Category Archives: Best Practices

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P15) … And So Is Supplier Management! It’s a CORNED QUIP!

That’s right, Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP! And we’ll explain what we mean shortly, but first … how did we get here?

When we started this series back in Part 1, we noted that Source-to-Pay is extensive, your organization needed all of it, but your organization couldn’t implement it all at once. So we needed to give you advice on where to start, which, after a careful analysis, needed to be e-Procurement. Next came spend analysis because, in the hands of the right analyst, if your organization wasn’t sure what module was the next most valuable, spend analysis would help the organization identify which modules would likely bring the most (relative) value (based upon the opportunities spend analysis identified). Often, there will be a clear winner, and your organization will know what module to start implementing tomorrow, but sometimes there won’t be. So what’s the answer then? When you are dependent on suppliers, there is no value beyond the supplier. Thus, in this situation, Supplier Management comes next.

But why is Supplier Management a CORNED QUIP? A good solution preserves and maintains the data, like a good cure, but the marketing from most of the vendors with these solutions is more entertaining than enlightening (as they seem to prefer wit to wisdom). This, of course, is not at all helpful when there are literally ten (10) different types, or at least aspects, of supplier management solutions on the marketplace, no one vendor addresses all of the aspects in their solution, and, in many cases, doesn’t even address more than a couple of these aspects. Furthermore, depending on your organizational needs and the platforms your organization currently has in place, some capabilities will be much more important to your organization than other capabilities. Moreover, sometimes certain capabilities in a supplier management solution, already present in solutions already implemented by the organization, will be downright useless as these aspects will, thus, be completely redundant. So, if a vendor is just selling “Supplier Management” or “Supplier Lifecycle Management”, which theoretically includes every core type of capability (even though not a single solution on the market today comes close to materializing all the capabilities), how do you know what they are selling?

Just what might that vendor be selling when they are trying to sell you Supplier Management? One or more management aspects of the CORNED QUIP (but likely not all of those aspects, as every cure is different, and every message witty in its own way, but not exactly enlightening).

What are these ten (10), core, aspects of modern supplier management? (Which dictate the core capabilities that such a solution should offer.)

  • C: Compliance (+ Government + Regulatory)
  • O: Orchestration (or Onboarding + Multi-Tier/Multi-Supplier capability)
  • R: Relationship
  • N: Network
  • E: Enablement (+ Engagement)
  • D: Discovery
  • Q: Quality
  • U: Uncertainty (+ Risk)
  • I: Information
  • P: Performance

Now, before we continue, we know you’re saying “what about ESG” and “what about diversity“? Well, at least as of today, most of these providers are data services that you use to augment your central supplier records (in your Supplier Master Data Management [SMDM] Solution, which could be your SXM or could be the ERP that the SXM extracts data from), and not standalone SXM products, so we will tackle those separately at some point in the future (especially since diversity is literally just data enrichment on a supplier record in any current solution).

Thus, now that we know what we are implementing, our next step is to decide how to evaluate the solution. Thus, in our next post, we’ll begin to break down the ten core aspects of the CORNED QUIP and define not only what they mean, but what capabilities are critical to the cure.

On to the A-Side in Part 16.

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P14) … So Do Not Stop at Spend Analysis!

As we discussed in Part 8, once you have your eProcurement baseline, that’s just the beginning. The very beginning. Even though not all modules are equal, and not all modules will return equal results, you, and your organization, will need all of Source-to-Pay eventually. However, since you can’t implement it all at once, you take it one module at a time.

After eProcurement, if you aren’t 100% sure where the most value will come from, you go on to spend analysis and use it to help you identify the best opportunities, and those opportunities may indicate the next best module to implement (for your organization at the current time). After that, you may have a clear answer, or, you may not. Sometimes the analysis indicates almost equal opportunity between sourcing and contracting, between contracting and supplier management, or between sourcing and supplier management. (Or, you might not have the manpower or expertise to do the analysis you need to get the right answer.)

So if it’s unclear as to which solution to choose next, it’s back to arguments and logic in an effort to determine which of the three aforementioned solutions to choose.

How about Strategic Sourcing? It’s the one technology proclaimed to identify the most savings and deliver the best results. The truth is that while it almost always identifies the most savings, it doesn’t actually deliver those savings, or even guarantee them. The savings are guaranteed by the contract, delivered by the (new) supplier, and captured by the eProcurement system.

So how about a Contract Management System? In order to guarantee the cost reductions, you need the contract. Or it’s just a quote that’s given today, denied tomorrow. But, as we indicated in a prior post, you don’t need a contract management system for a contract. You need (e-)paper, (e-)ink, and a pair of (e-)signatures. The right contract management system makes it easy to author, negotiate, manage, track, and enforce a contract. But the contract itself is up to people, and if they don’t agree, there’s no contract, and, thus, no need for a contract management system.

