Monthly Archives: May 2013

Decideware: An End-to-End Agency Lifecycle Management Solution Part II

In our last post, we re-introduced you to Decideware, global providers of an end-to-end Agency Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution, with offices on three continents (in Sydney, San Francisco, and London). We quickly overviewed the five core modules of the integrated ALM solution that they offer, and indicated that we would dive into them in the next two posts. So without further ado, here we go.

Capability

The capability module walks you through the six-step process of gathering appropriate information and approving the Agency as a potential supplier to the organization.

  1. Entity
    The first step is to gather the firmographic data, including the geography, the number of employees, the administrative and legal contacts, the revenues, the primary office locations, and vendor status information
  2. Type
    The next step is to determine the primary, secondary, and tertiary type of the agency. Is it creative, digital/interactive/social media, planning, relationship marketing, public relations, branding, investor relations, etc? An agency can only have one primary focus, and that focus must contribute to 50% or more of revenues to be primary. Similarly, it can only have one secondary focus, and that focus should contribute to 25% or more of revenues. Any additional focii are tertiary.
  3. Specialties
    In this step, a more complete picture of the Agency capability is created through the gathering of supporting data related to market segments, experience, media creation, etc. to fill in a more complete picture of the suitableness of the Agency for the company.
  4. Conflicts
    The next step is to determine if there are any potential categories of conflict for the company. If you’re in Pharma, and they are currently working on a campaign for a new heart disease prevention drug for your competitor, then you don’t want them working on a campaign for your heart disease prevention drug.
  5. Engagements
    What engagements for your company has the Agency worked on, and what engagements is the Agency currently working on? (It’s not uncommon to find out that another Marketing division in another geography is already using another office of the Agency for their campaign!)
  6. Approval
    Once all of the data has been gathered, and an individual with decision authority has decided that the Agency is qualified to work on (select) marketing campaigns for the organization (subject to no conflict), the Agency is approved as a potential vendor.

Scope of Work

The scope of work module walks you through the six-step process of creating a scope of work and approving the scope of work for execution by the Agency.

  • Scope
    Defines the scope of the project being undertaken – duration, geography, contractual details, and summary.
  • Objectives
    What are the objectives? More visibility? Market share? Better brand ratings? And how will they be measured.
  • Work
    The specific deliverables – tv commercial, print advertising, radio segments, etc.
  • Staffing
    The staff available to work on the projects.
  • Costs
    The costs, according to the costing model specified. This is one of the highlights of the Decideware Scope of Work solution. With a custom Excel-like spreadsheet interface, costs can be captured by resource, by function, by campaign, or by deliverable to the desired degree of detail. This not only lets the organization get a grip on what the main cost components are, but how one agency compares in fees and rates to another.
  • Approval
    Once all of the data has been gathered, and an individual with decision authority has decided that the scope of work is complete, a contract is cut and the work can begin.

Briefing

One of Decideware‘s newest Agency Lifecycle Management module, this module is designed to capture the day-to-day interactions with the Agency. It’s like a Community Communications Management and Balanced Scorecard rolled into one. Since this is still in beta with select customers, we’ll cover it at a later time once the first version is finalized and we’ve dived deeper into the nuances of Agency Relationship Management.

Tomorrow we’ll cover the Evaluation and Dashboard modules and talk about some unique capabilities of the Decideware platform.

Want to Get Ahead in your Supply Management Career? Read!

CEO.com recently released a short study on “CEO Information Consumption: How Business Leaders Stay Informed” that contained the results of a joint study by CEO.com and Domo who surveyed more than 350 chief executives. With the goal of finding out how CEOs consume information, the study made one thing crystal clear for anyone looking to get ahead in their career. You have to read!

Consider the following responses to the question that asked what forms of media do you (as CEO) prefer?

  • 02%: Podcast
  • 08%: Video
  • 18%: Inofographics
  • 22%: No Preference
  • 57%: Text

In other words, a total of 75%, or 3 out of every 4 CEOs, prefer to read. They don’t waste time on Youtube or Riotcast, they read. And, 3 out of 4 CEOs mostly consume information online! So read this blog, Supply Chain Matters, CPO Rising, Strategic Sourcing, and others that bring you education and insights on a daily basis and prepare yourself for career progression!

