The Corridor to Enterprise Contract Management

While there are a lot of vendors offering up contract management solutions, there are few vendors left offering pure-play contract management solutions. For example, even long-time contract specialist vendors like Selectica have acquired sourcing and procurement vendors (like Iasta and b-Pack in Selectica’s case, which changed it’s name to Determine). About the only pure-play contract vendors left Apttus, Corridor, Exari, and Novatus.

Among these few pure-play vendors left, Corridor Company occupies a relatively unique position in the enterprise software market with its deep visibility into their global buy-side and sell-side contracts with unique capabilities around obligation management, distributed reporting, and what they call counter-party management.

While not a well-known name in the Supply Management space, Corridor Company is a New England-based provider of a SaaS contract management solution that has been in business since 1998. Starting out as a services provider, Corridor Company, which has completed over 450 contract management projects (including dozens and dozens of projects for the largest global multi-nationals) to date, switched to a software provider in 2008 to better serve the increasing needs of their customer base and now serve over 40 global customers on their platform.

In addition to the unique capabilities highlighted above, Corridor has one of the deepest DocuSign integrations out there, integrates with major ERP platforms (including SAP, Oracle, and Dynamics) out of the box, integrates deeply with Sharepoint (that it is built on), and, unexpectedly integrates deeply with SalesForce.

While lots of solutions have shallow SalesForce integration, Corridor on the other hand, has a deep SalesForce integration. All data and meta data can be embedded in the salesforce application, with each Salesforce user having access only to the data they would in the platform, and, most importantly, the ability to punch into the relevant part of the Corridor platform (using single sign-in) to do contract research or maintainence.

Another strength of the platform is distributed reporting. Most contract management platforms have good, integrated, reporting capabilities with dozens (upon dozens) of built-in reports, but the capability is generally limited to canned reports or reporting capabilities which create one report for the filters, sent to one distribution list. But when you have a large global organization with multiple, distributed, contract management departments, dozens (or hundreds) of distributed contract management professionals, each needing a slew of similar reports on a daily basis, having to manually define hundreds of similar reports dozens of times is not only burdensome, but unmanageable when they have to be maintained over time. Thus, Corridor built the ability to define a meta-report and then filter out sub-reports targetted to each user who needs only a subset of the data (based upon their locale, department, account assignment, etc.). Each report type is only defined once, no matter how few, or many people need it and what subset of data they get access to.

There are more unique capabilities as well, and for a deeper dive, we recommend you check out the recent Pro coverage [membership required] on Corridor Company by the doctor and the prophet over on Spend Matters (Part I, Part II, and Part III), especially if you have deep contract management needs not met by an average module in an average Sourcing platform.

SRM Case Studies Speak for Themselves

On Friday, we noted that State of Flux just released their eighth annual SRM survey, entitled “Digital SRM: Supplier Relationships in the New Technology Landscape”, and with it the surprising revelation that while leaders are taking steps forward, Procurement organizations as a whole might be stagnant or taking steps back! This, of course, is not a good thing because the best sourcing event in the world is useless if the plan (encapsulated in the contract) isn’t followed through and the expected savings or value never materializes. SRM is the key to realizing sourcing success, and too many companies overlook that (and wonder why 30% to 40% of identified savings never materialize).

We’ve written many posts over the years not only on the importance of SRM but how to implement it and support it with technology, so this time, instead of doing another multi-part series (which can be found in the archives), we’ll just skip to some of the case studies covered in the report and hope that maybe they are enough to convince you to get your SRM act in gear and go forward!

Telstra, a big name in Australian telecoms that is relatively unknown outside of Australia, implemented a SRM program that not only put more structure, process, and value around SRM but repositioned the perception of Procurement from a function that is only focussed on cost saving to one that works with suppliers and stakeholders toward the realization of business goals. As a result of this change in mind set, and more collaboration between different departments and suppliers, Telstra has met 10% of savings targets through increased revenues, showing that SRM can do more than save money, it can increase sales and revenues by finding ways to create new value that end customers will pay (more) for.

But that’s a small win compared to Ladbrokes who saved £18 M by taking the gamble out of SRM. Since beginning their SRM transformation in 2014, they hit a 3-year savings target of £ 18M a full year ahead of schedule, demonstrating the true savings potential of a well defined and well executed SRM project, which is huge in an industry where the majority of indirect spend has to go to a very small supplier base and where competitive bidding has little effect.

