Category Archives: Vendor Review

marketdojo Opens the Dojo to Suppliers as Well

When we last checked in on MarketDojo with our posts on how you could walk your own way and plan your own path, they were a relatively new UK company that offered a basic e-Negotiation suite with category guidance. Not much, but when you consider you could:

  • try before you had to commit to a buy with their open sandpit,
  • pay per event, on your P-card and
  • see what suppliers see with toggle view

It was a good entry point for a mid-market Procurement organization that was stuck in the Procurement dark ages and unable to obtain budget for a modern suite (because the C-suite needed to have a guaranteed ROI).

While it was a good start, MarketDojo realized that is all it is — they needed that and more to conquer the mid-market, even in their native homeland. Once a lean, agile, over-tasked, and under-resourced mid-market Procurement organization gets their hand on a tool, they want to advance fast, learn faster, and apply it fast and furious — and they want to be as effective and efficient as possible.

For many companies, this means four things:

  • minimize data re-entry
  • minimize unnecessary supplier interaction
  • track relevant documents and sourcing artifacts
  • identify suppliers with potentially innovative capabilities

That is why MarketDojo has rolled out a full-featured supplier (information) management portal, called, obviously, SIMDojo and included innovation management in their primary offering (the InnovationDojo corner).

With their new SIMDojo offering, which can be used as part of the platform or standalone, which supports supplier self-identification and self-registration, buyers can create the appropriate questionnaires, have suppliers upload the appropriate documents, and lock supplier data (from updates). When suppliers change data, their profile is invalidated until reviewed by an appropriate sourcing professional, insuring only valid and validated suppliers can be included in sourcing events. The platform is simple to use on both sides, and some customers are buying it to augment other platforms they already have.

InnovationDojo is built on the RFX/Survey functionality in MarketDojo, but allows a buyer to issue innovation challenges, collect and score responses, include that information in RFPs, and track and manage innovation projects and responses separately. It’s basic, but it works quite well for the mid-market.

MarketDojo has also made functionality and usabiity enhancements to their platforms across the board, with template management in particular being noticeably improved. With few e-Sourcing companies left serving the mid-market, MarketDojo provides a solid offering, especially to those companies without (a modern) e-Sourcing solution that need to start quick, and keep it basic (to maximize efficiency and SUM [Spend Under Management]).

EC Sourcing: Getting Ready to Take the Mid-Market by Storm

When we last checked in on EC Sourcing, they had recently released an updated version of their basic e-Negotiation suite, Flex RFP, and their Supplier Corrective Action Reporting (SCAR) solution. Their e-Negotiation suite had straight-forward RFX, auctions, and a basic contract repository that was the 80% solution at the time. It couldn’t compete in the big leagues, but that wasn’t the focus — the focus was the majority of the market that the big players were ignoring (by selling overkill solutions the market didn’t need at a price point the market couldn’t afford).

The platform also had basic project management built in to allow customers to define projects — which include suppliers, users, RFXs 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. It also supported 4 languages, multi-currency, and formulas in auction and RFX weighting, it was a solid solution, which is further evidenced that about 1/3 of their client base are actually Global 3000s that realized that they didn’t need an overkill solution at an absurd price point to meet their daily sourcing needs.

Since we last checked in a few years ago, they have been developing steadily — improving both the base solution and adding new modules and capabilities, including some not found in the majority of e-Sourcing platforms (even when the big guys are included). They have added supplier management and workflow management and improved everything across the board (including, but not limited to, their internationalization with support for a dozen languages so far). The three biggest changes are:

Supplier Management

Their new supplier management module contains everything you would expect, including, but not limited to, self-registration, deep supplier meta-data management and search, and out-of-the-box Big ERP Integration. The supplier management module supports self-registration. When a supplier self-identifies, it will be presented with the default questionnaire(s), and upon initial review, the buyer can select the supplier for on-boarding, generate a full profile, and request that the supplier complete it. The buyer can define as many fields (across questionnaires) as they want, and each field can be tagged, filtered, and searched. Plus, the module, like the rest of the platform, integrates with JDE, Oracle, and SAP out of the box.

