As per our last post on how OneMarket Sources Your Contracts with Insights in its new Integrated Source-to-Contract Portfolio, LogicSource was founded in 2009 by experienced professionals who wanted to improve sourcing and procurement in organizations that didn’t have the knowledge, experience, and infrastructure to execute in an efficient, effective, and transparent manner. Their view was that every consultancy can offer advice, but not every consultancy can help the customer implement that advice and get results.

In order to do this, they decided to build out an end-to-end suite to support their indirect/tail-spend clients with their particular service-oriented needs. As per our last post, they launched OneMarket for Source-to-Contract in 2020, which followed the Procure-to-Pay (P2P) solution that they have had since they acquired the Cirqit P2P solution in 2009. It was updated and rebranded as OneMarket P2P since OneMarket launched in 2012 and has undergone continual development and updates through 12 versions since 2009.

The UX has been updated and is maintained to be consistent with the rest of their platform and the solution is tightly integrated with their analytics solution and supports very detailed PO, Invoice, and Spend Analysis on all transactions that go through the platform.

Buyer Side Procurement

The platform was designed to be a simple shop, buy, pay experience that supported simple quotes (bid-and-buy RFQ) for standard / repeatedly purchased products (to negate the need for a full sourcing event), single and multi-supplier catalogs, and rate cards for standard services. It’s really easy for a user to generate a requisition using each of these capabilities, as well as selecting options against approved supplier purchase orders (POs), blanket POs, and, as just mentioned, rate card POs. They support approval chains of 0 or more suppliers (where orders to approved suppliers with negotiated pricing within budget can be setup as auto-approved where there exist approved supplier, blanket, or rate card POs) which can be configured on implementation and updated on an as-needed bases by administrators.

When a Purchase Order is approved, it goes out to the supplier who can reject it (if there is no contractual requirement), request a change order, or accept it and flip it to an invoice with as few as two clicks (if they intend to ship in full), or a few key field updates of unit fields (if they are fulfilling with a partial order). Once the invoice comes in, it goes into its own approval stream of 0 or more approvals (as rules can be configured so that exact-match invoices under a dollar amount are auto-approved), and when approved for payment, the ok-to-pay is pushed to the organization’s system. In addition, if the payment system is integrated, the platform will monitor for updates and update the invoice status when the invoice is paid.

Dashboard

The entry point to the buyer’s P2P application is the Dashboard that summarizes:

• Requests awaiting their approvals
• Their requests in process

LogicSource understands their target market are overworked, often don’t have Procurement as their primary role, and aren’t the most advanced on the Procurement ladder, and designed the entire application to be as simple and straightforward for the average buyer as possible, and make sure every screen takes them directly to what they want or need to do.

Menus

The buyer application has four primary options:

• Create: which allows a user to create bid-and-buy projects, request estimates, create purchase orders (from existing approved supplier, blanket, or rate card POs), or enter a non-PO invoice that was received
• Transactions: which allows a user to access their estimates, orders, invoices, reviews, and projects
• Catalog: that allows the user to access their catalog(s) (which can be integrated or held separate), and which can be drilled into by organization (which limits the items that need to be searched and ensures the services and items that are found are those that have been approved)
• Analytics: that takes the buyer to the analytics application

Catalogs

Catalogs are hosted and work exactly as you would expect, with standard search, filter, and one-click select, but the level of item detail is deeper than you expect, and the ability to manage internal inventory, supplier commitments, volume-based pricing, and order minimums or maximums goes well beyond a standard P2P catalog. (Punch-out catalogs are coming, but the plan is to support hybrid or internal hosting as much as possible as their application supports more information and capability than punch-out catalogs.)

Search is by item id or description, and can be quick-filtered by category, supplier, status, keyword(s), and organization (which provide cross-catalog subsets relative to the different buyers and departments in the company). When a user selects a catalog, all they have to do is specify an order quantity to add it to a requisition.

When it comes to catalog item details, which can be seen upon drill in and maintained by the organizational administrator(s) as needed, the catalog will specify the internal item code, version, description, category (and subcategory), target organization, location types supported, keywords, whether or not the supplier is preferred, supplier part id, manufacturer item number, brand, more detailed description, inventory Unit of Measure, Quantity per Unit of Measure (i.e. there might be 50 gloves in a box), organizational item status, activation date, deactivated date if inactive, standard order quantity suggestion, organizational product owner, inventory manager, primary buyer, barcode, and any additional comments. In addition, the cost allocation can be pre-specified in the catalog item so the buyer doesn’t have to deal with it (and select the wrong/default “other” category all the time, which, of course, screws up analytics). Finally, if there is volume pricing or order limitations from the supplier, these can be defined as well as any commitments the supplier has made to item availability at the price points. (Supplier commitments are important as ordering against these can automate requisition approval as pricing and availability have already been confirmed and accepted by the organization.)

When the buyer is done shopping, they can create the requisition which will either be automatically approved and converted into one purchase order per supplier (if there are existing approved supplier or blanket POs and budget is available), or sent off for approval (and the approver will be notified through email and can approve through the email or through the system, as they will also see the request for approval on their dashboard), and then, once approved by the appropriate individuals, there will be one purchase order created per supplier.

