Author Archives: thedoctor

Carbon Calculation is Great, But What You’re Really Concerned About is YOUR e-Liability

A few weeks ago, we ranted that Carbon Tracking is Important — But a Calculator or a Credit is Not a Solution! The reasons that credits were not a solution were that most “credits” were iffy at best, and downright fraudulent at the worst. The only solutions to carbon are actual reduction or proven capture. But that’s a diatribe for another rant. A calculator is not a solution either. It’s important to understand YOUR carbon footprint, but simply understanding your footprint is not addressing your footprint. Plus, it’s not just your inbound footprint you need to worry about, it’s your outbound footprint as well. You are NOT responsible for any carbon in your organization associated with products or services that are being sold to another business. You are only responsible for the carbon footprint of products are services that are being sold to a consumer or that you incur in running your operations.

In other words, what you need to be tracking and addressing is your e-Liability, which was well defined in a recent Harvard Business Review article on accounting for climate change. And this is not scope 3 carbon tracking or ESG reporting under the GHG protocol which contains flaws that result in the same emissions reported multiple times throughout the chain by different companies and other emissions being completely ignored. All emissions need to be captured ONCE and allocated as appropriate between the different entities in the supply chain, depending on which business is the last business to acquire the products or services that the emissions are directly correlated with.

Note the concept of direct correlation. All of the GHG produced mining a rare earth mineral is direct GHG associated with that rare earth mineral, and is passed up the supply chain to the buyer who buys that ore to process it, whereas all of the GHG produced by the CEO flying around on his private jet just because he can is indirect GHG that is the liability of the corporation that needs to be accounted for, and offset in someway, but that cannot be passed on to an organization that buys its ore (as it was not GHG absolutely necessary to extract the ore).

The best part of the HBR e-Liability recommendation by Kaplan and Ramanna is that it is based on financial accounting principles which track liability inflows and outflows the same way an accountant or economist would track inflows and outflows. It’s mathematically sound, makes perfect sense, doesn’t double count, and properly used, won’t miss anything either. If you want calculator, get a proper e-Liability calculator.

But remember that understanding your e-Liability is only your first step. The next step is to find ways to actually reduce your GHG footprint by reduction of unnecessary activities, production process improvement (including energy and water efficiency), and product design improvements. (Not BS credits.)

Reporting is Not Analysis — And Neither Are Spreadsheets, Databases, OLAP Solutions, or “Business Intelligence” Solutions

… and one of the best explanations the doctor has ever read on this topic (which he has been writing about for over two decades) was just published over on the Spendata blog on Closing the Analysis Gap. Written by the original old grey beard himself (who arguably built what was the first stand alone spend analysis application back in 2000 and then redefined what spend analysis was not once, but twice, in two subsequent start-ups that built two, entirely new, analytics applications that took a completely different, more in-depth approach), it’s one of the first articles to explain why every current general purpose solution that you’re currently using to try and do analysis actually doesn’t do true analysis and why you need a purpose built analysis solution if you really want to find results, and in our world, do some Spend Rappin’.

We’re not going to repeat the linked article in its entirety, so we’ll pause for you to go read it …

 

… we said, go to the linked article and read it … we’ll wait …

 

READ IT! Then come back. Here’s the the linked article again …

 

Thank you for reading it. Now we’ll continue.

As summarized by the article, we have the following issues:

Tool Issue Resolution Loss of Function
Spreadsheet Data limit; lack of controls/auditability Database No dependency maintenance; no hope of building responsive models
Database performance on transactional data (even with expert optimization) OLAP Database Data changes are offline only & tedious, what-if analysis is non-viable
OLAP Database Interfaces, like SQL, are inadequate BI Application Schema freezes to support existing dashboards; database read only
BI Application Read only data and limited interface functionality Spreadsheets Loss of friendly user interfaces and data controls/auditability

In other words, the cycle of development from stone-age spreadsheets to modern BI tools, which was supposed to take us from simple calculation capability to true mathematical analysis in the space age using the full breadth of mathematical techniques at our disposal (both built-in and through linkages to external libraries), has instead taken us back to the beginning to begin the cycle anew, while trying to devour itself like an Ouroboros.

