Category Archives: About us

Sourcing Innovation Welcomes Vinimaya as New Lead Sponsor

Sourcing Innovation is pleased to welcome Vinimaya, an innovative provider of e-procurement catalog and marketplace solutions, as its newest lead sponsor. Vinimaya, which represents The Next Wave in Product Catalogue Management (PCM), has been adding new functions, new offerings, and new clients since I first blogged about them back in 2007 (shortly after they were named a Cool Vendor by Gartner).

Unlike other providers, who only support catalogs, marketplaces, punch-out, or punch-out 2.0 (where the vendor maintains a cached copy of the supplier catalogs to simulate simultaneous searching and comparison of supplier products), Vinimaya’s Virtual Internet Supplier Network solution (VISN, as in “vision”), supports simultaneous, or federated search directly from whatever catalog format your suppliers have in place — be it punch-out, on-line catalog, storefront, marketplace, database, or flat-file. Whereas most solutions force your supplier to adapt to the vendor’s format, Vinimaya’s agent-based architecture adapts to your suppliers, which is why it’s a low-cost solution for you and for them.

The proof that Vinimaya’s offering, which revolves around their SmartSearch Catalog software product, actually works is in the adoption level. Vinimaya’s client base, which includes mostly well-known, brand name, global companies from almost every vertical market, have executed over $1 Billion in online orders over the past 12 months alone. Delivered SaaS with the ability to “plug and play” with just about any e-Procurement system (e.g. SAP, Ariba, Oracle, Peoplesoft, etc.), once installed, the system not only allows you to find the product you need simply and efficiently, but also verifies that you’re paying at the contracted rates. Vinimaya’s clients sit back and watch their negotiated savings materialize with every purchase.

SmartSearch Catalog also comes with a number of unique features that enhance your efficiency and savings. The unique features include true side-by-side comparison shopping across suppliers, price audit (which will alert you whenever a price has changed or diverged from the contract price), supplier self-service catalog management (which allows your suppliers without any online capabilities to either maintain a catalog for you or create a punch-out site), and inventory checking (which checks that the item is in inventory before sending the order to the supplier). It even offers some capabilities specific to certain procurement systems (e.g. SAP Item Master Check). In the coming weeks, I plan to review the new version of the SmartSearch Catalog (a.k.a. the B2B Search Engine), as well as some of their new offerings, and if I can track down the Sourcing Maniacs, see if they have any insights from their last site visit.

Vinimaya’s bent toward innovation is no surprise when you look at the management team. CEO Gary Hare, who recently penned a piece on B2B e-Commerce right here on this blog, Orville Bailey and Richard Waugh have been thought leaders in the e-procurement space since its inception.

So please join me in welcoming Vinimaya. It’s innovative companies like them that keep this blog going.

According to Wharton, You Should be Marketing Now!

Wharton recently published an article on “managing in an upturn”, quoting famed Wharton professors Morris Cohen, Lawrence Hrebiniak, Peter Cappelli, and Oliver Chatain. The article offered up some very sound advice on how to successfully manage your business through the upcoming upturn. Buried among the nuggets of insight, which, by the way, echo many of the sentiments that I’ve shared over the last year, was one by Olivier Chatain that couldn’t be more timely.

According to Chatain, areas of opportunity can be found in products or computing software that increase productivity and companies that sell these types of products and services should be ramping up production and marketing now. I wholeheartedly agree. Even Forrester has found that “investment in procurement technology continues”. After all, what other vertical offers software that, when properly applied, can lower transaction costs while reducing purchasing costs?

Vendors, this is the quarter where many of your potential customers will be fighting for budget to acquire new sourcing and procurement solutions to help them increase efficiency and lower costs in the year ahead. This means that now is the time you want your brand to be front and center, because most budget requests are made based on the “baked-in” cost of the preferred solution… yours!

So where should you put your marketing dollars? Well, as far as I’m concerned, you should spend some of them on one of the leading blogs that attract thousands of readers every day and tens of thousands of readers every month. There’s a big difference between push and pull when it comes to web information. While the first model might be accompanied by distribution lists of an impressive size, the reality is that over 90% of people don’t read the vast majority of information pushed at them (think about how much “junk” mail you open). But when someone chooses to visit a site, that’s a reader who is actually interested in what that site has to say — 10,000 unique visitors to a pull-blog are more valuable than 100,000 “subscribers” of a push e-mail list. Much more.

If you would like to sponsor Sourcing Innovation, which reaches over 10,000 unique readers who are now making around 50,000 visits to almost 200,000 pages every month, information can be found on the side bar to the right of this page.

