Category Archives: SaaS

TAMR – Trying to Tame the Data Deluge!

TAMR may be a relatively new entrant in the stand-alone best-of-breed spend analysis space, having been incorporated back in 2013, but — and this is largely due to the pedigree and experience of its founders and senior team — it’s AI-backed probabilistic machine learning engine is on par with any player out there and it’s spend analytics success at some of the Fortune 500 players that have adopted it is on par with companies that have been doing spend analysis for over a decade.

And while, at first glance, TAMR appears to play in a large spend analytics space, when you zero in, you find that the vast majority of players offering spend analytics are (sourcing) suite providers and ERPs, with few companies focussed only on spend analysis or broader analytics. In fact, upon review of 25 major players, only Analytics 8 Spend View, Rosslyn Analytics, Sieveo, Spend 360, and SpendHQ remain in the stand-alone best-of-breed spend analytics space. Moreover, when you look at larger analytics focussed enterprises with spend analysis offerings, only Opera Solutions and PRGX stand out as most of the suite providers are still offering last generation or acquired solutions.

And even though there are only a few standalone providers and a few suite providers that stand out, TAMR, whose customers are primarily large Fortune 500 / Global 3000 customers, is in a class almost its own. Many of the standalone providers left are focussed on the mid-market and many of the leading analytics companies, like PRGX that focusses on audit recovery, specialize in other areas of analysis. At the end of the day, only Opera addresses the full range of analytics that TAMR does.

TAMR is relatively unique because, with TAMR, you can start with spend analysis and then deploy the same platform throughout the enterprise and marry marketing and social media impact analytics with spend to analyze results and outcomes per dollar of spend on a campaign basis, collect NPD and innovation challenge data and measure the outcomes from that spend on a fine-grained level, and compare investment opportunities against spend reduction opportunities and see which has the better outcome for the enterprise long term.

Like Opera, TAMR is built around advanced probabilistic machine learning algorithms that can work on any kind of data and can identify probably related and duplicate data in any domain. When human experts label a small subset of data elements, related data elements, and duplicate data elements, the algorithms can quickly adapt to the data sets and classification can occur quickly and accurately.

With regards to spend analysis, TAMR has built out a complete interface to their platform in Tableau that allows an analyst to see what has been classified, drill down, and see confidences in addition to standard supplier groupings, spend by category, spend by supplier, etc. The demo drill-down reporting suite is already more extensive than the standard offering from most of the pure-play spend analysis players and the alternate view into mappings and confidences will be more familiar to Tableau users than TAMR‘s built-in UI.

For a deeper dive into the strengths and weaknesses of this new analytics platform, check out the deep dive by the doctor, the prophet, and the maverick over on Spend Matters Pro (Part I).

Eved: Events Demystified

Eved, an event commerce company, was started to fill one of the holes in big organization spend management — event spend management. In many organizations, including those that use Ariba, event spend management can be a Million-dollar black hole — per event! For example, all most sourcing platforms can do is cut an all-inclusive PO to the event management vendor and process an all inclusive invoice, which could just be an invoice for venue, food, and services. Not much visibility or control into event spend management!

Without good expense management, companies are missing out on opportunities to impact millions of dollars of meeting and event spend because of disparate, disconnected systems and manual processes. This results in, among other inefficiencies, missed sourcing opportunities, extreme workflow inefficiencies, budget overage and spend leakage, and compliance (policy) risk.

However, with the Eved platform, the organization’s sourcing platform can cut a PO to be managed by the Eved platform, which can give fine-grained spend visibility into all event costs, track, and limit them, to a budget. The Eved platform has evolved over time to meet the needs of end-to-end event spend management including, but not limited to, budget management, program management, schedules, purchase orders, services, invoices, receiving, and other event-related requirements.

It also supports the full event sourcing process including, but not limited to, sourcing, supplier management, award, contract, change orders, invoices, reconciliation, and payment — capturing all of the necessary data for analytics and tax management. It also handles registration, attendee management, and related activities. The expense reconciliation is in real time, budget updates are real time, purchasing policies can be created and enforced, and the platform can be integrated with your accounts payable processes.

Both the sourcing process and the scheduling process can be governed using calendar-based program management. Just like good sourcing requires a good project plan with milestones, good event management also requires a solid timeline, with dates that often cannot slip in order to ensure a successful event. The platform allows milestones, tasks, and change orders to be tied to calendar dates to ensure that events get finished on time and that an event manager can see what is due to today and what is coming up. In addition, the integrated user-assigned color coding allows the event manager to see what types of tasks are (coming) due.

There are also strengths in collaborator management, statements of work, analytics, Ariba integration, and payment (including EvedPay that, through a Merchant partnership, allows event managers to use pre-paid debit cards that can be tracked through the platform using a p-Card type system). For more details on these strengths, and some of the unique Eved platform offerings, check out the recent Pro series by the doctor and the prophet over on Spend Matters Pro (membership required) [Part I]. The insights provided in this piece, particularly those straight from the prophet, are worth the long multi-part series read.