What else should you read? Based upon the top 10 business related searches for CEOs, you should also read:

  1. Supply Chain News
    You may live and breathe supply chain every day, but sometimes it’s easy to get trapped in the trenches and fall behind on what’s happening in the marketplace. Good sources included Procurement Leaders, the Supply Chain Management Review (SCMR), and Spend Matters.
  2. Market / Industry Trends
    It’s important to come up from the trenches on a regular basis to see where the industry is going and prepare yourself when it gets there. Good sources include The Economist, the ISM, and MetalMiner.
  3. Supply Chain Insights / Expert Advice
    Chances are that your organization, even if you think it’s above average, is only average. An organization only remains above average if it is continually improving, and that requires fresh insights on a regular basis. Good sources include Tompkins International, Supply Chain Shaman, and Supply Business (the former CPO Agenda).
  4. Technology Trends
    Technology drives the modern supply chain. Good sources include The MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, and this blog*.
  5. Marketing Trends
    The lifeblood of a company is cash flow, and that comes from sales, generated by marketing. Getting a grip on what marketing is likely to be doing is key to cementing Supply Management’s place as the go-to organization for help and advice, which is where you need to be to get that critical spend under management and increase the value-add of the products and services you source. Since “good marketing” is largely a matter of opinion, I’m not going to direct you to any specific resources but advise you to get multiple inputs and take everything you get with a few grains of salt.
  6. Competitor Analysis
    You don’t necessarily need to keep up with the Joneses, but you should be aware of what they are doing. For this, you will need to work with the analyst/market research firms and keep an eye on import data. SI recommends The Hackett Group and Supply Chain Insights in the former case and you can look to Zepol and Import Genius in the latter.
  7. Case Studies
    Good case studies can often provide deep insights into improvement. In this case, look to the leading publications (including the SCMR and Supply Business (the former CPO Agenda referenced above)), purchasing associations (such as the Next Level Purchasing Association [now the Certitrek NLPA]), and leading Sourcing and Procurement Vendors (including SI sponsors BravoSolution and Wallmedien).
  8. Executive Lifestyles
    While SI doesn’t recommend spending too much time on this one, because, even if you are a CPO, you probably don’t have much time to enjoy the executive lifestyle, it is important to understand what executives like to do in their spare time so you can relate to them when you get the opportunity. Once they see you in a positive light, that light may carry over to what you do (and help you close the disconnect). **
  9. Webinars / Virtual Tradeshows / Events
    Busy executives don’t have a lot of time to travel to many events on top of all of the business travel they already have to do, and neither do you. So webinars are a good way to consume information quickly when you have a lunch hour free, for example. (Archived webinars are even better as you can scan the presentation and focus in on the key parts that are relevant to you.) Vendor web-sites are a great starting point for free (archived) webinars.
    Where events are concerned, focus on conferences that revolve around education, and not vendor offerings. And avoid the big expos like the plague (that they are a breeding ground for). Smaller groups allow for more interactive workshops and knowledge sharing between attendees, and tend to attract more senior, more experienced, and more career-focussed people. Procurement Leaders Conferences and the Next Practices Xchange are good examples of this type of event, and the upcoming Next Level Purchasing Association Conference should prove to be as well!
  10. Speeches / Panel Discussions
    This is really a continuation of #9 and the search for knowledge. Don’t be afraid to branch out from Supply Management to spark the creative juices and ask TED.

Finally, when it comes to social media, take a tip from the CEOs and stick to LinkedIn. Most CEOs, especially those over 50, don’t waste any time on Facebook or Twitter.

* (the doctor does have a PhD in Computer Science!)
** Apparently, executives spend a lot of time thinking about their shoes. the doctor would like to think this is not the case, but considering that Jason Busch, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Spend Matters, has felt the need to educate the reader about shoes on multiple occasions (including posts about business shoes and shoe lessons), it probably is. 🙁

Decideware: An End-to-End Agency Lifecycle Management Solution Part I

In our last two posts we discussed Agency Lifecycle Management (ALM), the criticality of such to Marketing, and the need for Supply Management to support (ALM) end-to-end if Supply Management wants to get the sacred cow Marketing spend under management. We also outlined the four fundamental phases of Agency Lifecycle Management, key requirements of each phase, and the capabilities that Supply Management has to bring to the table to get a seat at the table. We concluded the post by noting that if Supply Management doesn’t have the requisite processes and technologies at its disposal, it should get them and that there were solutions out there.

One of the leading solutions in Agency Lifecycle Management is Decideware. Decideware, which was first covered on Sourcing Innovation back in 2010 (in this post), started out with the goal of building a SaaS Supplier Performance Management system to allow organizations to get a grip on strategic supplier management. However, in the process, they discovered that Marketing, in particular, was significantly underserved. So they started to build specific features, and then modules, for Agency Performance Management. However, the deeper they went down the rabbit hole, the darker they found it to be. Marketing desperately needed an end-to-end Agency Lifecycle Management solution, but at the time, no one was offering it. So they built one. Then they discovered, now that they had a light to guide their way, that they rabbit hole was far deeper and far darker than anyone thought. So now they are extending their ALM solution, considerably. And Marketers are doing the dance of joy*.

