tell you right now that the application (which is now on R3) does precisely what Hiperos says it can do, that it’s relatively easy to configure and use (and a couple of clients have self configured it without any help at all), and that it can be configured to report on precisely what you want it to report on, and display this information in real time on every login. Furthermore, if you use it’s capabilities to augment data collected internally with data in your other entprise systems and external data sources and integrate 3rd party risk and financial data, such as what you would get from Equifax, Lexis Nexis, or D&B (using their new “D&B Inside” offering), you can truly get a 360° view. Furthermore, if you define your risk assessment and monitoring metrics accordingly (and / or select the right templates for your vertical and organizational risk management needs), my assessment is that you can be just as confident in the risk assessments as you would be if you outsourced it to a specialist consulting firm (especially if you bring one of them in to help you define your risk assessment program and insure you set up the feeds, applications, and reports appropriately).

The application allows you to define what fields you want to track, what metrics you want to use, the calculations that define those metrics, and the reports the metrics appear in. It also allows you to define as many roles as you need (buyer, manager, approver, CPO, third party auditor, supplier, etc.) and define access permissions and capabilities based on those roles. In addition to the standard supplier, contact, contract, and (enterprise) program entities, it also allows you to define “relationships” and define the data you want to capture, track, and measure against those relationships. For example, a relationship will be with a supplier, managed by a local account manager and supplier account manager, against a program type and have it’s own status and risk measurements. Collectively, these measurements and statii can be rolled up to give an overall status and risk picture, which, of course, can be drilled into at any time. You can also define as many levels of details as you need in your surveys and scorecards, which, of course, frees you from the limited capabilities of a 3-dimensional spreadsheet workbook. And it comes with template libraries for standard compliance (HIPAA, RoHS, REACH), risk management, and sustainability (carbon tracking) initiatives that can be used to jumpstart configuration for your enterprise.

The one weakness is that while the application has been configured to be extensible and accept an unlimited number of external data sources, at this point in time, only RSS Feeds and a couple of 3rd party financial feeds are configured out-of-the-box. This means that you will have to do some integration with appropriate 3rd party data sources to get a 360° view, which is vital because, if you don’t have someone on the ground, or a good relationship with a 3rd party auditor you can trust, you can’t trust self-submitted supplier surveys alone. (And, these days, some of the best leading indicators are those you get from financial risk data consolidators like D&B — who acquired Open Ratings — and Equifax — who acquired Austin Tetra — and from import/export visibility companies like Zepol, Import Genius, and Panjiva.)

The application is one that is definitely worth looking at, because the only other providers offering integrated solutions of the same breadth are Aravo, CVM Solutions, and, if you’re in the health-care industry, Vendormate.

A FieldGlass Update

Those of you who followed the travels of the Sourcing Maniacs on their 2008 Vendor Tour may recall that one of their stops was FieldGlass (in Chicago), a provider of an on-demand contingent workforce management solution.

A well-designed contingent workforce management solution will streamline the contingent labor requisition process, simplify the identification of qualified resources, automate the distribution of requests, standardize resource rates, automate the collection of quotes, track contracts, and insure that staffing companies and contractors always bill at the approved rate, and only for approved hours on approved projects. The solution will reduce recruitment costs, processing costs, and payment costs as well as prevent overcharges and overpayments, which can often total 20% or more at companies with a large contingent workforce and no solution to manage the process.

FieldGlass has taken the SaaS approach to application development, and instead of one big release every year or two, they’ve moved to a quarterly release cycle where they package smaller, but useful updates every quarter. Their latest release adds or improves on four areas functionality:

  • fine-grained service control
    More granular cost allocation, rate card flexibility and tracking down to GL accounts.
  • time-sheet review process
    The ability to have suppliers and local program managers review time-sheets as part of the approval process so that errors are caught, and corrected, earlier (or, in the worst case, supply managers cannot claim lack of knowledge of deceptive billing as they have to sign off).
  • improved ad-hoc approval support
    Sometimes there’s an emergency where you need someone right away and can’t follow the usual process.
  • decision wizard
    That can be used to guide you through the the process.