Technological Sustentation 81: Social Media

While there may be a dirty dozen of risk categories that we need to address in order to adequately address the Procurement Damnations we have willingly placed ourselves in as we try to collectively forge a new frontier, the largest category of risk that we need to address is that of Technology. Almost one fifth of all damnations that plague us fall into the technology category. This is the latest technology damnation that we are going to address. Even though it’s difficult.

As we mentioned when we penned the original damnation series, social media might be the most damning of them all. Besides the obvious facts that we collectively as a society waste enough time on a single video to double the size of Wikipedia (Source), that social media is literally making us stupid (Source), and that every marketer and their dog is doing their best to convince you that your company has to be on every social network in existence (including the dozen that are literally here today and gone tomorrow as Facebook and Twitter have pretty much won the social media war in the English speaking world for the time being), there is the simple fact that social media takes more than it gives.

So how do we survive? How do we deal with the fact that despite the fact that social media was designed for people to be social with each other, and not for businesses to sell wares to consumers, and certainly not for businesses to sell goods to each other, we are constantly bombarded by social media firms that tell us we can use social media to conduct important, strategic, operations.

And if having to deal with the outside pressure isn’t enough, you are constantly bombarded with requests from marketing for information about your supply chain efficiency, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, or other operations and practices that can be used to boost corporate image, brand reputation, or product differentiation on these outlets. You’re working hard to define and implement proper category management techniques on dozens of strategic and high-value categories but all marketing cares about is which supplier will get the organization the most free press, whether the “in vogue” corporate social responsibility practice of the day is getting enough attention, or if the new product being sourced will have enough bell-and-whistle features to allow for one dozen unique messages for each social media channel of interest. It’s inane, insane, and both.

And then, to make matters worse, rather than use your supplier portal, your suppliers want to message you on the social network they are signed into 24/7, your partners are checking the never updated Facebook company page instead of the official contact directory, and eliminated vendors keep messaging your organization’s Facebook and Twitter accounts asking marketing why they are no longer being considered, rather than read the detailed explanation in the vendor management portal you provided them.

So What Can You Do?

1. Refuse to answer meaningless marketing inquiries and instead change the conversation.

When marketing asks if the new product being sourced will have lots of features to wrap messaging around, simply state that the product is being sourced to corporate specifications, and that full details will be provided.

When they ask about CSR practices, simply inform them that you have vetted all suppliers using a third party and that they should read the appropriate reports.

And when they ask if you use twitter, simply point out that is their job. Don’t get distracted.

2. Adopt Procurement tools with integrated messaging, message boards, and social media like features in the communication portal.

If your Procurement portal gives the suppliers what they want, then they won’t be constantly asking to message you on Facebook, Twitter, or the platform de jour.

3. Help Marketing select the right CRM and social media monitoring platform.

Even though it’s the last platform you should touch, it is marketing’s livelihood – so it’s critical to make sure that if they are going to be using such a platform, that they are at least using the best one available. And if you can find one that meets all of their needs, maybe they will spend all of their time on it instead of bothering you.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it will at least allow you to survive, if you are strong enough. (Because only the strong survive.)

Serex – Bringing Auctions Back to Procurement

At this point in time, you’d think reverse auctions would be old news in Procurement, seeing that FreeMarkets was running reverse auctions twenty years ago and the doctor has repeatedly bashed their use in strategic sourcing (because they are not strategic), but they’re not.

There are two reasons for this.

1. They have an important role to play in tactical Procurement.

and

2. Companies new to strategic sourcing are still convinced by first generation solution providers with great marketing teams that they are still the greatest thing since the spreadsheet and that the historical savings opportunities are still there.

And while the doctor would like to think that the majority of buyers of these solutions fall in group 1, the reality is that the majority of buyers fall in group 2, and, once acquired, will treat every strategic sourcing event as a nail and use the auction tool as a hammer. So if that is the case, then the buying organization better get the best damn auction tool out there (since they will still need the auction for the tactical procurement nails when they figure out there is a better way to do strategic sourcing, and will actually need the auction tool more).

And these organizations will need a useable solution. The reality is that while just about every suite and point-based sourcing and procurement vendor offers an auction tool, not all of these are good auction tools against modern standards. Many first generation tools have no way to bulk select suppliers, bulk select products, bulk upload starting bids, import historical data, bulk upload attachments, etc. — ease of use capabilities you would think that would be standard. In fact, for the most part, only the newer reverse auction tools from smaller best of breed vendors targetting the mid-market tend to have the usability one would expect.

Usability and efficiency capabilities in an auction tool is key. I’ve heard countless stories about big organizations taking 1 to 3 weeks to set up a large global auction for large bill or materials or global category in a first generation tool when that same auction could be set up in a modern tool in 1 to 3 hours.