Each purchase order will have an auto-generated purchase order number as well as the corresponding order id, order name, requester, contact, and deliver by date automatically extracted from the requisition. It will contain the full item information for each item: id, description, UOM, (agreed upon) catalog price, quantity, line item total, subtotal, tax, order total, (default) shipping information, and any associated digital specification documents. All of this can be updated by the buyer (on an auto-approved PO) or the approver if necessary before the PO is sent to the supplier. Internally (i.e. not shared with the supplier), the Purchase Order will also maintain the cost allocation from the catalog for processing and any associated messages that have been sent between the buyer and supplier.

Bid-And-Buy / Requests for Estimate

A buyer can request a(n updated) quote on one or more existing catalog items or variations with new, detailed, specifications (especially if the catalog item is a placeholder for products that can have multiple configurations or services). Specifications can be extremely detailed and can be configured to go well beyond standard catalog specifications and can have subsections for each type of specification required. For example, for a mailer (for those who still do print campaigns), you can specify the high level project description (header), specific project details (component information), the paper attributes, the artwork details, the prepress details, each individual component (i.e. envelope, mailer, artwork, etc.) that can be drilled into, associated digital files, shipping information, estimate specifications (type:RFQ/Sealed Bid/Auction, due date, expiration date, commitments, etc.), capabilities required, and selected suppliers.

Once the suppliers have responded, the buyer can click into the estimate and see all of the bids by component by supplier with the lowest bid highlighted and preselected. The buyer can select the award as is, or change the award by component, and when the buyer is happy, select it and the requisitions and/or purchase orders (depending on what suppliers were selected, the total cost, existing purchase orders, and approval rules) are automatically created (and, if auto-approved, distributed).

Supplier Side Procurement

The platform is designed to be super easy for suppliers to respond to bid-and-buy requests and orders.

Dashboard

The entry point to the supplier’s P2P application is the Dashboard that summarizes:

• Bid-and-Buy Estimate Requests awaiting their response
• Orders
• Recently Completed Estimates

If you think about how a supplier generally interacts with a buyer platform, it’s to provide quotes, fulfill orders, submit invoices, and request status. The dashboard captures most of this (as the supplier can flip an order to an invoice once they have fulfilled it), and it’s a single click into one of the three main main drop-downs to bring up the invoice (status) screen (although SI feels it would be really useful to have a quick summary of unapproved invoices so a supplier who can’t figure out a menu doesn’t call the buyer asking for a status they can look up themselves).

Menus

The supplier application menu has three primary options:

• Dashboard: that we just discussed above
• Create: where they can create change requests and invoices
• Transactions: where they can access their requests, estimates, orders and invoices

Orders

When a supplier clicks into an order, they see all of the header, client, shipping and line-item information right up front. From here they can accept the order as is and flip it to an invoice, altering the unit quantities to those they can deliver now if they want to, message the buyer for more information, or make a change request, which will be returned as an associated change order if approved by the buyer.

Clicking the ‘Create Invoice’ button takes them to the invoice screen where they can provide more details or alter other information as required (or desired, but changing prices, terms, or delivery dates will prevent a PO match and could delay the buyer’s processing of the invoice). When they are ready, they either accept the PDF generated by the system (as an unalterable historical record) or upload their own (from their AP system), and then it’s one click to submit the invoice (both the application and PDF version) to the buyer.

Centralized Procurement

A lot of LogicSource‘s customers are operations with multiple locations, including brands that own retail chains. These customers need a solution that can help them keep track of spend across their locations, help their locations buy, but do so with corporate policies in place and supplier/distributor minimums in check. The OneMarket solution contains a simplified configuration just for location managers who only need to make orders and manage orders and invoices.

When a location manager logs in, they see a dashboard that summarizes their orders: incomplete, pending receipt – action required, and open; and a search bar where they can begin a search and start a new order. Search brings up all matching results, where they can select a preferred item, enter the quantity they want, and add it to the cart. They can continue until they have everything in the cart, and then go to the cart screen where it groups the items by supplier, shows subtotals by supplier, and indicates, with red highlight, if there are any sub-orders that don’t meet order minimums (or violate any other rules for the supplier). They can then increase the quantity, add more items, or delete all items from that supplier until the entire order meets business rules. When they are happy, it’s one click to check-out and the orders are distributed to the suppliers (as no approvals are needed since their catalogs are limited to pre-approved suppliers and products with commitments and approved prices).

Procurement Analytics

The analytics solution we discussed in our last article on how OneMarket Sources Your Contracts with Insights is also integrated with the P2P solution and, since the data that flows through OneMarket is automatically categorized and clean, OneMarket can pre-configure a lot of meaningful and detailed reports out of the box. These can include change orders, client operations, missed opportunity, order activity, order detail, supplier order, tracking list, inventory, and retail reports in addition to all of the reports described in our last article. Retail reports can include billing status, capital project analysis, commitment status, project costs, freight detail, historical shipment analysis, order history, pre-paid allocation, and tax reports, among others. The existence of detailed PO, invoice, and line-item data allows for very deep analysis on spend and P2P process time. Spend, supplier spend, supplier rating, invoice throughput, and supply chain analysis are preconfigured on all available data and the out-of-the-box cubes are detailed and deep.

LogicSource‘s OneMarket is a great P2P solution for organizations that do a lot of indirect Procurement and need a simple, service-supported, solution or a solution that can be rolled out to multiple locations with limited Procurement expertise and capability. It’s definitely worth checking out if you are that kind of (mid-market) organization.