Category Archives: Best Practices

SIM Powered Recovery Will Take Your Recovery to the Next Level!

Every year, corporations are at risk of losing significant dollars due to transactional errors such as: over payments, duplicate payments, missed rebates, missed discounts, lost credits, and fraud.

The money is lost with no chance to reclaim it unless a recovery audit is performed. Most recovery audit service providers claim on their websites and marketing material that they can recover between $500,000 and $1M per every $1B that a company spends on an annual basis.

Even under the most conservative estimates, this problem is costing mid-sized and large companies millions of dollars every year.

Unfortunately, the recovery audit industry relies heavily on manual processes which focus almost entirely on a client’s historical transactional records. Manual processes are time-consuming, inconsistent, expensive, and focus too heavily on client records. The methodologies, while they do add value, leave a large portion of the recovery opportunity unexplored.

Over the last several years, some service providers have developed technology-enabled recovery processes that are accurate, complete and deliver claims in real-time. Even more recently, some recovery solutions have seen the incorporation of a supplier information management (SIM) application and have drastically improved audit results.

The combination of recovery audit technology and SIM drives more supplier compliance, significantly out-recovers manual recovery methodologies and improves the organization’s working capital situation as a result of the recovery process. In addition, even when delivered separately from any recovery product, SIM is a powerful tool that offers significant benefits to a financial organization by driving lower costs, streamlining supplier on-boarding, reducing working capital, improving strategic supplier management and decreasing payment fraud.

To find out how SIM-Powered Recovery can improve your recovey results by a factor of 3, 5, or even 9, and maximize your return, download the latest Sourcing Innovation Illumination, sponsored by Lavante on Taking Capital Recovery to the Next Level. When you find out how you can save hundreds of thousands while recovering millions, you won’t be disappointed!

Adoption a Problem? Incentives are the Answer!

Just make sure they are the right incentives.

As per this article by Mitch Free on Forbes.com on the Best Advice a CEO Ever Received, your incentive plan works. You will get the results you incentivize, so be careful of and monitor for unintended consequences.

As per the article, Mr. Free couldn’t understand why, when he took his car in for a wash, the attendant was so insistent in fixing a “pitting” on his windshield that he couldn’t see that the attendant even offered to do the fix for the same price as the wash and give the wash for free, which did not make much sense. So Mr. Free emailed the owner, who stated that he was paying a $5 commission on window repair sales, and none on car washes, in an effort to increase window repair sales and that Mr. Free’s e-mail explained why there was a big spike in people getting their windshields’ fixed but not getting their car washed. It was an unintended consequence of the incentive plan.

The same holds true where Supply Management software is concerned. Adoption will depend on the incentive plan. A proper incentive plan will go a long way to getting utilization, but an improper one will go even further to jeopardizing your supply management returns. For example, if you made a worker’s bonus contingent on using the new e-Procurement system, and then calculated a certain percentage of his bonus based upon total spend put through the system, you might find that, at the end of the year, that worker put as much spend as he possibly could through the system. And while you might think this is the intended consequence, you might also find that spending overall on indirect categories such as office supplies, computer and electronics equipment, and temp services increased 10% year over year. Why? Instead of doing quick RFXs and then negotiating bulk purchases with the lowest bidder, the buyer bought everything he could through the vendors already integrated (via EDI, punch-out, etc.) with the e-Procurement system, even though most of the purchases were for off-contract items that were, on average, 10% higher than rates that could have been obtained with a new sourcing contract with another vendor.

In this scenario, the right incentive plan would be to incentivize buyers on achieved year-over year savings on spend under management, where spend under management is that spend that is negotiated or managed through a supply management system, whether it is the e-Procurement system, the e-Sourcing system, or the Contract Management system. This way, the system will be used when it’s appropriate, and the buyer is only rewarded when savings are achieved.

What are the keys to a successful supply chain?

In a recent article over on Inbound Logistics on three keys to a successful supply chain trading partner network, Christopher Mazza, SVP of Business Development at IAS (International Asset Systems) claims that the three keys to a successful supply chain trading partner network are connectivity, visibility, and optimization. And those are definitely the fundamental requirements of a trading partner network.

But since a supply chain goes beyond a trading partner network, it leads one to ask what are the keys to a successful supply chain. This is a bit harder to answer in general because the depth and breadth of supply chain required is different for every vertical, and every company, and it can be argued that the most critical success factors are different across verticals and companies, but there are some common fundamentals. In this post we will attempt to identify some of them.