This just leaves Supplier Management. But is this where we start? If we think about the value sourcing identifies, it’s generated by the supplier. So it’s critical that the supplier perform. If we have a good supplier management solution, it will track the supplier’s progress, alert us to issues, and assist us in managing the relationship if intervention is required. It will enable performance management, which is critical because if the supplier doesn’t perform and/or doesn’t adhere to the contract, then it doesn’t matter how great the sourcing event was or how good the contract inked was.

And so, because suppliers, and relationships with them, are key, when all things are about equal, or when it’s hard to identify where to go next, we go with supplier management.

Start the dive in Part 15.

Source-to-Pay+ Is Extensive (P13) … But I Can’t Touch The Sacred Cows!

In our last installment (Part 12) of this series here on Sourcing Innovation (SI), we provided you a list of forty-plus (40+) vendors that could potentially meet your spend analysis needs and help you identify the cost savings, reduction, and avoidance opportunities you have in your organization as well as the best modules to achieve those cost savings, reduction, and avoidance opportunities. The right spend analysis tool properly applied will generate returns that are many orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the tool and will surprise you.

However, some of those best opportunities will be in the “sacred cows” of Marketing, Legal, and SaaS subscriptions. And you probably think you can’t do anything because you don’t have the data, Marketing and Legal won’t let you touch their spend (or give you the detail you need to even analyze it, often because they didn’t collect it), and you have no idea on what SaaS is actually being used and how much you overspend.

the doctor knows this, and knows that you might need custom solutions to manage, and analyze, this spend, so, before we move on and tackle the next module in the Source-to-Pay queue, we’re going to take a brief sidebar and provide you with short lists of vendors that specialize in each area that will collect the data you need — and sometimes even provide you with deep, customized, integrated analytics that provide you with the insights that matter (including the insights that matter on your matter spend) — to enable deep spend analysis, benchmark creation, and opportunity identification.

But first, we have to repeat our disclaimer that, as per the lists of e-Procurement vendors provided in Part 7 and the list of Spend Analysis vendors provided in Part 12, this list is most definitely in no way complete (as no analyst is aware of every company, and neither Marketing nor Legal are the particular domains of expertise of SI), is only valid as of the date of posting (as companies get acquired and go out of business, often without notice), and does not include the broader range of offerings that are available for SaaS Management (including provisioning and cloud management), Marketing (including agency management pure-plays, although DecideWare, for example, does this), or Legal (including contract authoring, management, and clause analysis — although we will cover some of these players when we get to Contract Lifecycle Management [CLM]).

Again, and we can’t say this enough, not all vendors are equal and we’d venture to say that this most definitely applies to the lists below. The companies below are of all sizes (very small to very large), offer different functionality (focussing in on different aspects of Marketing, Legal, and/or SaaS Spend Management), different levels of customization and integration, different types of companion services, focus on different company sizes and/or company types, and integrate with different Source-to-Pay and Enterprise ecosystems.

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 a few of these vendors, you may find a write up in the Sourcing Innovation archives, Spend Matters Pro, or Gartner cool vendor write-ups, but for many of these vendors, you’ll have to look beyond your typical sources of information as they are highly specialized and don’t fall into the typical Source-to-Pay bucket. But if you have enough Marketing, Legal, or SaaS spend, they can be highly valuable.

Note that, due to the newness of SaaS spend management, the different marketing and legal needs of every organization, and the high degree of differentiation between many of the solutions below, we are not (yet) defining baseline functionality and instead advising you to do a detailed analysis of your spend, processes, and needs and judge potential solutions based on that. If you need help with that, seek out a pro who can do the (gap) analysis and RFI creation for you.

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

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) Subscription Cost Management

Company LinkedIn
Employees		 HQ (State)
Country
Beamy 60 France
BetterCloud 305 New York, USA
Cledera 63 Colorado, USA
Flexera 1026 Illinois, USA
G2 Track 792 Illinois, USA
Hudled 8 Australia
NPI Financial 410 Georgia, USA
Productiv 139 California, USA
SaaSRooms 9 United Kingdom
SaaSTrax ?? North Carolina, USA
Sastrify 166 Germany
Setyl 14 United Kingdom
Spendflo 70 California, USA
Substly Sweden
Torii 114 New York, USA
Trelica 12 United Kingdom
TRG Screen 179 New York, USA
Tropic 240 New York, USA
Vendr 404 Massachusetts, USA
Viio 18 Columbia
Zluri 111 California, USA
Zylo 144 Indiana, USA