Currently, the Decideware solution has one module for each of the core phases of Agency Lifecycle Management plus a dashboard. The core modules are:

  • Capability
    which acts as the main interface to the underlying AIM (Agency Information Management) system that underlies all of the modules and allows information on Agencies to be entered, maintained, and searched
  • Scope of Work
    which is used to capture the complete scope of work in a methodical process that can support multiple workflows depending on the fee type (function, resource, deliverable, or agency) and project
  • Briefing
    which is used to capture the interactions with the Agency during each phase of the relationship
  • Evaluation
    which is used to record actuals, cost details, and approvals

and

  • Dashboard
    which provides a unified interface to all of the modules and functionality contained in the system; from the dashboard, the user can search all of the Agency data and retrieve lists of agencies by geographies, capability, scope of work, and other relevant criteria

The system is tightly integrated and fits together quite nicely. From any point in the SaaS solution, a user can drill into the information at hand and quickly get to the information she needs. And if she doesn’t know what to do next, each module has a well-defined step-by-step workflow that will guide the user to optimal results. In the next two posts, we will dive into the Decideware solution in more detail.

* and I’m told it’s a sight to see 😉

How Do You Support Marketing? Get a Grip on Agency Lifecycle Management, Part II

In our last post we explained that even though Marketing thinks its spend is sacred cow spend, it’s really not and that proper Agency Lifecycle Management techniques can be used to get a grip on marketing agency spend and manage it through the services lifecycle. We also explained that basic Agency Lifecycle Management consisted of four necessary steps: selection, scoping, briefing, and evaluation. In this post we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into the requirements of each step as Supply Management will not be able to support Marketing in Agency Lifecycle Management, and get its hands on that sacred cow spend, unless it has the appropriate processes and technologies.

Selection

In order to support the selection process, Supply Management will need to use a full featured RFI solution that can capture, at a minimum, the following agency information for each agency under consideration:

  • firmographic data, including location, size, financial health, ownership, and affiliations
  • (core) capabilities and resource availability
  • (primary) and secondary specialties, and the relative percentage of business
  • experience in the vertical(s) of interest
  • (major) clients and (potential) conflicts

In other words, before a selection can be made, a rather complete profile is needed to narrow in on the agencies that are not only capable of doing the work, but appropriate with respect to the target mediums, populations, and desired branding. For complex requirements, you almost need a SIM application to capture, store, and analyze all of the data.

Scoping

Where Agency selection is concerned, it’s not as simple as just identifying the agencies that could do the work, it’s finding an agency that can do the work, do the work the way the Marketing department wants it done, commit the resources the Marketing department is acceptable with, and do so in the requisite timeframes. Where as any Tom, Dana, or Harry, at least in the eyes of a Marketing Department, can sweep a floor or use a copier, not just any Tom, Dana, or Harry is going to come up with that killer campaign. For that, you need a Sven, Celine, or Giorgio.

This requires, once potential candidate agencies are selected, the provision of a detailed scope of work and the collection of detailed responses to the scope of work that outline who the Agency has that can do the work, what the resources can do, when the resources can be devoted to the project, where the work will be performed, how the Agency intends to reach your target audience, and why the Agency is the best for the job at hand. This will require some back and forth negotiation until the response is acceptable to Marketing and the scope is acceptable to the Agency. Then an agreement can be cut. Then it’s on to the

Briefing

In the briefing phase, the scope of work is further refined to provide the Agency with details on demographics, target audience, budget, and desired creative elements for the current phase of the marketing campaign. Typically, the scope of work will be for the entire campaign and then a detailed briefing will be provided at the start of each phase. The Agency will then respond with any additional requests for clarification or refinement, some back and forth may occur, and then they will produce and, after the requisite review(s), deliver the work for the phase.

Evaluation

Marketing should be reviewing the results after each phase, particularly where the budget is concerned. If the scope of work was for a one year campaign, with a new set of tv, radio, and online advertisements each quarter, and halfway though the year the Agency has blown three quarters of the budget, something is very wrong. Marketing has to keep a continuous eye on budget, timelines, and (any measurable) results on a regular basis, and make sure everything goes to plan. This is where Supply Management, and it’s best practice Supplier Relationship Management and data analysis skills, can really help Marketing.

If Supply Management can effectively support each of these phases, then chances are it can effectively support Marketing and get some control over that sacred cow spend.

And if it doesn’t have the processes and tools it needs, there are Agency Lifecycle Management solutions on the market.