Why You Might Not Want A Check-Up By the doctor

One of the regular features on Sourcing Innovation are vendor solution reviews, which occur only after the doctor has seen the product. Normally occurring in the spring and fall, these vendor posts, which provide solution providers with a great opportunity to reach a broad global audience, are always well received. But not all vendors who receive a demo invitation accept. For a while now, I’ve been trying to figure out the most likely reasons why. These are the best I could come up with:

  • 5. The product doesn’t exist.
  • 4. The product doesn’t work.
  • 3. The product works completely differently than the marketing spin around it.
  • 2. A discussion of the product’s capabilities “gives too much away” to competitors.
  • 1. the doctor is distrusted for some reason.

As far as 3,4,5 are concerned, no legitimate vendor in our space is selling snake oil or moonshine. All the products work, and accomplish some significant fraction of their mission. So that can’t be it.

With regard to 2, companies should understand that their competitors know them well, perhaps better than they know themselves. Nothing that the doctor might say is going to give away any secrets.

Finally, with regard to 1, the doctor has never slammed a company with a product that accomplished its designated task reasonably well, especially when the company is open about its strengths and weaknesses. The Sourcing Innovation vendor post archives prove this, far better than any claim I could make here.

So, vendors, what are you waiting for? Let’s share your accomplishments this fall with the highly targeted audience that constitutes the readership of Sourcing Innovation!

How to Connect with the doctor

While some of you might think that the doctor has a bit of an anti-social streak because he’s still faceless, spaceless, and twitter-free, that’s not the case. the doctor just has no time for useless social networking sites that do nothing but suck up your valuable time while offering you little or no value in return.

the doctor is on Linked-in, Plaxo, and Ki-Work and is even looking into other useful services like Trip-it and SlideShare because he believes in business networks and business tools that enhance your productivity, knowledge, and networking capability in the true spirit of B2B 3.0. In addition, the doctor has set up the Sourcing Innovation Linked-in Group and the Sourcing Innovation Plaxo Group where you can discuss topics addressed on SI, ask questions, and even recommend future topics!

I really hope you’ll join and participate in the SI Group. Whereas some blogs exist just to feed the blogger’s ego, Sourcing Innovation is all about educating, informing, and, maybe even, inspiring you. (I can assure you that the doctor has no self-esteem problems. He knows he’s awesome.) Sourcing Innovation is about down-to-earth discussions about technologies, strategies, best-practices, and innovations that you can use. And if you have great idea for future series, I’m all ears. Furthermore, if I can’t provide you with the knowledge you seek, I’m quite happy to invite the experts that can. (Sourcing Innovation has already featured more thought leaders than just about every other blog in the supply and spend management space combined, and, as per last week’s post on how Sourcing Innovation brings you the best from the best, I’m working on lining up dozens more as you read this!)

So if you’re looking for the doctor, feel free to send me an e-mail or to reach out on one of the networks above.

Fourteen Hundred and Seventy Two Posts Later …

… and Sourcing Innovation crosses the 1,000,000 word mark!

That’s right, after a mere three years and three months, Sourcing Innovation crossed the 1,000,000 word mark yesterday and became only the second supply management blog to reach that point. Not even e-Sourcing Forum and Supply Excellence, the only other blogs that have been publishing as long and (almost) as regularly, have come close to reaching this mark.

Blog Live (Y-M-D) Posts (Approx) * Words (Approx) *
Spend Matters 2004-11-30 3,265 1,180,354
Sourcing Innovation 2006-06-09 1,472 1,000,337
e-Sourcing Forum 2005-08-30 1,013 386,369
Supply Excellence 2006-04-30 737 234,292

To put this in perspective, the entire Harry Potter series (all seven books) only contains 1,090,739 words. This says that, in a little over three years, on this blog alone, I’ve provided you more free content than J. K. Rowling published in the Harry Potter series over the span of a decade. And let me repeat the phrase “on this blog alone” because I’ve also (co-)authored almost the entire e-Sourcing Wiki (which contains over 30 distinct wiki-papers consisting of over 229,160 words), contributed over 90 guest posts to various blogs and e-publications (some of which are indexed in this post and this post and total over 86,000 words), authored a number of Illuminations and white-papers (which collectively contain over 21,050 words) and co-authored and edited the e-Sourcing Handbook (which is approximately 91,500 words). (If you add it all up, that’s over 1,427,700 words!)

And, dear marketer, that’s one of the many reasons why your search traffic comes here.

 

*Methodology: Since each blog uses a standard blog package that utilizes common page structures, utilizing the “archive” URL format by day, I wrote a script that downloaded each day and extracted each unique URL using the “post” URL format (over time). It then downloaded each post page, extracted the post, saved it as text, and ran it through a word counter. (Random) Errors or inconsistencies in page generation (caused by a stray special character, etc.) could have prevented some posts from being extracted or properly parsed, but my manual checks satisfied me that over 95% of posts were captured and properly parsed, so the table is at least relatively accurate.