Legal Spend Management

Company LinkedIn
Employees		 HQ (State)
Country
Apperio 48 United Kingdom
Brightflag 150 New York, USA
(LexisNexis) CounselLink 28 Ohio, USA
Fulcrum GT 158 Illinois, USA
Mitratech TeamConnect 1119 Texas, USA
Onit 339 Texas, USA
Ontra 421 California, USA
Persuit 100 New York, USA
Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker ?? Ontario
Tonkean LegalWorks 76 California
Wolters Kluwer (TyMetrix 360) ??? Netherlands

Marketing (Procurement) Spend Management

Company LinkedIn
Employees		 HQ (State)
Country
DecideWare 27 Australia
HH Global ?? United Kingdom
Mtivity 15 United Kingdom
Promost 68 Poland
RightSpend 23 New York, USA
SourceIt Market 6 Australia

Onwards to Part 14.

Source-to-Pay+ Is Extensive (P12) … Here are Some Spend Analysis Vendors

As promised in our last installment (Part 11), where we outlined the baseline capabilities that are needed for a solution to qualify as a modern spend analysis solution, here are some vendors that you can consider that meet most of the requirements. Note that, where spend analysis is concerned, some companies actually use two solutions, one as part of the platform ecosystem that they use that serves as the centralized master data store for spend analysis with the central “cube” and pre-configured reports for management, and a standalone best-of-breed powerhouse tool for free-form what-if analytics, where the power analysts can slice, dice, and reconfigure the data as they wish without impacting anyone else in the organization. Thus, it’s okay to choose two different, complementary, solutions if that meets your needs better than one (or keeps your users happy and using a system vs. trying to bypass it).

Note that, as with the list of e-Procurement Vendors we provided in Part 7, 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 generic business intelligence or analytic applications offered by providers without any specialization in spend analysis. (Nor does it include vendors that are only focussed on one vertical. While a couple of vendors below have a primary vertical, our understanding is that they can support other, related, verticals and have some generic elements of spend analysis.)

Also note that, and we want to be very clear here, not all vendors are equal, and we’d venture to say that NONE of the following are equal. The companies listed below are of all sizes (very small to very large, relative to vendor sizes in our space), cover the baselines differently (in terms of percentage of features offered, how deep those features are, how integrated analytics is [or can be] with other modules, and how customized the solution can be for an organization or the vertical in which it plays), offer different additional features, have different types of service offerings (backed up by different expertise), focus on different company sizes, and focus on different ecosystems (such as plugging into other platforms/ecosystems, serving as the Source-to-Pay master data repository or controller, offering a plug-and-play model for a larger, or different, ecosystem) 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.

And, again, note that if we say Source-to-Pay, it means that the vendor offers modules that also cover baseline capability across most of Sourcing, Supplier/Vendor Management, Contract Management, e-Procurement, and/or e-Invoicing/Accounts Payable/Invoice-to-Pay. As to whether or not SI would consider those modules as meeting the majority of baseline functional requirements, you will have to (wait for and) check the starting vendor lists in those areas.

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

Company LinkedIn Employees HQ (State) Country Other Offerings/Notes
Alteryx 3065 California, USA
Analytics8 SpendView 213 Illinois, USA
Anaplan 2395 California, USA Finance, Sales & Marketing, HR, Supply Chain
AnyData Solutions 10 United Kingdom Supplier Management, Contract Management
Corcentric Platform 587 New Jersey, USA Source-to-Pay, Payments
Coupa 3666 California, USA Source-to-Pay, Treasury, Contingent Workforce, Supply Chain Planning
Delicious Data 27 Germany
ElectrifAI 132 New Jersey, USA Contract Analytics, Supply Chain Analytics
Everstream 165 California, USA Supplier Risk
GEP 4640 New Jersey, USA Source-to-Pay, Supply Chain
Ignite Procurement 60 Sweden Contract Management, Supplier Management
intelflow 7 Germany Procurement Intelligence
Ivalua 848 California, USA Source-to-Pay, Direct Materials
Jaggaer ONE 1263 North Carolina, USA Source-to-Pay, Inventory Management, Supplier Network, Direct Materials
kiresult 5 Germany
LevaData 58 California, USA Direct Materials
McKinsey (Orpheus) 15 Germany
Metric Insights 18 California, USA
Neqo 8 France
Onventis (Spendency) 139 Germany Source-to-Pay, Direct Materials
Oversight Systems 145 Georgia, USA Payment Monitoring
PRGX 1421 Georgia, USA M&A Analytics, Retail Analytics, Audits
RightSpend 23 New York, USA Marketing Procurement
Pro(a)Act 5 Sweden
Robobai 50 Australia Sustainability, Risk, Treasury
Rosslyn 65 United Kingdom
SAP Ariba 84 California, USA Source-to-Pay, Supplier Network
Scalue 6 Germany
ScanMarket (Unit4) 60 Denmark Sourcing, Supplier Management, Contract Management
Sourcing Insights 9 Indiana, USA Contract Management, Risk Management
SpendBoss 3 North Carolina, USA
Sievo 303 Finland Project Management
Silvon 18 Illinois, USA
Simfoni 260 California, USA eSourcing, Tail Spend Management
Spendata ?? Massachusetts, USA
SpendKey ?? United Kingdom
SpendHQ 76 Georgia, USA Procurement Performance Management
SpendWorx 7 California, USA Market Intelligence
Suplari 10 Washington, USA
Tamr 169 Massachusetts, USA Healthcare
The Smart Cube 1004 United Kingdom Services
Xelix United Kingdom Payment Monitoring

Onwards to Part 13!