It was the last capability that caught my attention. With so many options to choose from in a large company: current approved staffing vendor, new recruiter, direct hire … statement of work, position advertisement, RFX … hourly rate, salary, fixed price contract … it can be hard for someone outside of HR and new to their position to make the right decision. The ability to create company specific decision trees for staffing and hiring allows a manager to walk through a series of Y/N or multiple-choice questions and quickly figure out the route they should be taking, the partner (if any) they should be using, the type of position they should be filling, and how they should be classifying it. This, in turn, allows a manager to focus on finding the right resource, instead of wasting time fiddling with processes, which is what workforce management should be all about.

QuickDraw Procurement with Coupa QuickStart

Earlier this week, Coupa announced the availability of Coupa Quickstart, the second in a string of big announcements they have planned for the first half of this year. (The first was, of course, the acquisition of a new CEO, Rob Bernshteyn, earlier this month.)

As noted in the Press Release, Coupa Quickstart is a setup wizard that visually guides purchasing mangers through the setup process for users, approval rules, payment and shipping terms, billing information, chart of accounts, suppliers, and other basic information that is required to get a purchasing system up and running in less than an hour. Noticing that one of the biggest barriers to adoption of e-Procurement software in small and smaller mid-size organizations was the lack of (technical) personnel to support the acquisition, setup, and implementation of en e-Procurement system, Coupa wanted to build an on-demand e-Procurement system that any buyer, with limited technical capability, and only a browser at his or her disposal, could set-up by themselves quickly and easily. The Quickstart wizard, built on top of a basic, default configuration and e-Procurement process, enables a buyer to get going as soon as they define basic company information and configure the system on an as-needed basis. As a result, most users will be able to be up, running, and cutting their first purchase order in under an hour. (Small organizations with only a few users and simple approval hierarchies will be up and running in under half and hour, and one customer managed to get a basic system configuration defined in only ten minutes!)

The Coupa QuickStart process is a streamlined process that walks a user through:

  • Company Info Definition
    In this stage the user defines the company name and address, uploads the logo, and defines the currencies (default USD), units of measure (default Each), departments (if required), and standard commodities (pre-populated with a basic default list Coupa has found to be common to many small and mid-size business) they buy on a regular basis.
  • User Definition
    In this stage, the system users and approval hierarchies are defined.
  • Financial Rules Definition
    In this stage, the user can define the company’s standard payment terms, shipping terms, billing info, and accounts (& account structure). (The system can auto-generate account numbers if the user simply defines the legal values in each segment.)
  • Supplier Definition
    The user defines the suppliers they do business with. Invitations are sent to the supplier to connect electronically, and if the supplier is already defined as a user in the Coupa system, they will see the user’s company as a customer in their instance when they accept.

Finally, the new QuickStart offering comes with a streamlined help system that contains numerous “visual” entries on how to use the invoicing, receiving, RFQ, budgeting, inventory, contracts, and punch-out capabilities as well as numerous other standard Coupa features.

The Sourcing Maniacs 2008 Vendor Tour Part 21: Vinimaya

Today’s post has been broken down into vacuity, vindication, and veil.


Vacuity

 