Why did this happen? The usual reasons. Partly because some of the developers couldn’t see a resolution to the issues when they were first developing these solutions, or at least a resolution that could be implemented in a reasonable timeframe, partly (and sometimes mostly) because vendors were trying to rush a solution to market (to take your money), and partly (and sometimes largely) because the marketers keep hammering the message that what they have is the only solution you need until all the analysts, authors, and columnists repeat the same message to the point they believe it. (Even though the users keep pounding their heads against the keyboard when given a complex analysis assignment they just can’t do … without handing it off to the development team to write custom code, or cutting corners, or making assumptions, or whatever.) [This could be an entire rant on its own how the rush to MVP and marketing mania sometimes causes more ruin than salvation, but considering volumes still have to be written on the dangers of dunce AI, we’ll have to let this one go.]

The good news is that we now have a solution you can use to do real analysis, and this is much more important than you think. The reality is that if you can’t get to the root cause of why a number is as it is, it’s not analysis. It’s just a report. And I don’t care if you can drill down to the raw transactions that the analysis was derived from, that’s not the root cause, that’s just supporting data.

For example, profit went down because warranty costs increased 5% is not helpful. Why did warranty costs go up? Just being able to trace down to the transactions where you see 60% of that increase is associated with products produced by Substitional Supplier is not enough (and in most modern analysis/BI tools, that’s all you can do). Why? Because that’s not analysis.

Warranty costs increasing 5% is the inevitable result of something that happened. But what happened? If all you have is payables data, you need to dive into the warranty claim records to see what happened. That means you need to pull in the claim records, and then pull out the products and original customer order numbers and look for any commonalities or trends in that data. Maybe after pulling all this data in you see, of the 20 products you are offering (where each would account for 5% of the claims if all things were equal) there are 2 products that account for 50% of the claims. Now you have a root cause of the warranty spend increase, but not yet a root cause of what happened, or how to do anything about it.

To figure that out, you need to pull in the customer order records and the original purchase order records and link the product sent to the customer with a particular purchase order. When you do this, and find out that 80% of those claims relate to products purchased on the last six monthly purchase orders, you know the products that are the problem. You also know that something happened six months or so ago that caused those products to be more defective.

Let’s say both of these products are web-enabled remote switch control boxes that your manufacturing clients use to remotely turn on-and-off various parts of their power and control systems (for lighting, security monitoring, etc.) and you also have access, in the PLM system, to the design, bill of materials (BOM), and tier 2 suppliers and know a change takes 30 to 60 days to take effect. So you query the tier 1 BOM from 6, 7, 8, and 9 months ago and discover that 8 months ago the tier 2 supplier for the logic board changed (and nothing else) for both of these units. Now you are close to the root cause and know it is associated with the switch in component and/or supplier.

At this point you’re not sure if the logic board is defective, the tier 1 supplier is not integrating it properly, or the specs aren’t up to snuff, but as you have figured out this was the only change, you know you are close to the root cause. Now you can dive in deep to figure out the exact issue, and work with the engineering team to see if it can be addressed.

You continue with your analysis of all available data across the systems, and after diving in, you see that, despite the contract requiring that any changes be signed off by the local engineering team only after they do their own independent analysis to verify the product meets the specs and all quality requirements, you see that the engineering, who signed off on the specs, did not sign off on the quality tests which were not submitted. You can then place a hold on all future orders for the product, get on the phone with the tier 1 supplier and insist they expedite 10 units of the logic board air freight for quality testing, and get on the phone with engineering to make sure they independently test the logic boards as soon as they arrive.

Then, when the product, which is designed for 12V power inputs, arrives and the engineers do their stress tests and discover that the logic board, which was spec’ed to be able to handle voltage spikes to 15V (because some clients power backup systems off of battery backups that run off of chained automotive batteries) actually burns out at 14V, you have your root cause. You can then force the tier 1 supplier to go back to the original board from the original supplier, or find a new board from the current supplier that meets the spec … and solve the problem. [And while it’s true you can’t assume that all of the failure increases were the logic board without examining each and every unit of each and every claim, in this situation, statistically, most of the increase in failures will be due to this [as it was the only change].]