Source-to-Pay+ Is Extensive (P11) … What Do You Need For (A) Spend Analysis (Baseline), Installment 2

In our last post (Part 10), after reviewing the spend analysis process which, in short is:

  • Extract the relevant data
  • Load the data into the solution (mapping it to a starting taxonomy)
  • Structure for the types of analyses you need to perform
  • Analyze the data and get useful insights to
  • Act on the insights you get

We identified that the core requirements a spend analysis system needs to support are those that enable:

  • Load
  • Structure
  • Analyze

with a focus on

  • Efficiency

Let’s take these requirements one by one.

Load: The first step is to get the data in. It needs to be easy to ingest large data files and map the data to a starting taxonomy that can be manipulated for the purposes of analysis. Particularly, those data files in classic csv, row, or column formats that are universal. The ingestion needs to be fast and intelligent and learn from everything the user does so that the next time the application sees a similar record, it knows what to do with that record. This allows us to identify our first two core requirements:

  • rules: the application needs to support rules that allow for deterministic based (re)mappings when certain data values (within a tolerance) are identified (and these rules need to be easily editable over time as needed)
  • hybrid AI: that can analyze the data and suggest the rules for the user to select to speed up rule definition and mapping during load

Structure: The next step is to structure the data for analysis. In spend analysis, the core structure is a

  • Cube: the application must be able to build a custom cube for each type of analyses required; one size, and thus one cube, does NOT fit all; the cubes must also support derived dimensions using measures and summaries

Sometimes the cube needs to be explored, which means that the application also needs to support

  • Drill Down: to the data of interest
  • Filters: to define the relevant data subset
  • Views: that can be configured and customized using measures, drill downs, and filters for easy exploration and easy revisiting

Also, while the theory is that you have one record in your ERP, AP, etc. for a supplier, product, and other real-world entity, the reality is that you have multiple (multiple [multiple]) entries, so the application has to also support

  • Familying of like entites: suppliers, products, and even locations
  • Mapping of children organizations to their parent when you can cut master contracts / agreements (such as with hotel chains)

At this point, we’ve built a cube, and we’re ready for:

Analysis: where we analyze our slices of the data to get insight that we can eventually act on; this requires:

  • Measures: that can summarize the data in a meaningful way
  • Benchmarks: that can be compared against
  • Reports: which can be bookmarked views that show the right summary (and can be saved or printed)
  • Data Science Hooks: to external algorithms and libraries for forecast generation, trend analysis, etc.

And at this point, while we don’t necessarily have everything the doctor would want in a modern spend analysis system, we almost have everything that is needed to meet the baseline, with one exception, and that’s the functionality needed to enable

Efficiency which, in spend analysis, equates to the technical requirements that eliminate the need to “reinvent the wheel” every time the analysis effort needs to be repeated. The problem with traditional spend analysis systems is that any time the data changes, all of the work has to be repeated. A good system will remember everything that was done, preserve it, just identify the data changes and new data, and pull them in. Some systems do this okay, but if the underlying data source changes, they fall apart.

However, when there’s more than one user, which is the case in most organizations, the implementation creates a central, “master”, cube and everyone has to work off of that. Usually this involves creating a copy of that cube, and then working off of that central cube. And then, when that cube is updated, create a copy of that cube and start all over.

Better systems will allow the user to pull in “just the new data” if the structure of the core cube hasn’t changed and the data can be mapped by the existing rules. But any time the base cube undergoes even a minor structural change, all of the analysts have to start again, from scratch. But this is mitigated if the system supports

  • Inheritance: which creates every user’s cube as a sub-cube of another system cube or the master cube and, when any parent cube changes, use the relationship to automatically propagate any changes without any effort required on the part of the user

There are, of course, other features and functions that can be added to increase efficiency even more, but this one capability makes a spend analysis system exponentially more efficient than any system that came before.

We should note that, as of today, only one spend analysis system supports full inheritance, but a couple support partial inheritance and are attempting to improve their offering. So keep this in mind when you are comparing solutions, as not all will be equal.

Continue to Part 12.