Wakko I never imagined a Stampede could be so much fun!
Editor’s note: the maniacs took a little detour through Calgary after finishing their visit with Upside Software in Edmonton
Yakko It sure is! But we should probably be getting back to our tour. After all, we still haven’t been offered a job!
Dot We’re not done yet?
Yakko We’re only at U!
Dot Precisely. Who uses V, W, X, Y, and Z anyway?
Yakko Well, I’ll admit that a lot of companies start with the early letters of the alphabet, presumably to come first in the listing or to take advantage of common power words, that usually start with M, N, R, S, T and other Wheel-of-Fortune favorite letters, but there are still a few companies left. I’m sure there are at least ten companies in the space that start with V.
Dot Precisely. Who uses V, W, X, Y, and Z anyway.
Yakko Verian Technologies, Vertical Net, and Viewlocity.
Dot Vertical Net is Bravo Solution now.
Yakko Okay, Vendormate.
Dot Touche! So who next. Any recommended by the doctor?
Yakko Let me check.
more flipping through the handy dandy notebook
the doctor mentioned a company called Vinimaya (rebranded Aquiire, acquired by Coupa) when we asked him who the innovative companies were.
Dot What do they do?
Yakko Catalog Management.
Dot Sounds so Web 1.0. What else?
Yakko Looks like they’re billing themselves as the B2B Search Engine now.
Dot B2B Google?
Anything else?
Yakko Looks like that’s it.
Dot Are you sure?
Yakko I think so.
Dot So what are we missing? the doctor says they’re innovative, but catalogs and search have existed for over a decade.
Yakko I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to go find out!
  the maniacs take off for Shelton, CT

 



Vindication

 

Dot Are we here?
Yakko Uhmm, I think so.
Dot I’ll knock.
tap tap-tap tap tap … tap tap
Smiling Man a smiling man opens the door
Howdy! How can I help you!
Yakko We’re a little confused. the doc said you were innovative, but we understand that you do catalogs and search.
Smiling Man That’s right!
Dot And how’s that innovative?
Smiling Man You need to understand, it’s not what we do, but how we do it.
Dot What do you mean?
Smiling Man To use the doctor‘s terminology, we’re B2B 3.0 all the way.
Yakko B2B 3.0?
Smiling Man Business-to-Business 3.0. We provide enterprise software technology that puts business users on the same footing as consumers who have had “3.0” technologies at their fingertips for years. B2B 3.0 is about connectivity that is open and free to all, content that is managed once in a non-redundant fashion by the content owner, and an open community where buyers and sellers can come together for short periods of time through virtual networks that allow them to conduct the business they need to conduct — when, and how, they need to conduct it. We provide the technology platform that, using the open connectivity of the internet, enables innovative content management that allows buyers and suppliers to engage in productive e-commerce.
Dot And how do you do that?
Smiling Man Through content unification. If you go back to the beginning, B2B 1.0 if you will, you had the catalog, which was different in every ERP, procurement, and sourcing application, and which had to be maintained by the buyer — who had to collect data from the supplier to populate their application. This led to stale data, and an inability to find new products in a timely fashion. Then the punch-out came along and helped to usher in B2B 2.0. This was a slight improvement, as the supplier was able to maintain their own catalog, which the buyer could connect to, but there were still issues. The catalog was only as fresh as the last supplier update, which could be months in the past as the supplier had to maintain a different puchout with different pricing for each buyer, and the buyer could only connect to, and search, one punchout at a time.
Dot So?
Smiling Man How do you get the best price?
Dot You review and evaluate all the options.
Smiling Man And how do you do that if you can only search one catalog at at time?
Dot You build a spreadsheet …
Smiling Man Don’t you buy a technology solution to help you with your job? Doesn’t having to build a spreadsheet hinder you? Why not just use Google and search each vendor site individually. It would be just as effective and save you money.
Dot True.
Smiling Man So buyer hosted catalogs don’t work, as they are always stale and don’t have the right prices, or products, and punch-outs don’t work as they restrict a buyer to one site at a time. Plus, both solutions often cost way more money than they’re worth. Sure you can get a catalog solution cheap, but how much is it going to cost you in salaries to keep it up to date? If you’re a large company, millions. And you might think punchouts are cheap, but a supplier has to pay someone to create a separate punchout with distinct pricing for each buyer, and then has to pay someone else to maintain that data. And who do you think pays for that overhead? That’s right, you!
Yakko So what’s the solution?
Smiling Man Our platform.
Yakko And how’s that work?
Smiling Man It’s a web-services enabled agent-based meta-search technology that can plug into any electronic product listing a supplier has at its disposal — be it punch-out, e-Catalog, a web-enabled database, or a plain old ASCII flat file — and integrate the listings into one consistent, coherent view for the buyer.
Wakko So it’s e-Bay for enterprises? A single view into all available products and services that you can search — by product name, characteristic, or price range — to find the best product to meet your need at the best price, right now?
Smiling Man That’s right Wakko! We enable buyers and suppliers to conduct commerce the way it was meant to be — simple, easy, and cost effective.
Yakko That’s it?
Smiling Man That’s it. We’re the first company to utilize the full power of the internet to let buyers and suppliers to conduct business using the technology they have available; we add the ability for both parties to define pricing and presentation rules that are applied in real-time on every search; and our powerful interconnectivity platform allows us to integrate seamlessly with all of the major platforms. What else would we need to do?
Yakko I can’t think of anything else.
Smiling Man Precisely! Sometimes you just have to keep it simple.