And the value of SRM has not been lost on the giants. For example, if Mars were a public company, it would be a Fortune 100 company as it regularly sells in excess of $ 33 Billion a year in food products (as it manufacturers more than just the iconic Mars bar). Even though it is a top procurement organization (that employs many leading supply management technologies and processes), it has recognized that SRM can help it get even bigger and better still, and that is part of the ambitious plan it has for SRM. While its initial SRM program is still in rollout, it’s starting to see a lot of enthusiasm from stakeholders and suppliers alike, which is a hard momentum to build in an organization of 77,000 employees with a dedicated commercial team of 1,200 individuals! Whereas most organizations might have a few dozen people on the commercial side, and maybe a few hundred, and can thus build enthusiasm for new initiatives and roll them out quickly, getting a thousand people on board is no easy feat. But the potential of SRM is such that even an entire organization can get behind an initiative that can cut costs, increase value, and even encourage innovation in the supply base.

In other words, there’s a lot of gold in them thar SRM hills, and any organization that doesn’t mine for it is leaving a lot of money and value on the table. To find out how much money and what kind of value might be left on the table, check out “Digital SRM: Supplier Relationships in the New Technology Landscape”. It’s worth your time.

Eighty Three Years Ago Today …

Edwin Armstrong, an American engineer, presented his paper A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation to the New York section of the Institute of Radio Engineers (which merged with the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1963 to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers), which described his 1933 invention of radio broadcasting using frequency modulation, now known as FM broadcasting, and LOLCats everywhere rejoiced!


I Love My FM Radio!

The US Federal Election is in 3 Days …

So, American LOLCat, who do you predict will win, given that just a few days ago the polls were so close, as per this Telegraph article that put the candidates neck-and-neck in a recent poll as a result of the resurfacing e-mail scandal? (Now, FiveThirtyEight.com still gave Hilary a 66% chance two days later, and, historically, Nate Silver is pretty accurate in his predictions, but will this election buck the trend?)


American? American? Iz Canadian Cat!

Well, I guess this explains the recent increase in the Canadian Cat population! 😉

It’s 2016! Welcome Back to the Industrial Age of SRM!

State of Flux just released their 8th annual supplier relationship management research report entitled Digital SRM: Supplier Relationships in the New Technology Landscape and while it reveals the handful of leading supply chain organizations are, or are moving towards, digitization, it reveals the majority of organizations are not only stuck in the past, but moving back towards the industrial age in their supplier (relationship) management processes. Scary!

So scary in fact, that I hope that the purchasing wizard Pete Loughlin of Purchasing Insight does a follow up to his piece on how “we are now arriving in the digital economy – turn your watch back 40 years” entitled we are moving forward in the digital economy, turn your watch back another 40 years because some of the practices many global organizations are still practicing with respect to supplier relationship management could literally be straight out of Marshall Monroe Kirkman’s classic The handling of railway supplies. Their purchase and disposition.

And I’m not joking.

Many organizations are still doing nothing more than inviting bids by public advertisement for a year’s supply and taking the advice that the pulse of the market should be continually felt and, clearly, not thinking about the importance of managing relationships after the purchase order is cut.

And while it looked like we are making progress last year, the simple facts that:

  • the number of businesses failing to invest in any SRM-related training rose from 26% in 2015 to 39% in 2016
  • 80% of companies are not achieving on-going benefits from external spending (compared to what they could be)
  • 87% of companies are still using Excel (which is essentially just an electronic version of a general ledger at most companies) as their primary SRM tool

demonstrate that, for the majority of organizations, the digital age (which for the consumer has been here for almost two decades) is still decades away.

After all, why are Purchasing Manages still panicing when they receive the 2:00 am phone call from the CFO informing them that their primary supplier in China just filed for bankruptcy and the company needs to know ASAP what the impact will be. If they had modern supplier relationship management systems, it wouldn’t take them 48 sleepless hours pouring through accounting systems, ERP systems, and spreadsheets to figure out what products come from the supplier. With modern supply management best practices it wouldn’t take them weeks to identify a new supplier and months to switch. And with good supplier relations, they definitely wouldn’t have to absorb the price doubling mandated by the receivership for continued supply of the critical product lines.

With proper supplier relationship management, you know as much about the (financial) health status of your strategic supplier as you know about your own organization. With proper supplier relationship management, you know all the products that are being provided, in what volume, in what consumer product lines they are being used, and what the impact of a stockout or termination of the line will be. With proper supplier relationship management, a company knows which other suppliers it is using that could also produce the product, how long it would take to switch, and how much it would cost. And with good relations, the last thing the supplier personnel would be comfortable with is charging their best customers an unexpected, possibly contract violating, unmitigated price increase, and would fight any suggestions by the receivership management to increase prices to any degree.

And the sad thing is there is no shortage of basic SRM systems these days. Not all are industry leading like (and not all will deliver anywhere near the value of) State of Flux’s Statess solution, but there are so many ways for an organization to enter the digital age that it’s shocking just how hard they fight to stay in the industrial age.

Hopefully, now that the results have been demonstrated for eight years in a row, they’ll finally accept SRM is not a passing fad, its the foundation for a new reality, buy in, and go for it. At the very least, hopefully they’ll check out “Digital SRM: Supplier Relationships in the New Technology Landscape” and realize what could be.