Simeno – Global Catalogs for Global Businesses

Simeno, which is not yet a household Procurement name in North America, is a provider of a SaaS-based e-Procurement that has been around since 2000 and that has been offering catalog management solutions and services since 2002. Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Simeno has grown to be a rather large provider of such solutions in the EU and around the world. With 250,000 users in 60 countries, including users from dozens of Global 3000 companies, Simeno is still growing steadily, having recently opened offices in Germany (Hannover) and the USA (Chicago).

In addition to offering catalog management, Simeno also offers supplier-onboarding, catalog maintenance, and the custom requisition form creation services for their clients so all of their client spend — product and service — can flow through the system. But they are heavily focussed on selling long-term Procurement solutions centered around their catalog-based Procurement solution that can be integrated with the ERP, AP, and other relevant Supply Management solutions that can support the relevant parts of the Source-to-Pay cycle.

The core of the SIMENO solution is the catalog management capability which, like other leading platforms, allows clients to integrate punch-out catalogs, their-own catalogs, and vendor-provided catalogs (in various file formats) and search across all catalogs in real time. Simeno not only focusses on integration, but on fast upload and even faster search. Simeno can process extremely large updates (in the GB) in minutes, search catalogs of up to 10M items in 1.5 seconds and provide a real-time glimpse into what’s happening from a buying perspective in their global organization in just a few seconds.

This catalog solution is offered as a private cloud solution, where access to public catalogs and punch-outs can be as broad, or restrictive, as the organization wants it to be. The platform can be used in conjunction with, or as a replacement for, other catalog and purchasing systems, and can integrate with, or replace Oracle iProcure and SAP SRM UI5. Simeno regularly integrates with a host of ERP solutions and best-of-breed Sourcing / AP systems and can set up workflows to take data in and push data out as needed, which is all part of the initial set-up.

The catalog also supports 22 languages simultaneously, including accents and special characters, product and supplier centric views, and very easy requisition and purchase order creation. The form-based “guided-buying” solution works so well that some organizations have over 1,000 predefined forms, and define more as needed using the detailed form builder that can be used to create forms customized to the organization’s needs.

Simeno is very powerful, and there is a full solution around the platform with RFX, contract management, requisition, purchase order, and invoice management. For more information on these extended capabilities, and deeper insight into Simeno, check out the recent >Spend Matters Pro series (Part I, membership required) by the doctor and the prophet. The deep coverage is worth the time it takes to review it.

KPMG Is Listening To Too Much Bob Dylan …

… but still failing to understand the subtlety of the message the Nobel Laureate conveyed in the message he imparted to us 53 years ago.

Recently, as pointed out by the procurement dynamo over on Procurement World in his post on 4 Fascinating Futures, KPMG gave us four potential visions of Procurement’s future in their recent Future-Proof Procurement paper (co-published with Florida State University’s College of Business). [It’s a great read, by the way, for those of you that always enjoy a good alternative universe/timeline SciFi story.)

According to KPMG, we are headed to one of four possible Procurement futures, namely:

  • Primacy of Procurement
    where Procurement becomes the center of power as a result of technology enablement
  • The Creative Agency
    where Procurement totally re-invents itself in order to stay relevant
  • World of Project Economy
    where Procurement disperses (and becomes merely a means to an end)
  • R.I.P. Procurement
    where Procurement brings about its own demise (and is replaced by machines)

All Depending upon the outcomes of the following matches:

  • human centricity vs. algorithms
  • centralism vs. decentralism

In the second case, it depends upon whether or not the march to centralization continues or decentralism retakes center stage. And in the first case, it depends upon whether technology becomes good enough where it can be trusted in place of a Procurement pro.

And, according to KPMG, the futures are defined by the winners as per the following graphic:

In other words, KPMG believes that we need to either prepare for

  • The Path of Dominance
    where Procurement takes total control of the extended supply chain, and, as a result, the business world
  • The Path of Salvation
    where Procurement totally reinvents itself and stays relevant in the turbulent global economy as time shifts the sands
  • The Path of Harmony
    where Procurement adapts to the gig based project economy and simply becomes a means to an end OR
  • The Path of Progress
    where we enter a new era where there is no Procurement. R.I.P. Procurement (Peter Smith, Spend Matters). (It’s already among the walking dead and soon to be entombed, anyway.)

But all this assumes that there will be one winner in the human centricity vs. algorithm war and one winner in the centralism vs. decentralism, but until SkyNet takes over and locks us in The Matrix, there will be no winner in the humans vs. algorithm war, just like there will always be no winner in the centralism vs. decentralism war as there will always be new recruits to factions on both sides.