In other words, true analysis means being able to drill into raw data, bring in any and all associated data, do analysis and summaries of that data, drill in, bring in related data, and repeat until you find something you can tie to a real world event that led to something that had a material impact on the metrics that are relevant to your business. Anything less is NOT analysis.

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P21) … And We Have a Long Way To Go! Next Up: Contract Management

When we started in Part 1, we noted that even though all core sourcing and procurement technologies have been available for twenty (20) years (although it is debatable just how good the initial versions of many of these applications were) … the majority of organizations still do not have what any modern analyst would consider reasonable support for the full, core, source-to-pay process.

However, now that inflation is back with a vengeance, anticipated savings is leaking faster than a bald spigot, and most organizations are in a cash crunch as a result of down sales during the pandemic (and now due to a lack of core inventory to sell), they need to update their procurement tech stack fast.

But, and this is the kicker, they can’t do it all at once. We went into a lot of the details as to why, but, basically:

  • the applications don’t work without data … and don’t work well without LOTS of data … clean, organized, enriched data … (that you don’t have now and won’t have for a while)
  • the applications don’t deliver without user training …
  • you need value out of the gate to justify the purchase … and good luck getting enough value to justify the license cost of an entire suite!
  • your users need to see results for them to adopt … and use … a solution long term

So, you need to figure out where to start. And after three posts, we figured it out — e-Procurement. We then spent a few posts discussing the need for e-Procurement, the benefits, the barriers to e-Procurement (which were not what you think), and providing you with a large list of vendors. But then we had to step back and figure out what came next again because, depending on the particular situation at hand, there were good arguments for contract management, spend analysis, strategic sourcing, and supplier management. It took quite a bit of analysis, and the answer was spend analysis because, even if all things seemed equal, or one solution looked more attractive than another, spend analysis could identify the (biggest) opportunities and the solution best suited to the most / biggest opportunities, and so spend analysis always made the most sense to adopt after e-Procurement.

After that, it was difficult. But, if all opportunities are equal, or there is no one to do the thorough spend analysis that can help differentiate the savings opportunities that can be enabled by each S2P module, there still has to be a best choice for what’s next. And that was … Supplier Management, which is what we just finished covering after a deep dive into the ten (10) facets of the CORNED QUIP mash that is Supplier Management today. The reason? Just like you needed to get your spend data captured for everything to function (which is what e-Procurement does), no matter what you’re doing, you’re interacting with suppliers, so you need to manage them effectively.

However, now it’s not so difficult as we’re down to two choices as to what comes next: Strategic Sourcing and Contract Management … and the answer is Contract Management.

Why? Don’t you have to find the products and services you need before you contract for them? Technically, yes, but the reality is that you’re already buying products and services, you already have contracts, and chances are you can’t find most of those contracts, don’t know what the obligations and deliverables are for anything that’s not available through the e-Pro catalog, and don’t even know the pricing, permitted price escalations, etc. Not to mention, most organizations without a modern CLM don’t know how many evergreen contracts they have, when they automatically renew if not terminated or renegotiated by that date, when key contracts they need are expiring, and so on. And this doesn’t even take into account the excess manual effort and time the organization is taking to re-negotiate existing or negotiate new contracts. Nor its inability to do a proper analysis of existing payment terms, key risk clauses that are required for a new regulation, and so on.

Contract Management may not identify any big opportunities, but without a good, enforceable, contract that can be easily monitored throughout its lifetime, the reality is that the identified savings will likely never materialize. Thus, Contract Management is key to have in place before you start strategically sourcing, as you want to immediately turn the bids into contract terms before the process disconnect from not having a good CLM solution causes bids to be retracted “because they were only good for 15 days” or some other excuse a supplier will come up with to not honour a bid.

However, like Supplier Management, Contract Management is also a bit of a mixed bag. To be precise, it’s a NAG, but most vendors can’t even get that right, and instead offer solutions that typically fall primarily into one of the three camps:

Contract Negotiation
which supports the authoring and negotiation part of the process
Contract Analytics
which supports the syntactic, semantic and numeric analysis of the contracts
Contract Governance
which supports the ongoing monitoring, management, termination/renewal, and long term archival of the contracts

Tomorrow we will begin our coverage by diving into Negotiation in Part 22.

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P20) … And Supplier Management Very Extensive … So Here Are Over 100 Supplier Management Companies to Check Out!