Workflow and Configuration

EC Sourcing has moved well beyond basic project management and now includes procurement request functionality (which can kick off a workflow outside of Procurement), deep approval and routing capability, customizeable status information associated with each task, and custom workflow definitions that allow a user to define a complete workflow for any sourcing project, with direct links into the relevant parts of the platform. All of these workflows are 100% configurable by the user, who can create them as templates, copy them, and customize them as needed for each sourcing project. Very few sourcing platforms have this capability, and no other mid-market solution has Procurement project management at this level of configurability and completeness.

e-Sourcing Automation Capabilities

It might sound trivial, but EC Sourcing’s new capabilities that allow the platform to:

  • automatically identify and invite all approved suppliers for a product/category
  • automatically attach specifications to an RFX on a line-item basis
  • automatically calculate advanced weightings and scorings (when the event is created from a template using advanced lots)

is extremely powerful, especially for large events and junior buyers.

Some categories (like office suppliers, MRO, etc.) have hundreds of line items and, for national (and international operations) that are collectively provided by thousands of suppliers. Even if each product or service specification (document set) can be located, uploaded, and attached in 2 minutes, for 210 items, that’s 6 hours of manual labour. And if there are 5 potential suppliers for each item, and no supplier can supply more than 50, it’s easy to conceive that there may be 1,000 different, pre-approved, suppliers. The manual time it would take to identify those 1,000 suppliers and then identify the lots they are allowed to bid on and configure that could be days.

However, with EC Sourcing’s auto-identification and auto-association capability, all approved suppliers in the SIM database can be automatically identified and invited to just the portion of the RFX/e-Auction they have been qualified to bid on and, if the documents follow a naming convention, all of the specification documents can be uploaded in a single zip file and the system will automatically extract the documents and associated them with the line, lot, or event as appropriate. This, as we noted above, can save days of a buyer’s time.

With the recent acquisition of classic mid-market leaders like Iasta (by Selectica, now Determine) and MarketMaker4 (by Xchanging), there are few providers that have been around since the noughts, fewer still with as mature a platform, and even fewer still with almost 2 decades of strategic sourcing advisory and consulting (which is how EC Sourcing started out before it realized that an organization could be much more effective powered by a proper platform as opposed to just a crack sourcing team with limited bandwidth). As a result, EC Sourcing is poised to make a big splash in the mid-market, and with the recent release of its newly upgraded solution, is sure to make one in the years to come.

Decideware: Taking Marketing Magic to a Whole New Level!

When we last briefed you on Decideware, they were Taking Agency Expense Management to the Next Level! Their Production module had just entered beta, and they had the facility to track not only quotes but actual costs down to the lowest level of detail and associate it with tasks, budgets, providers, and even individual resources.

In the production module, clients define jobs in detail, associate team members, define workflow, assign to vendors, breakdown costs, and go. The definition of job can be quite detailed — name, scope, lead, budget and budget period, type, geography, org unit, and so on. It can be as detailed as necessary, supporting everything from the creation of a simple banner advertisement to a full-scale shoot of an extended informercial, with costs ranging from 10 thousand to 10 million.

Costs can be broken up by phase, and then broken down by expense type, and even resource. The module can track estimated, actual, and will then compute the variance automatically by line item, task type, and phase. This may simply sound like an enhanced version of their scope of work, but the breakdown is much more detailed and their ability to capture data much more refined. This is important, because it supports their new dashboard module.

Their dashboard module, which needs a better name, is not a dashboard at all, but the release beta of their new deep BI capability. Decideware have recently integrated Tableau and can finally bring Marketing the deep insight into spend, and performance, that Marketing has until this point lacked.