We’re not in the world of Anachrony where there can be only one one winner if the cataclysmic future is to be prevented. We’re in the real world, and the situation is a lot more complex.

Bob Dylan said it best:

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slowest now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fading
And the first one now will later be last
Cause the times they are a-changing

The line is drawn and the curse it is cast. The two sides of the centralist debate will fight to the last.

The slowest now will later be fast. As the laggards adapt new technology and the leaders drown in that they amassed.

As the present now will later be past. And leaders will fly different masts.

The order is rapidly fading.

And the first one now will later be last. Emerging economies take lead and leading economies are surpassed.

Cause the times they are a-changing.

But the more things change, the more they stay the same. And that’s the underlying message. The conflicts won’t be resolved, fueled by emerging and changing economies, with new governments and organizations taking center stage, discovering and rediscovering the Procurement revolutions, while leading economies go through devolutions as a result of shifting market landscapes and first generation solutions failing to deliver.

Procurement will still be on the verge of death, or among the walking dead, 20 years from now. Only the technology (vendors), processes, and terminology will have changed. The only question is, will your organization have switched sides (from laggard to leader or vice versa).

Despite Bob’s plea, fifty three years later:

Senators and Congressmen still block the hall
They stand in the doorway, don’t heed the call
and the country gets hurt for they have all stalled
and the battle outside keeps raging
it shakes all our windows and rattles our walls
for the times they are a-changing.

ScanMarket – Spreading P2P through the Clouds

ScanMarket is a Denmark-based cloud-based Source-to-Contract suite provider with hundreds of global clients and high adoption rates. ScanMarket claims that companies that switch to their solution see 3x gains in adoption and spend volume (put through the system), and it’s not an unrealistic claim (especially when the system is compared to older Source-to-Contract solutions). It’s another company that has been around quite a long time (since 1999), even though it’s not a name you know in North America.

Even though modules can be activated or deactivated as desired (and an organization can buy anything from just Project Management to the whole suite), ScanMarket was designed to be a single, integrated, source-to-contract suite that contains eRFX, eAuctions, Contract Management, Supply Base Management, Project Management, and Spend Analysis (which is the only module that is almost completely separate). Functionality can be purchased separately, but there is no versioning — ScanMarket is one platform, one instance (where ‘modules’ can be turned off depending on the functionality not desired by a customer). (ScanMarket provides a short, quick on-line introduction video overview of what they think an e-Sourcing platform is.)

The RFX solution allows RFI, RFP, and RFQ which support numerous evaluation settings via bid parameters and weighted scoring, a powerful bid matrix that can capture up to 1 Million data points in a single bid, a template (and question) library for quick event creation, (standard) Excel integration for offline completion, and integration into the sourcing dashboard. In addition, it contains the ability to copy events using multiple template settings that take just the desired data forward. In addition, the buyer can choose to just take some suppliers and some bids forward as well. It’s pretty powerful for an RFX platform.

The e-Auction platform is more-or-less your standard e-Auction platform supporting Japanese, Dutch, Reverse, Factored, and Forward auctions with numerous, configurable, bidding rules to match the event to the situation including individual starting prices, feedback options, blindfolding, proxy bidding, rank, traffic lights, staggering, blind period, reserve price indicator, and partial quantity bidding. Auctions can be monitored in real time on an item and lot level, and the buyer can choose whether to see a full tabular history of bids by item or lot or a real-time graphical “horse-race” view. In addition, the bids can be modified in real time using one or more modifiers (such as switching costs) or formulae (which can include factors to account for different defect rates) and allow buyers to do realistic cost comparisons (even if such cost comparisons are hidden from suppliers).

Contract Management provides a single, online, repository for all contracts with search and reporting. It supports templates (for quick contract data capture), version control, categorization, and buyer-defined meta-data with a detailed approval workflow to support negotiations. Contracts can be instantiated directly from the results of a (cherry-picked) RFX or e-Auction, dates specified, and appropriate notifications and reminders set.

ScanMarket SBM is their Supplier Information Management (SIM) solution that acts as the central, single, repository for all supplier information. It can capture all of the data you expect, including any and all attachments that need to be captured, index those attachments with meta-data, allow for repository-wide (metadata) search, provide full visibility into associated supplier activities (including event history, contracts, and captured performance), and maintain complete audit trails. It also integrates with the suite dashboard for dashboard-based reporting.

