Category Archives: Decision Optimization

Trade Extensions: No Rest for the Wicked-ly Powerful – Part I

It’s been less than five months since we last checked in with Trade Extensions, who had traded up to a Fact Sheet User Interface and added a slew of new features, including improved RFI support, multi-dimensional rankings in e-Negotiation, Google Earth integration, new incumbent rules, and an OLAP foundation to reporting, including the implementation of a new n-way comparison report. Since, then, it would appear that Trade Extensions have been working around the clock to add a host of new features in auctions, reporting, award management, scenario creation and analysis, and feedback mechanisms. They are advancing the platform so fast that only a few companies in the space are currently keeping up with their rate of development. And while nothing added in the last few months is earth shattering, Trade Extensions has again taken usability to a whole new level, which is the key to adoption, use, and, ultimately, cost avoidance and reduction in your sourcing organization.

Auctions

Probably the biggest improvement is the new wizard-based interface that defines different types of RFX and Auctions, including Quick Quote and Simple Auction, that simplify event creation. In the new wizards, the user only needs to define the critical information necessary to create the event and can, if the user so chooses, define everything necessary to set up straight-forward RFXs and Auctions, including lots, on a single screen. While the workflow-driven wizards provided in many of today’s platforms are good, if you just need a quick quote or are auctioning office supplies, you just need to set it and forget it. The platform’s newfound ability to handle simple events with ease while simultaneously allowing for the creation of the most complex events one can think of is quite powerful for an organization that wants a single tool to handle the whole gamut of sourcing events. Now a user can define how much information is required to define an event and enter just that, whether it be a few pieces of information or a few hundred pieces of information. In addition, the new bidder UI is slick, clean, and quite easy to use.

Reporting

Trade Extensions, which supports the Fortune 1000, has added new multi-project reporting which allows for the creation of (roll-up / drill-down) reports across projects. The user can select any set of projects and any set of scenarios in those projects and create a roll-up or comparison report across those projects on any set of dimensions and facts that they choose, which can be organized in a user-defined row-column format. One of the things that Trade Extensions noticed was that a number of users, even when their new OLAP reporting was rolled out product-wide in January, were still downloading reports to Excel for the sole purpose of reformatting them into a preferred or dictated format. So they built this capability, including pivot table functionality, into the tool. Combined with the ability for a user to create fields defined on just about any formula (macro) the user can imagine, there is now no need for a user to have to export to Excel for analysis or report formatting. It’s a very impressive leap forward in reporting and goes well beyond the reporting capabilities of most of the on-line sourcing and procurement platforms that SI has seen.

Award Management

Trade Extensions has created a new set of rules that allows a user to define a scenario that uses allocations from an existing scenario for any subset of the award that they want to fix. No longer does a user have to copy the scenario and define fixed award rules, which can quickly lead to unsolveable scenarios if the user has 20 rules and messes up one or two to create a conflict that results in an unsolveable scenario. Just point at an existing scenario where part of the award is acceptable, indicate that the award for items X and Y at locations A through M are acceptable, and the tool will fix those allocations and build a smaller model that will solve faster (instead of a bigger model with more constraints that solves slower).

Come back tomorrow for Part II which will address the rest of the cool new features in Trade Extensions’ new release.

Transportation Network Optimization Requires Technology

Although it saddens me that most companies will not adopt optimization technology until they realize they cannot “solve the transportation network puzzle” without it, totally missing the savings opportunities that lie in sourcing, I was glad to see that the recent article on “solving the transportation network puzzle” in Logistics Management relayed the need for optimization technology in transportation network optimization. It is the case that that the sheer size and complexity of these networks means technology is required to perform the analytics that enable harvesting the value.

Furthermore, it is no longer the case that a carrier will give you discounted rates just because you have lots of freight. Given the current, and almost continually rising, price of fuel, the cost to maintain their fleet, and the relatively low rates many of them quote the first time around (to try and shave a round or two off negotiation and keep their trucks moving), many providers are no longer able to offer deep discounts unless they want to go out of business, like many of their financially weak breathren have done over the past few years.

Unless the carrier has excess capacity to fill, chances are the buyer will not be ble to wrangle the deal they’re looking for. And, as the article points out, unless the buyer exposes enough information about their needs, and allows the carriers to bid on specific lanes or flows, the buyer will never know that a carrier could have offered a better price in that region and the carrier will never know that they can be guaranteed the specific slice of the business that they can serve cost effectively — and keep quotes down.

And unless the buyer has the right tool to analyze the bids at the lane level, the buyer will never be able to slice the award properly as a large model will have hundreds, if not thousands, of lanes and dozens of carriers bidding on lanes in one or more groups. This generally results in tens of thousands of quotes, depending on volume, which is impossible to analyze in a spreadsheet when regional or volume discounts are also being offered by larger carriers for a minimum percentage of the business. But a modern decision optimization solution can analyze such a scenario in minutes, and allow the analyst to build and solve dozens of “what if” scenarios to understand the impacts of a given decision.

High-Definition Sourcing: Category Excellence Moves to the Next Level


Today’s guest post is from Paul Martyn, Vice President of Marketing for Bravo Solution.
Paul can be reached at p <dot> martyn <at> bravosolution <dot> com.

the doctor — along with many others — has been advocating for “next-generation sourcing” for some time. I couldn’t agree more that modern supply management organizations must take sourcing practices to the next level if they are going to continue to distill value from the discipline and practice.