And now the post you’ve all been waiting for! A partial, starting, list of over 100 supplier management companies that may (or may not) meet some, or many, of the core baseline capabilities we outlined in the last four parts of this series (Part 16, Part 17, Part 18 and Part 19) as we discussed the A, B, C, and D sides of Supplier Management today (with more sides emerging, as we still haven’t discussed ESG and Diversity, to name a couple of topics, as those providers are mainly data providers today, which you integrate into your SIM, SCM, SUM, or SRM solution today).

As with our lists of e-Procurement Companies (in Part 7), Spend Analysis Companies (in Part 12), and Sacred Cow Companies that do, or support, customized “spend” analysis on Marketing, Legal, and SaaS (in Part 13), we must again give our disclaimer that this list is in no-way complete (as no analyst is aware of every company), is only valid as of the date of posting (as companies sometimes go out of business and acquisitions happen all of the time in our space), and does NOT include any companies that just (or primarily) do ESG data collection (or carbon calculators), diversity data enrichment, or other emerging areas of supplier management not in the ten (10) areas we’ve covered so far (for which there are actual solutions that do more than just supplier record data enrichment) in our expository on the CORNED QUIP mash of Supplier Management.

Furthermore, as we’ve said before, not all vendors are equal, and we’d venture to say NONE of the following are equal. The companies below are of all sizes (very small to very large, relative to vendor sizes in our space), cover the baseline differently (in terms of percentage of features offered, the various degrees of depth in the feature implementations, and differing levels of customization for a vertical), offer different additional features, have different types of service offerings (backed up by different expertise), focus on different company sizes, and focus on different technology ecosystems (such as plugging into other platforms/ecosystems, serving as the core platform for certain functions or data, offering a plug-and-play module for a larger ecosystem, focussing on the dominant technology ecosystem(s) in one or more verticals), etc.

Do your research, and reach out to an expert for help if you need it in compiling a starting short list of relevant, comparable, vendors for your organization and its specific needs. For many of these vendors, good starting points might be found in the Sourcing Innovation archives, Spend Matters Pro, and Gartner Cool Vendor write-ups if any of these sources has a write-up on the vendor.

Finally, a second reminder that inclusion on this list DOES NOT imply Sourcing Innovation is recommending the vendor.