Using Tableau, they have developed custom level 1 and level 2 dashboards for over a dozen big clients and are providing marketing spend insights that are going light years beyond what Marketing has ever seen, with the deep drill down you’d expect from a standard spend analysis tools.

At level 1, clients can see how much they are spending by agency, project type, phase, task, or resource, drill down on any available dimension, and, once and for all, see average costs for resources, tasks, projects and other deliverables. They can see when the average cost per hour for banner ad creation and management is $75 and one firm is charging them $125.

This is great, but the real value comes when you start importing performance data and contrasting it against cost. Nowhere is it more true than in marketing that “it’s not what you spend, it’s the impact you make”. It’s not how much more or less than the average you pay for social media campaign marketing, it’s how many impressions you make and clicks you get. If the average impressions on a campaign that cost $5000 is 500, and the average click throughs 15, then paying a company $10000 for a campaign that gives you 2000 impressions and 100 click throughs is a great deal, as you are paying 100 per lead vs. 333. And while most good marketers will get this data from a focussed campaign, how many can integrate it with the cost of campaign (banner ad) creation, how many can contrast it against similar campaigns, and how many can do that against normalized costs around the globe? None. But now they can.

With their latest development, DecideWare have not only taken (Marketing) Agency Management to a whole new level, they have also taken the insight into the ROI into a whole new level. Which creative genius is worth the $500 / hour (as his contribution can now be compared to end results across all his projects and his cost per effect normalized and compared against the other creative geniuses at the other agencies)? And which one isn’t even as productive as a $50 grunt doing stock art. With the new Decideware platform, not only can Marketing win the Agency Management Battle, but the cost management war.

How Does Your State of Flux Measure Up?

Your SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) is in a state of flux. It’s a fact. Policies are undocumented. Processes are not automated. Critical interaction data is not captured. And the majority of your employees interacting with your suppliers on a daily basis cannot even identify five of your top ten strategic suppliers. (Finance might hazard a guess, but while dollars spent is an indicator, it’s not a guarantee.)

A strategic supplier is any supplier that supplies products and / or services that are critical to your operations and that cannot be easily replaced by going out to bid to one of three suppliers in the next state. The supplier might get 1 Million annually and might get 100 Million annually. And if you want the best value from that strategic supplier, you have to be a customer of choice.

How do you become a customer of choice? Good SRM. How do you get good SRM? Good processes, and good platforms. That’s why it’s quite appropriate that this year the annual State of Flux research report is centered around technology. In particular, State of Flux will be researching the use of SRM technology globally, the benefits achieved, and implementation best practices for commercial success.

As with previous years, the 75-question survey takes about 20 minutes and all respondents get a free copy of the annual report, released at the end of October. This report has traditionally been the most extensive research on SRM on the global market and is well worth the time investment.

This year, as a bonus, State of Flux will immediately provide all companies that take the survey a benchmark ranking of how well they are doing against their peers based upon the eight years of survey data they have collected and a standardized ranking system that they are able to use. (And if multiple parties from your organization in different roles complete the survey, they will even augment that benchmark ranking with a SWOT analysis.)

The survey is open until July 1, 2016. Take the survey here.

Determine – Determined to Conquer b-pack’s Brave New World Part II

Our last post (re-)introduced you to Determine, a name you know even if it’s a name you don’t, as this provider is the successful fusion of the mature solution offerings that have been offered by Selectica since 1996 and Iasta and b-pack since 2000. We ended by noting that the new Determine platform is the platform that many sorcerers always wanted but never knew they were missing. Today we’re going to dive a little deeper into why.

Now, even though there’s not a whole lot new since SI last reviewed b-pack in its series on Taking Root in Their Brave New World (I, II, and III) or since SI last reviewed Iasta pre-acquisition (in Smart-Source Style, I, II, and III), these platforms have been integrated, their core modules have been enhanced and, most importantly, the (core) platform has a new UI that is not only easier to use than the one that b-pack had before, but is better looking to. (It was straight-forward, and there was nothing wrong with it, but parts of it looked like it was built as a Windows application and not a SaaS application.)