Project Management in ScanMarket is a single repository for all projects, notes and attachments that provides an integrated dashboard view of, and reporting across all, projects. There is customizeable workflow management, that allows for the creation of multiple project workflows that can be instantiated as needed, and the templated workflows can be customized for each task in each project across stakeholders and participants. There is also integrated communication and messaging and the ability to quickly jump into the appropriate point in the eRFX, e-Auction, supplier profile, or contract associated with the project.

ScanMarket is a solution that is definitely worth looking into. For more information, see the recent Spend Matters Pro [membership required] series by the doctor and the prophet. (Part I, Part II, and Part III)

Agiloft — For those with Lofty Ambitions for Contract Management Agility

Agiloft is another rare breed in the Supply Management space. It’s ancient (as it was founded in 1991, only a year after the first web browser was invented), it was founded to be a back-office B2B enterprise application (and their main offerings are service desk, workflow & business process management, and contract management), it’s debt-free, it has a large network of resellers, it has multiple global hosting locations (to support local privacy laws or government & military security requirements), and you can have it anyway you want: pure (low-cost) multi-tenant SaaS, classic ASP, or even on-premise with your choice of two different platforms (Windows or Linux). [Hint, choose the 2nd.]

Obviously, in this post we are going to focus on the contract management solution, as that is the most relevant to Supply Management, and the related BPM and Workflow elements they have in their Workflow and BPM solution to support it as well as their Asset Management capabilities. While the ability to use a single vendor for multiple “back office” B2B applications might be attractive to some organizations, our specialty here at Sourcing Innovation is Supply Management and Supply Technology Innovation, and that’s what we will cover.

The contract management solution supports contract creation, negotiation, approval and renewal. It contains a searchable central repository with double-byte language support and automatic audit trail for regulatory compliance, clause libraries, Word templates, and Word integration. In addition to Word integration, it also provides a complete API and and bi-directional pre-built integration with systems such as AD, SAML, Oauth, SSO, SalesForce, MS Exchange, DocuSign, QuickBooks, and Xero.

The contract creation is not only flexible, but so is the complex review and approval routings that can contain a combination of sequential, parallel, and conditional approvals. Agiloft’s ability to create and support complex, customizeable, business processes and workflows make complex creation and approval processes a snap. Furthermore, in addition to complete version history (and automatic redlining), it also supports a complete audit trail of those changes, built in OCR that can process attached image files, and fine-grained security that can control access by user group down to individual fields in a contract record.

It can easily be configured to support any industry and regulatory requirements that the organization has to support (or wants to support) by way of additional data capture, workflow modifications, mandatory checks and required approvals by appropriate risk management personnel. It can also be integrated tightly with asset management and each asset affected by the contract can be correlated with the contract, and each contract that references an asset can be correlated with the asset. This last point is particularly relevant as some assets can be shared across contract if they are only needed for short periods of time (such as excavators on construction projects).

However, as of now, any organization that has regulatory or compliance needs, requirements to track additional types of compliance, insurance, or audit documents has to define the requirements, create tables to track the necessary data and documents, define the relationships, create the monitoring tasks, create the notification templates, hook the notifications up to email, and so on. The wheel has to be re-created in each and every organization that needs to track a specific requirement. The platform needs the ability to capture and store common tasks, workflows, and components in a repository that can be accessed by any and all customers and included in individual instances as needed. Agiloft plans to release a community next year that will allow customers, consultancies, and anyone on the platform to export and share custom capabilities that they have created, and this is a good start, but it would really quicken start up time if this functionality was there.

That being said, the configurability of the solution (and the speed at which it can be configured by their services team) should not be overlooked. Consider the example of Enki(.co). Enki is a cloud services provider that was founded by the former NetSuite CIO and Director of Engineering. They spent 6 man-months customizing NetSuite for contract management, sales, and support, but never realized their vision. They eventually replaced NetSuite with Agiloft, and managed to customize it to their needs in 10 days, going live a week after that. In other words, the platform can be customized to the needs of most organization’s in a matter of weeks, but only by an experienced configurator. (However, once someone in the organization goes through about a week of training with Agiloft, they will learn to maintain and customize the platform at close to the same speed going forward.)

Agiloft is a great fit for those organizations that have some supply management capability (in front end strategic sourcing or back end procurement / procure to pay) but do not have good contract management and need a good CLM tool to serve as a foundation for their Supply Management processes. The ability to define the required contract lifecycle and sync with other platforms makes it a great central system for any organization that does not have, or cannot acquire, a fully integrated source to pay suite (as it can manage workflow across applications).