COMPANY LINKEDIN
Employees		 HQ (Country)
State		 C O R N E D Q U I P
Achilles 757 United Kingdom N I
Advanced 2769 United Kingdom R U I P
apexanalytix 411 North Carolina, USA D U I
Aravo 117 California, USA C R U I P
Arcus (Trade Interchange) 27 United Kingdom C I P
Avetta 833 Utah, USA C R N I
Axiscope 13 France C R Q U I
Basware 1575 Finland N I
Bedrock 78 Florida, USA R I
Beroe 660 North Carolina, USA O D U I
Brooklyn Solutions 24 United Kingdom C R U I
Canopy 14 United Kingdom C R U I
Claritum 7 United Kingdom I P
CMX1 75 California, USA C R Q I P
Corcentric 601 New Jersey, USA R I
Coupa 3687 California, USA R N U I
Delta eSourcing 206 United Kingdom I
Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) 5569 Florida, USA C U I
eBidToPay ?? Germany R Q I
Ecovadis 1418 France C U I
eCratum 12 Germany N I
ECSourcing (Simfoni) 11 New York, USA C R I
Everstream Analytics 183 California, USA O U I
FullStep 130 Spain U I P
GateKeeper 101 United Kingdom C U I
GEP 4803 New Jersey, USA R I P
GHX 1394 Colorado, USA C N I
Globality 178 C R D I
GraphiteConnect 62 Utah, USA R E U I
GRMS 29 California, USA U I
Hellios Information 74 United Kingdom N I
HICX 117 United Kingdom C R I
Ignite Procurement 65 Norway R U I P
Informatica 5992 California, USA I
IntegrityNext 61 Germany C R U I
Intenda 109 South Africa I
Interos 254 Virginia, USA C O D U I
Ion Wave 22 Missouri, USA R I
IS Networld 1007 Texas, USA C N I
ISPnext 59 Netherlands U I
Ivalua 900 California, USA C R U I P
Jaggaer 1313 North Carolina, USA R N U I
K2 Sourcing 10 Wisconsin, USA I
Khareed ?? Pakistan I P
Kodiak Hub 40 Sweden R U I P
LexisNexis 10348 New York, USA U I
LGX Corp ?? North Carolina, USA I
LiveSource (Blume Global) 8 Georgia, USA R E Q I P
LUPR 5 New Jersey, USA R U I P
Market Dojo 34 United Kingdom R I
MarketPlanet 72 Poland R I P
Matchory 12 Germany D I
MCO (My Compliance Office) 188 New York, USA C U I
Medius (Wax Digital) 568 Sweden R I
Mercell 462 Norway R I P
MeRLIN (Rheinbrucke) 172 Germany R I
Meshworks 18 Ohio, USA R Q I
MFG 468 Georgia, USA D I
Newtron 54 Germany R N Q U I
Oalia 24 France I
Oboloo 6 United Kingdom C I P
Onventis 147 Germany R N D I P
Open Windows Software 29 Australia C R I P
OpusCapita 474 Finland N I
PratisPro ?? Turkey I P
Proactis 566 United Kingdom R N I
ProcessUnity 143 Massachusetts, USA R U I
Procurence 9 Poland C R E Q U I
ProcurePort 8 Indiana, USA R I
ProcureWare >?? Washington, USA R I
Prokuria 8 Romania I P
Promena 18 Turkey R D I
Prospeum ?? Germany I P
QAD Allocation ?? California, USA C R Q I P
QMSC 15 Texas, USA Q I
Raindrop 29 California, USA R I
Resilinc 299 California, USA O U I
Ready Contracts 243 Australia R I P
RizePoint 62 Utah, USA C Q I
SAP Ariba 3009 California, USA R N D U I P
ScoutRFP 44 California, USA I P
SourceDogg 31 Ireland R I
Sourcing Force 4 Ontario, Canada C R I P
Sphera (riskmethods) 125 Germany U I
ScanMarket (Unit4) 61 Denmark C R U I P
Scoutbee 102 Germany D U I
SourceMap 95 New York, USA O R E U I
Suppeco 10 United Kingdom R I P
Supplhi 12 Italy C O R D U I
supplier.io 92 Illinois, USA O R D I
SupplierSoft ?? California, USA C R Q U I P
SupplyOn 239 Germany C R E Q U I P
Supply Risk Solutions 5 California, USA O U I
Synertrade 185 Germany R U I P
State of Flux 62 United Kingdom R E U I P
Tealbook 143 Ontario, Canada O D I
Trade Interchange ??

 United Kingdom I P
Transparency-One 23 Massachusetts, USA C O N U I P
Trust Your Supplier 15 North Carolina, USA C U I
Vendorful 15 New York, USA C R U I P
Vizibl 49 United Kingdom R E I
VORTAL 195 Portugal R I
Zumen 66 California, USA R I P
Zycus 1540 New Jersey, USA R N U I P

Continue to Part 21 where we continue our review of Source-to-Pay.

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P19) … Time to Break Down the CORNED QUIP of Supplier Management, D-Side

In our last post, we “flipped it to the ‘C’ side, finished with the ‘B’ side , nothin’ on the ‘A’ side, so tired of the inside, to the ‘C’ side, to the ‘C’ side” (because, in the 80s, we knew that Cats Can Fly). This was because, while records have only A and B sides, we know that Supplier Management is not flat and is best described as a multi-surface convex polyhedral with many sides, including a C-side and a D-side.

While Part 16 and Part 17 focussed in on the more “classic” offerings in the SXM space which were very internally focussed, our last post, Part 18, focussed outward on supplier discovery and network management, because supplier management is pointless if the organization does not have the right suppliers. We also pointed out that once you have identified the right suppliers, in addition to managing them, you need to outreach and enable them to do better, so today we move on to the last side of supplier management, appropriately named the D-Side as many buyers still think of the supplier as the dark side of the force, when, in fact, the supply base is just the dark side of the moon, ripe with opportunity for discovery if we’d just make the effort to get out there and explore.

So, in our final attempt to dissect the CORNED QUIP mash, we will dive into Supplier Orchestration (SOM) and Supplier Enablement (SEM) and outline the remaining capabilities you should be looking for in a Supplier Management Solution if these capabilities are important to you (and they should be).

