e-Sourcing is a critical part of proper strategic procurement, but one that not a lot of SMEs and lower-end mid-markets have access to due to the cost of most strategic sourcing suites designed for the upper mid-market and enterprise that are beyond their budget, typically leaving them with only ultra-basic RFX solutions which are not enough.

In contrast, oboloo offers a Source-to-Contract platform with basic supplier management, contract document management, and savings management capability which can be obtained for $1,000 / user / year, allowing a SME Procurement department of 5 users to obtain decent sourcing software for 5K a year and put it on a P-card.

e-Sourcing

Their new, V2, e-Sourcing module is the core of the recently upgraded platform and allows an organization to build and issue RFIs, RFPs, and RFQs custom tailored to their needs for every event.

The entry dashboard to the Sourcing module allows a user to search the sourcing event database by opening and / or closing date, location, department, category, sub-category, event type, and event creator. From this dashboard, the user can access an existing event they have access to or create a new event.

If they choose to create a new event, they start with the sourcing wizard that allows them to configure the RFX event as a collection of (pre-defined) (standard) sections for internal use, standard information gathering (supplier questionnaires), event specific supplier sections, and a pricing section. (There’s only one standard product/item pricing template at the moment, but they are looking at including more for services [based on rate hours] and/or [manufacturing] cost breakdowns in future releases. If the user desired a more detailed price breakdown, they can attach an Excel spreadsheet.)

The platform walks the buyer through the process of

• defining the activity that captures all the sourcing meta-data
• selecting the sections for internal use
• selecting the sections for supplier response
• selecting the standard questionnaires (sustainability, security, etc.)
• defining the pricing request
• attaching any supporting documents
• defining the scoring criteria
• inviting the suppliers

Internal sections might consist of information on evaluation criteria and current pricing and cost structures.

Supplier sections consist of relevant criteria on required confidentiality, contact information, implementation plans, and future roadmap. Once a section is selected, it can be edited as needed.

Questionnaires are for the gathering of standard security and privacy information, sustainability information, service and support information, quality assurance, and other standard information required of any supplier for the product, category, or doing business requirements.

The pricing section is where the products are defined, by name, code, unit of measure, and quantity. The buyer can add as many products as she wants.

Once the products are defined, the buyer moves on to the scoring section where she defines the weighted scoring across each section included in the RFX.

Finally, the user selects the suppliers she wants to send the RFX to as well as the contacts at each supplier who will receive the RFX. If she chooses, she can switch to a supplier view before issuing the RFX. When she’s done, she presses send, and the RFP is complete.

The whole process can be completed in 10 minutes if the products are defined in the system and the buyer is okay with standard templates.

With regards to the construction process, the platform comes with a suite of standard sections and questionnaires that the buying organization can start with, and then the buying organization administrator can alter these as desired upon implementation.

Once the RFX is complete, and issued, the buyer can easily access the current status at any time. They can see which suppliers have responded, what they have responded to, and where the RFX is in the process. Once the RFX is closed, the buyer can start scoring and once scoring is complete, make an award.

Scoring is done on a section by section basis, with the information for each supplier displayed in consecutive rows for each supplier. The platform supports multiple scorers, and the weighted average will be used across scorers if multiple scorers are defined. Once scoring is done, the buyer sees the average score by section by supplier as well as the average score by supplier and can then mark a supplier for the award.

Contract Management

oboloo defines their contract management as a customized document management system, and that’s essentially what it is. It’s simply a repository for tracking organizational contracts, indexing them with metadata, defining relevant dates and alerts, and providing some basic reporting. But for most small organizations, that’s all they really need. They don’t use complicated contracts, they don’t want a separate document management system they won’t use, and they certainly don’t need the ability to define extensive clause libraries with multiple versions of each clause.

With respect to reporting, the system tracks expiring contracts by month, and can break them down by department, location, category, manager, type, etc. The user can also search across all of these criteria to quickly identify contracts of interest. It also tracks the number of documents (not) approved, the number of documents that have expired, and the number of contract records associated with suppliers that have been marked approved. And, of course, it can be setup with automated alerts/notifications to let the buyer know when contracts are coming up for expiry, when they are expired, etc. (And, of course these alerts/notifications exist throughout supplier management, RFX, and savings tracking when tasks are due.)

Each contract is a record consisting of key metadata classifiers, owners, financials, termination information, associated information, savings tracking, and a change log.

Supplier Management

The platform is defined as a basic supplier information and performance management platform that can maintain records for all suppliers used, or invited, by the buying organization and these can be searched by key identifiers that include industry, sub-industry, supplier type, preferred status, location, active (status), and contract as well as supplier name.

Supplier records are rather basic and consist of basic identifying information, owners, contacts, contracts, and scorecards. Performance management is scorecard centric in the application, and scorecards are also used to manage risk and track sustainability in the platform, as the buying organization can start with oboloo templates and set up their own to track the information they are interested in from a supplier performance management perspective.

Like contract management it is also fairly basic, but that’s what most SMEs and small midsized organizations need. Most of them don’t need extensive records on suppliers they are mainly buying indirect and MRO products from, and performance management is just a matter of ensuring quality, timely delivery, sustainability, low risk, and adherence to contract(s). This makes it easy for the buying organization to define and manage their suppliers.

Savings Tracking

Savings tracking is a simple module where, on a product, or contract, basis, a buyer can setup a savings tracking project on a fixed or variable time period for a set number of milestone dates. The buyer defines the product(s), current baseline spend (adjusted for the quantity, the projections, and then, at every milestone, defines the actual spend and the platform automatically computes the savings (or the lack thereof) and, once the last milestone is entered, computes the savings for the project.

As with the contract module, the system can then create meta-reports across all savings projects by month, year, and all time, as well as the remaining projected savings (and percentage). This can be broken down by category, sub-category, location, department, saving project type, and the responsible buyer.

Configuration

The platform supports roles-based security, comes with four pre-defined roles, and more can be configured to define created, read, edit, approval, archive, and similar rights across each module. Each user has a role as well as a unique profile.

It also supports the ability to define the industry and sub-industry hierarchy, the category and product hierarchy, corporate locations, departments, and each element type used by the system as identifying metadata (such as sourcing, contract, supplier, saving, document, etc. type). In addition, all of this information can be uploaded from excel (csv). The backend is built on APIs and the next version will have well-defined open APIs for data import as well as third party software integrations by 2025 Q1. Finally, users can select their currency (and define their preferred exchange rate) as well as their language, with approximately 15 languages currently supported.

Finally, the user can see their current licence and the corporate administrator can see all the currently active user licenses on the platform.

At the end of the day, oboloo contains the basic functionality you found in best-in-class first generation sourcing platforms almost two decades ago, with a few key differentiators. It’s a fully modern cloud-native SaaS stack, which can be fully self-implemented and self-configured, with a streamlined UX for SMEs, fully customizable template sections to allow for supplier records, contracts, RFXs, and savings projects to be created in minutes (vs hours or days). Most importantly, all of this comes at a cost that is a fraction of what these early SaaS platforms used to cost (and of what most [mini-]suites targeted at large mid-market and above, with a lot more bells and whistles than SMEs need, cost today), allowing a small sourcing team to get started for under 10K instead of having to spend 100K or more.