  • Analysis
    The first step is figuring out what is needed, when it is needed, and how much it should cost.
  • e-Document Management
    Then you need to find suppliers, send specs, get designs, get quotes, send responses, make awards, cut contracts, send orders, get invoices, process payments, etc. — all e-Documents.
  • Collaboration
    You need software that allows you to interact online with your suppliers and partner and customers virtually and in real-time. (Connectivity in this day and age is a given — but it’s not enough unless there are collaborative elements to the connectivity).
  • Optimization
    Bid analysis, awards, logistics management, inventory management, real-time order management, etc. all require optimization to keep costs down and value up.
  • Visibility
    Knowing what is, and is not, where all the way back to suppliers of critical raw materials and sub-components, is key to avoiding devastating disruptions in today’s supply chain. If a raw material doesn’t reach a component supplier on time, then the component is not going to reach the tier 1 supplier on time, and your product is not going to reach you on time.
  • Risk Monitoring
    Hand in hand with visibility is near real-time risk monitoring. This involves monitoring significant global events (so that you know an earthquake has damaged a tier 2 supplier’s plant when it happens, not 60 days later when the product doesn’t ship), monitoring supplier’s financials and/or brand (as irresponsible corporate practices such as the use of child labour could be more damaging then to your organization than if they went bankrupt), and monitoring shipments and inventory for risk of loss or theft for starters.
  • Innovation
    The supply chain needs to be progressive, constantly on the look-out for new processes and technologies that can improve it, and forward moving when opportunities arise.

Furthermore, these requirements hold true across the board. And if you have trouble remembering them, think of the fact that when you bring these needs up, you are A VOICER of truth.

Don’t Take Late Payments Lying Down

As pointed out repeatedly by Pete Loughlin over on Purchasing Insight (and in this recent post on “social media the new weapon to combat late payment”) and SI (including this recent Blue Friday post), big customers are trying to push payment terms to ridiculous extremes and, frankly, hoping their suppliers will bend over and take it without any resistance. But just because it’s their fantasy, it doesn’t mean it should be your reality. You have to stand up for yourself and help bring this foolishness to an end.

How do you do it? A recent article over on CFO.com on what to do “when your big customer wants to pay late” had some great advice. Summarizing, and extending, it, we can see that you should:

  • Know Your Worth
    Chances are that you are providing a unique value and you should not be afraid to make it clear. And if it’s really unique, your customer doesn’t have (very m)any options besides you.
  • Understand the Relationship
    Has it been a long term relationship? A good relationship? Have you been paid on time regularly in the past? Have you been providing value over and above committed levels? If the relationship has been good, if you were contracted to provide a product but have also been providing free value-add consulting, if you were always paid on time for always delivering on time and maintained a good relationship, point that out.
  • Create Flexible Payment Strategies
    This doesn’t (necessarily) mean early payment discounts, but it could include such for (really) fast payments. Consider multiple (milestone-based) billings that the customer can digest over time, rather than one big bill at the end (within reason).
  • Avoid the Procrastinating Accounts Payable (AP) Department
    They are the boneheads that still believe extending DPO is a good thing (even though a recent Hackett study demonstrated that playing this game actually costs them an extra 10% in the end). Deal with Procurement and/or the buying organization who have a better chance of understanding that delaying payments unnecessarily only hurts everyone in the long run.
  • Suggest Financing
    where the customer enters into a relationship with a bank who pays you right away, at a small discount, and then the customer pays the bank on their schedule, for a fee. Done right, it’s better (for you) than an early payment discount as its an immediate payment.

and if all that doesn’t work, do what Pete suggests:

  • Name and Shame Them Publicly
    Be civil and respectful, but don’t be afraid to let the world know, in no uncertain terms, that they are either being deliberately cruel or incompetent.

SI likes Pete’s suggestion best, but agrees that you should try the more professional methods listed in the CFO article first. But if they don’t work …

Some Decent Tactics for Working Capital Management Improvement

A recent white-paper by GT Nexus on “Holistic Supply Chain Management” had some decent tips for improving WCM (Working Capital Management) that, amazingly enough, didn’t focus on DPO extension at the expense of the struggling supplier. Because of this, SI is going to review some of the better tactics identified in the white-paper and recommend that you read it.

Remembering that the goal of working capital 101 is to improve the Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC), which is generally defined as DIO (Days Inventory Outstanding) + DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) – DPO (Days Payable Outstanding), there is more than one way to improve the CCC. You don’t have to increase DPO, you can decrease DIO or DSO.

Starting with DIO, the paper recommends to lower the amount of buffer stock needed to maintain customer service levels. While there is safety in safety stock, there is also cost in safety stock. Cost that is likely unnecessary when you consider that most companies have way more stock on hand then is needed when you add stock in transit, stock in production, and stock at other locations that could quickly be moved if necessary. As a result, a company needs less stock than it thinks it needs.

Moving on to DSO, the paper recommends to use a collaborative platform for shipment planning and execution. This allows the company to ensure that inventory doesn’t sit idle and is shipped as soon as sales come in and to make sure that the shipments reach the customer quickly to allow for faster invoicing, and subsequent payment.

It also has other recommendations to balance DIO and DSO, reduce COGS, and minimize errors, but the primary point is the important one — you don’t have to increase DPO to improve your CCC and WCM. Remember that.