Now, we get that “the suppliers aren’t paying for the solution” and, as a result, most buying organizations (that aren’t forward thinking enough in our view) don’t care enough to pay for supplier-focussed functionality, and that this means that most vendors just aren’t bothering to build these solutions. However, industry leading buying organizations are waking up to the fact that you can’t employ all the best people and thus the organization needs to take advantage of all the intelligence in its supply chain. Similarly, thought leading vendors are working on solutions to enable the supplier to do more, which really isn’t hard to do as they built most of the communication and collaboration mechanisms into classical onboarding and collaboration and project management, and just didn’t bother opening these capabilities up to the supplier in the past. Today, the best vendor platforms are making the functionality ubiquitous between parties, and those are the platforms we think that you should be looking for.

Orchestration Management. (or Onboarding + Multi-Tier/Multi-Supplier capability)

Classical supplier management was designed to support management of, and visibility into, an organization’s first tier suppliers because that was thought to be enough to minimize risk, reduce cost, and ensure smooth sailing on calm seas in the days ahead. For a while, that was enough, but as the pandemic demonstrated more clearly than any event before, not having deep insight into the deeper tiers of the supply chain can result in significant disruptions across the organization’s operations, not just point based disruptions from the odd supplier failure or (increasingly occurring) natural disaster. Thus, newer solutions are supporting multi-tier supplier management through cascading invitations, onboarding, and management by the tier above and visibility down to the source material.

Multi-Tier Network Linkages
A key requirement for multi-tier supplier orchestration is labelled bi-directional multi-tier network linkages that allow a buyer to trace their supply chain through a supplier down multiple tiers to the raw material suppliers when needed and monitor all of those producing critical raw materials, and critical components one level up, for potential risk or disruption. This is easier said then done because a buyer should only see the relationships that are supporting their products and services, not the linkages used by their peers, so the connections have to not only indicate who is using who, and for what, but also on behalf of who. Similarly, a tier 1 supplier should not know that it’s tier 2 supplier is also serving/servicing its competitor unless the competitor or tier 2 supplier chooses to make that relationship public, so now we have to consider relationship type, relationship purpose, relationship reason, and relationship visibility. It’s a lot to think through for a software developer, especially if you want to build an uncertainty management solution on top of that and calculate impacts of delays and disruption up the chains if a tier 4 supplier can’t deliver.
Cascading Onboarding Support
When a tier 1 supplier is selected to provide one or more products to a buyer, it needs to define the tier 2 suppliers it is using that need to automatically be invited by the platform to onboard to help the supplier maintain insight into its supply base and provide that insight to the buyer. Similarly, when those tier 2 suppliers onboard, they need to define the tier 3 component / material suppliers they are using to provide their products / components to the tier 2 suppliers. And so on.
And when another tier 1 supplier uses the same tier 2 supplier, it needs to be invited to just provide the relevant supply chain view to that new tier 2 supplier, with tier 3 only invited if they are new or providing different products than are already registered in the system. Unless, of course, a tier 2 (or tier 3) supplier chooses to become a customer, then they can manage their entire supply base through the solution (and not just that which supports the organization[s] currently paying for it). Like multi-tier network design and support, this is also a lot to think through for a software developer, especially one that wants to quickly bring a simple app to market as a “MVP” that it can sell for money.
Multi-Tier Supplier Support
The platform has to be more than simple visibility to be useful. It has to support messaging, and collaboration, down and up the chain to determine if early warning signals represent potential problems and, if so, allow for collaboration between the tiers to address those potential problems and proactively define solutions. It has to enable relevant supplier management functionality to all tiers of the chain to be truly useful to a buyer trying to manage a particular chain, but do so only for that buyer as the reality is that if no one is paying, the business providing that solution will not be able to stay in business. In other words, it needs to enable most of the core functions, but not provide any non-paying organization with any ability to add suppliers beyond those indicated to support a given chain.