But like most New Year’s Resolutions, while the aspiration to improve may be great, the effort may be too much for even the most committed. I see this a lot, especially when it comes the challenges of sourcing strategic, complex categories. Not without reason of course, but more and more I also see that the benefits of mastering the art of sourcing these challenging categories far outweigh the difficulties of the actual process.

Strategic categories mean different things to different businesses. For one company, the category may be transportation; for another, packaging material. The common denominator: the business can’t succeed without it, and can’t afford to over-pay for it.

To make decisions based on the most strategic objectives of the business, sourcing teams need to integrate many dimensions of information from areas well outside their domains. For example, if non-price factors like diversity or sustainability are part of the company’s corporate social responsibility initiative, those factors can — and should — be part of sourcing strategies.

As a result, the volume and the sheer variability of the information render common e-sourcing tools or Excel spreadsheets useless for collecting and evaluating proposals. That’s where high-definition sourcing — which combines technology, expertise and process — delivers the goods at the lowest total landed cost, and aligned with the greater organizational strategy.

So how do you know if high-definition sourcing can turn even the most complex categories into real value for your organization? There are generally three scenarios where the opportunity to apply this discipline will help you capture meaningful and sustainable savings

  1. The category leader is frustrated with traditional sourcing techniques
  2. The category is avoided by the faint of heart
  3. Sourcing alone will not deliver the value

Sound familiar? Odds are good that at least one of these reflects what’s happening in your organization. Regardless of which situation you face, there are immediate opportunities to be gained with high-definition sourcing

  • Use technology to design and execute more sophisticated proposal collection and analysis, including the ability to use “what-if” scenarios.
  • Build supplier performance monitoring and triggers for re-evaluating supplier selection into your category management solution
  • Partner with suppliers to drive costs out of the system and strike the perfect balance between suppliers’ pricing and capabilities with buyer business constraints and preferences
  • Tap domain and process experts to bring market and industry best practices to bear on your own sourcing process

The results will be well worth it. Best-in-class companies make the connection between complex categories and the business’ charter. Lowering initial costs is a given. More importantly, these leaders make better decisions based on capabilities and price and secure meaningful — and sustainable — savings.

Thanks, Paul!

Why You Should Optimize Your Supply Chain

Besides the host of reasons this blog has provided you with in the past, which include:

if the supply chain isn’t optimized, it might not be nimble enough to keep up. As per this recent McKinsey article on building the supply chain of the future, ““the competitor that’s best at managing the supply chain is probably going be the most successful competitor over time“. Furthermore, as supply chains are becoming more splintered, they are getting harder and harder to manage by the seat of one’s pants, which increases the management complexity. In many organizations, instead of increased agility, this actually leads to increased inefficiency as managers struggle to manage the complex splintered chains efficiently.

But if supply chain optimization is employed, the splintered chains can be quickly optimized. But more importantly, an organization can progress beyond managing splintered chains to managing supply chain segments, which is likely the ultimate key to supply chain success in the years ahead. Think about it … if the origin and destination of goods has to continually adapt due to changing low cost locales and emerging (consumer) markets, then the ultimate key to quick adaptation will be to just change the relevant segments of the (splintered) chains and not the whole chains. If the organization was sourcing from Thailand but switches to Vietnam, but is still shipping to the US, why should the whole supply chain change? Maybe it’s still the same ocean carrier, and all that changes is the port and the carrier that gets the goods to the port. And if the organization has general contracts with a number of different international carriers, it will be quick to run an optimization and build the modified change from available segments.

And that, in a nutshell, is why you need supply chain optimization.

Why You Should Optimize Your Logistics

Because half of the time (on average), that truck you use is running empty. But you’re still paying for fuel, maintenance, driver time, etc. Consider this statistics from a recent article on “How to Combat Logistics Inefficiencies in Your Organization” over on Environmental Leader.

  • 25% of all freight vehicles in Europe run empty
  • 50% + of all freight vehicles in Europe run only part-full

As the article states, this is a monumental waste and has a staggering negative impact on the environment. In Europe, freight transport is believed to account for 1/4 of all carbon emissions. That’s 25% — and one sixth of the emissions are 100% unnecessary (as the equivalent of half the trucks are running empty and road transport accounts for 1/3 of the emissions). Given that road freight alone accounts for about 420 Million tonnes of CO2 per year in Europe (more than the entire carbon footprint of some countries, including South Africa, and 1/3 of global road freight emissions), that’s a lot of environmental damage!

And don’t tell me it’s not your problem, or that it’s your logistics carrier’s problem, because it’s not. It’s your freight, and you can do something about it. When you send out that RFI that asks if a carrier can service a given route, also ask if they currently service that route, how many trucks travel down the route on a weekly basis, and what % of trucks go FTL, LTL, and empty each way. Then you can define empty transport costs, carbon costs, and efficiency discounts in your sourcing model based upon how many empty trucks you will create or get rid of. If there are no full trucks going to the vicinity of your warehouse now, then the carrier will have to add trucks which will go to your warehouse empty, adding cost and carbon to your supply chain. But if there are full trucks going to the vicinity of your warehouse that always leave empty, you will be increasing the efficiency of the carrier while reducing the overall carbon footprint of the logistics carrier’s operation — and be in a position to potentially negotiate even better rates. And while the exact breakdown of FTL/LTL/empty on any lane varies by week, carriers on top of their game have these stats for the last month, quarter, and year at all times. The data is there. You just have to get it and make use of it. (And with a good optimization platform, you can!)