 



Veil

 

  we join the maniacs an hour or so later at a diner
Dot So, are we done?
Yakko We’ve done WhyAbe, and the only other W company I know of is WeSupply, but they’re on the other side of the Atlantic.
Dot And the only X company I know of is Xign, but since they’re owned by a bank, we know they’re just payments, which isn’t that exciting.
Yakko I don’t know of a single company in the space that starts with Y!
Dot I guess that brings us to …
Yakko, Wakko, & Dot … Zycus!
Wakko Aren’t they based in India?
Dot They are. But don’t they have US locations?
Yakko They do, but they’re mainly sales offices, and the doctor says he hasn’t had any luck getting a response from them locally.
Dot I guess we’re done for now, then.
Yakko It’s probably for the best. I’m feeling a chill in the air, and I don’t like the cold as much as I used too.
Dot We did get awfully used to the wonderful year-round weather in the valley, didn’t we?
Yakko We did. Let’s go home for the winter. We can start a new tour next year … and maybe, armed with our superior knowledge from this tour, we’ll even find a job!
Wakko And in the mean time, I can be Califorina Dreamin’.
Yakko, Wakko, & Dot All the leaves are brown
And the sky is grey
I’ve been for a walk
On a winters day
I’d be safe and warm
If I was in L.A.
California dreamin’ …
  the maniacs fade into the distance

I don’t know about you, but I think they deserve a 21-gun salute for their efforts. Twenty-one posts and one hundred and thirty pages of amazing content that is so rich that you have to read it multiple times to thoroughly extract all of the nuances is more than some blogs give you in an entire year (or lifetime)! Rest up maniacs, you deserve it!

 

The Sourcing Maniacs 2008 Vendor Tour Part 20: Ketera

This post is a wee bit lengthy, so I’ve broken it into kidding and Ketera.


Kidding

  the maniacs are enjoying themselves somewhere in Alberta
Wakko Hee Haw!
Dot That was a classic, wasn’t it. Did you know it had Canadian roots?
Wakko Yippie Ki Yo Yippie Yay!
Dot We’re in Alberta, not Texas, Wakko!
  ring, ring
Yakko Yakkos Yiddish Yamakas … cheery caps for cheery chaps!
Australian Accent G’day, Mates! You wanted a demo of Ketera?
  if you’ll recall, back in part 12 (Kinaxis) the maniacs asked Ketera for a demo … they were too busy at the time, but promised to get back to the maniacs
Yakko Yes, we did.
Australian Accent Ace! Could you do it now?
  neeiiggghh!
Australian Accent Is that a Brumby I hear? Is this a good time for you blokes?
Yakko It’s just fine. I’ll fire up the satellite and we’re good to go!
Australian Accent Bonzer!
Are you out in the bush, mate?
Yakko No, we’re just enjoying the ranch.
Australian Accent Texas?
Yakko Alberta.
Australian Accent You’re in the Back of Bourke, aren’t you?
Yakko I guess you could say that.
Australian Accent You’re sure it’s a Mickey Mouse time for you?
Yakko No problem. I’m ready.
Dot I’m ready.
Yakko We just need to wrangle Wakko. One sec.
Wakko!
Get your strides over here now!
Wakko Why?
Yakko It’s time for the Ketera demo!
Wakko Now? Here?
Yakko We got sattelite internet, remember?
Wakko glumly
o. k.
Dot You can get back to having fun as soon as we’re done!
Wakko cheering up
A’ight!
  Wakko moseys on over.
Yakko We’re ready to give it a fair go!