Enablement Management. (+ Engagement)

Orchestration is great, and key to managing not just the supplier but the supply chain, but what’s the point of orchestrating if you’re not going to take it to the next level and enable the suppliers to better serve you. Being able to see where things are, send messages, and get responses is great, especially since it can provide early warning signals of issues that need to be dealt with, but the point of supplier management should be more than reactive issue resolution. Good supplier management should focus on proactive improvement. And, most importantly, that improvement should not just come from the buyer.

(Supplier-Led) Innovation Support
As an organization, your goal should be continual improvement both within your four walls and within the four walls of your strategic suppliers. Considering that most of your products and services are sourced, they will not improve if the suppliers do not improve them. Furthermore, given that your resources are finite, how much time will you actually have for innovating and improving the products you source to sell. Very little or none. It’s critical that most of the innovation come from your supply chain (as that’s where most of the manpower, and hopefully brainpower, should be). Moreover, you shouldn’t have to push for it. Your suppliers, when they find opportunities for quality or process improvement, or efficiency improvements, should be free, and even encouraged, to make those suggestions and kick off innovation projects (under your guidance, of course).

There should be full featured support for innovation. Multi-channel synchronous and asynchronous communication. The ability to whiteboard, design at a high level, and store prototype and related files and artifacts from design tools. Put together project plans — with milestones, tasks, and owners — and allow for tracking, change management, and commentary. It should also support tracking of quality data and quality processes as well.

Sustainability Guidance
Sustainability is more than a buzzword, it’s a necessity if your organization wants to not only thrive, but even survive. First of all, with regulations consistently popping up everywhere all at once, you need to get ahead of the curve. You can’t wait for a substance ban, a new GHG tax, or a new documentary requirement to pop up before figuring out its impact on your supply chain and what actions you will need from your supply base to ensure compliance. You need to start working on sustainability as soon as you suspect a regulation is coming. But figuring it out on your own with everything coming at you from everywhere all at once is just too much for an average organization to handle. A great enablement solution will not only help you keep tabs on current and potential sustainability requirements, but also give you guidance on how to be more sustainable, regardless of whether a regulation is enacted or not. Over time, sustainability will increase the longevity of your business and decease your costs. The sooner you increase your utilization of renewable energy and resources, and decrease your usage of finite resources, the better off you will financially be.
Integrated Supply-Centric Portal
An enablement solution PUTS THE SUPPLIER FIRST. Let’s repeat that for clarity. It PUTS THE SUPPLIER FIRST. The problem with every single supplier management solution on the market is that it was designed for the buyer and the supplier was an afterthought. For most solutions, the supplier interface is poor, limited in terms of available functionality, and definitely not single sign on (even if the supplier is also a client of the vendor — in this case they will have one sign-on where they can see all their suppliers, but still have to access a different view for each buyer they serve).

If the goal is to engage with the supplier to help them help you, the platform needs to not only enable the supplier to do that, but be a platform the supplier wants to use. A platform where they have to login to 20 different views to support 20 different buyers is NOT one they want to use. A platform that limits their ability to interact with you; denies them access the same features and capabilities in terms of creation, collaboration, and project management; doesn’t allow them to manage their teams and their workflows on their own; that doesn’t adapt to how they work is NOT only one that they don’t want to use, but also one that does NOT enable them.
The Supplier Enablement Platform should be so good that not only does every supplier want to buy it to manage their full supply base as a buyer, but one that they tell buyers without a good supplier-based supply chain management solution to look at because it supports them. This is where SXM platforms need to go if they want to be true enablement platforms, and the doctor will tell you that, despite all the marketing, he’s yet to see an engagement or an experience platform that does all this and puts the supplier on equal footing with the buyer across the platform and first for enablement. The first platform to truly do this will change the game, and change it in a way that will ultimately benefit the end buyer in the supply chain the most. (And who cares if the end buyer is paying for it at first, that buyer will reap benefits that will be many times the platform cost as their production costs predictably stabilize, the efficiency improves, their quality increases, and their sales go up as a result.)

This concludes our discussion of the D-side, the dark side, because, unfortunately, most Supplier Management (SXM) vendors still aren’t shining a light here and building the next generation capabilities these platforms truly need. A few are starting, but they have miles to go.

Next up, a partial list of SXM companies to look at in Part 20. (All do SIM to some extent. As for the rest of the CORNED QUIP, you will have to do your homework. None are SCORNEDQUIPM.)