That being said, there are some cool new features, including:

  • Virtual Purchasing ContractsGood invoice and payment management requires m-way matching every invoice to at least a purchase order or contract and, if possible, a goods receipt as well. For many types of recurring payments — such as rentals, utilities, etc. — Procurement does not cut a contract and there is no Procurement record for AP to refer to when an invoice comes in. This prevents an m-way match and makes it difficult to detect duplicate, erroneous, or fraudulent invoices (and this, of course, contributes to over-payments). However, in the Determine system, you can set up recurring payment contracts and define expected payment dates along with expected amounts or ranges. Then, when an invoice comes in, it can be matched to an associated virtual contract payment, and if there is already an associated invoice, if the invoice is outside of the expected/agreed to range, or if the invoice is from a supplier without a virtual purchasing contract, it can be defined as duplicate, erroneous, or potentially fraudulent.
  • Supplier NetworkOften you know who the suppliers are you want to invite to a sourcing event, and often they are already in your Source to Pay system, but sometimes they aren’t in the system and sometimes you need to invite new suppliers that you don’t know. That’s why Determine is building a supplier network to not only help suppliers centralize their data management across multiple customers, but help buyers search for new suppliers. However, it takes time to build a supplier network so Determine comes …
  • … with TradeShift Integration… so that a buyer can find a new supplier “out of the box”. Tradeshift has a large global supplier network that can be used by any customer to jump-start their supplier identification and management for new sourcing events.
  • Full E-mail Approval SupportRequisitions, purchase orders, invoices, etc. — anything that requires approval can be approved or rejected through e-mail, making it easier for buyers to get quick responses from approvers and executives who never need to log in to the system.
  • DocuSign integrationWhich allows for contracts to be created and signed electronically, eliminating the need for paper contracts (that get lost in filing cabinets), paper couriers (which can lose the contracts or fail to get them to their destination on time), and paper cuts (which are well deserved when paper is wasted).

And the following will be in the next release (end Q2 / beginning Q3):

  • Contingent Labour ManagementThe b-pack platform had a very powerful catalog management system, which has recently been upgraded and extended in the Determine platform with full punch-out support to third party catalogs, and seamlessly integrates hosted catalogs and third party catalogs like any modern catalog system. It also supports standard requisition templates that allow a buyer to order merchandising (and simply specify the quantity and colors, etc. of the merchandise), bound documents (and specify the binding, paper, etc.), and other standard make-to-order products. And with the next release, it will also support embedded continent labour / service management capability where a buyer can search for resources with select skills, request a time of service, and send it off to one or more organizational contingent labour suppliers under contract (or create a requisition that will be fired off to the appropriate buyer for a sourcing event).
  • Workflow Driven Dynamic QuestionnairesAt present, the platform has standard workflows for new supplier registration, RFX creation, and so on, but these simply present pre-made questionnaire and forms to the user. As of the next release, the questionnaires will by fully dynamic and buyers and suppliers will only see the questions and information they need to see based upon their answer to current questions and their industry, product, service, etc.
  • Universal Action PlansOne of the unique offerings of the b-pack platform was action plans, mainly used for corrective action plans in supplier management. In the next release, buyers will be able to create action plans for any process — including sourcing, procurement, and supplier development — manage them, and even tie them to appropriate metrics (built on the relevant platform master data).

And within a year Determine plans to have the Iasta platform native and all of the relevant CLM functionality native on the core b-pack platform, so not only will everything be off of one Master Data Management store, but one seamless user interface as well. And given the rapid pace at which they’ve integrated and extended the core platform so well, you can be sure that as long as Determine is determined, this will happen. In short, if you’re looking for a new S2P platform, this to know provider should definitely be on your short list.

For a deeper dive into the new Determine platform, watch for the two-part Pro coverage by the doctor and the prophet, coming soon on Spend Matters Pro (membership required).