Ketera

Australian Accent switching to his best American for the demo
Today I’m going to run through our new e-Sourcing application. It’s pretty straight-forward, so it won’t take much time.
  unlike the maniacs’ walkabout …
Yakko No problem! Take it away.
Australian Accent I should start off by noting that what we noticed was that a lot of people were spending a lot of money on enterprise sourcing applications without using the full extent of their capabilities … most of our catalog, procurement, and supply network customers were just using e-RFX and e-Auction and most of those customers were just using single round RFXs and traditional reverse auctions … not the dozen or so variants that have sprung up over the last ten years.

We saw the need for a low-cost 80% solution that would give the market what we felt it needed most … a basic sourcing solution for small and mid-size companies without large budgets or sophisticated software needs. And that’s what we built.

Our e-Sourcing solution is just RFX and Reverse Auction … and unlike many enterprise applications that take hours, if not days, to set an event up … our solution allows an event to be configured in minutes using a very simple 3-step process.

Step 1: Create a new event.
Step 2: Specify the items and item details.
Step 3: Invite suppliers.
  Then you just sit back, and watch prices tumble.

Yakko If it’s that easy, is it really an 80% solution?
Australian Accent Think about it. How much does an e-RFX and e-Auction solution really have to do?
Yakko Well, one thing we learned from talking to Source One about WhyAbe is that, for many categories, and many small to mid-size companies, it doesn’t have to do that much.
Australian Accent Precisely. And their offering is actually a good starting point to understand our offering.
Yakko So how does your offering compare to theirs?
Australian Accent Quite good. We both have the bare minimum requirements for e-RFX and e-Auction, but whereas, in our view, they’re more of a 60% to 70% solution, we add a few features that, although they sound like bells and whistles, are actually necessary for an 80% solution in today’s global e-Sourcing marketplace.
Yakko Like what?
Australian Accent Localization. Contract tracking. Fine-grained scoring on RFX questionnaires. Microsoft Excel integration. Templates. Instant-Messaging and Alerts. Customizable dashboards. Supplier Master Management. Wizards for each step of the process. The little things that make it easy, useful, and a pleasure to use — all embedded in a streamlined application with a carefully designed UI that buyers want to use.

And, unlike many other e-Sourcing platforms, it’s a low-cost, self-service, pay-as-you-go platform.

Yakko How low?
Australian Accent $39.99/month for unlimited RFIs, RFPs, RFQs, and reverse auctions. Plus, you get instant access to thousands of suppliers in the Ketera network.
Yakko Beaut!
Australian Accent Too right!
Yakko Anything else we should know?
Australian Accent It’s very easy to administrate, and the item and supplier master views support numerous filters for quick location of the appropriate item or supplier. It’s straightforward to enter proxy bids on behalf of a supplier. All of the reports have decent graphic capabilities. We support the UNSPSC schema for item categorization. And it has basic project tracking capability — you can quickly see your open events, events requiring bid evaluation, and recently evaluated events at any time.
Yakko So it really is a decent sourcing solution for small and mid-size companies just starting out on their e-Sourcing journey, or those companies without sophisticated sourcing needs.
Australian Accent We think so. And, as I said before, very easy to set-up a sourcing event.
Wakko I’m out of baloney. How long to set up an event to source a 3-months supply?
Australian Accent Five minutes. Watch.
  five minutes pass as the salesperson demos the tool
Wakko That’s it?
Australian Accent That’s it!
Wakko Fair suck of the sav!
Apparently, Wakko has his Aussie down pat! If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was from the Never Never!
Yakko Well, thanks for the demo. It certainly is an interesting take on the e-Sourcing space. A sourcing tool that every business can afford.
Australian Accent Thank you. Hooroo, Journo!
Wakko Hooroo, mate.