And this is where Serex comes in. Serex is an interesting entrant in the e-Procurement space. Originally founded 23 years ago to help clients select, implement, deploy and effectively use CRM and marketing automation systems, something it still does to this day, a few years ago, after a routine meeting with a client that asked if it had systems to support buying, it decided to enter the e-Procurement space when it found out that its client had tried, and passed on, over a dozen auction and sourcing platforms because not one met its need. (Serex was shocked at this as it knew there were a lot of solutions and assumed some were good, but figured it one Global 3000 couldn’t find a useable solution, then there must be other companies in this group that couldn’t find a useable solution either.)

So, after securing beta customer support (and a commitment for monthly guidance from the CPO with over two-decades of cross industry experience in large mid-size and Global 3000’s as well as weekly buyer availability), they began development of a new auction solution that would be developed by buyers, for buyers, and used by buyers. (And it is. Serex’s first customer saved 6M in year one and since full launch this year, its first few clients have logged over 14M in savings. And this is one reason why all of its prospects are large mid-size and Global 3000 organizations, despite the fact that the solution best fits the mid-market, which they have traditionally served on the CRM side.)

The reverse auction solution was designed to enable buyers to quickly set up and run auctions through quick bidder search and selection, quick product search and selection, quicker selection of which suppliers can bid on which products, and default auction parameters (which can easily be overridden). Complete product specs can be defined or uploaded as attachments if needed. Suppliers can send detailed messages during the auction to request or offer alternate delivery dates or substitutions for quicker delivery, and a buyer can update the auction specs as needed. In addition, all auctions are saved and new auctions can be created as copies of old auctions, and then updated as needed, allowing repeat auctions to be setup in just minutes (which is valuable if a product sells better than expected and an auction needs to be repeated on short notice to meet demand). (The auction platform has a built in attachment viewer that displays standard web formats.)

And that’s the solution. With the exception of a product manager sub-component and a bidder management sub-component, there isn’t even an RFX, which is probably the biggest short-coming of this new e-Negotiation tool — because sometimes you just want a simple tool to collect bids and make a decision. This is the biggest weakness of the tool. But Serex built it in a little over a year, and can easily build it out considerably in the next year. SI expects that in two years it will more or less compete on par with the other best-of-breed e-Negotiation mini-sourcing suites aimed at the mid-market along with adding capabilities that will cause larger organizations to adopt it onside their first generation Source to Pay platforms that they are locked into (but which are not useable enough to use on the majority of procured categories).

SpendHQ: Revving Up Visibility Into Your Supply Base

When we last dug into SpendHQ back in 2014 (Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV), we noted how this solution has grown from a simple spend reporting tool into a fully featured spend visibility tool that tracks all of your spend over time — by category, department, and user; a category management tool that lets you dive into category spend and filter down to the items of interest, see managed vs unmanaged spend, and track compliance; and, as of the next release later this quarter, track contract meta data and do basic contract lifecycle management.

We also noted that while it was not the most powerful (ad-hoc) spend analysis solution on the market, it was a really great solution for a mid-market company without a (useable) spend analysis or visibility solution that needed to get one up and running quickly, accurately, and usefully (as the solution has more power and capabilities than the average company needs to get great results). Within 4-6 weeks, a company with no spend analysis capability can be up and running 100% and be making useful, informed decisions.

Since then, they have been hard at work improving the contract module; adding a new compliance module in the visibility engine that allows the user to instantly see, for the selected categories, the addressable spend, the managed spend, the compliance rate, and the impact rate; and a brand new vendor detail module that sits on top of their brand new supplier database that contains information on about 20 Million entities that was formed from the fusing of their database of over 7.5 M entities that they built up over 12 years of operation and InsideView’s database of over 15 Million entities. The database has basic vendor information (address, ownership, status, industry, revenue, etc.), insights (on products, services, strengths, etc.), family tree (which contains ownership, subsidiary and sibling information), and financial data. A user can also see all associated contracts in the contract module and click into the details of each one as required.

One of the gems of the platform is the new and improved Category Management module with greatly enhanced savings management capability. On a category basis, this module summarizes spend, managed spend, core list compliance, and pricing accuracy — where each unit purchased is compared against the contract price. This allows an organization to identify maverick spend and overspend during the contract (on every refresh) and address issues as they arise. Within a category, they can drill into each item and see total spend and drill into spend by location and/or buyer, allowing them to zero in on maverick spend and spend that is priced off-contract. The pricing accuracy can drill down from a category to an item if need be and track inaccuracies, undercharges, overcharges, and overall error rate (as well as overall loss).

In addition, the particular interface customization and support for MRO, T&E, shipping and small parcel spend categories, often overlooked “tail spend”, is far superior to an average product and lets a buyer not only figure out what is maverick or going to on-contract suppliers (but being billed at off-contract rates), but how the spend breaks down across base charges, fuel charges, surcharges, and so on. This allows you to drill into the cost drivers of categories and products, and attack the real cost drivers in a strategic engagement. The specific capabilities built for shipments in particular are quite good. The shipment analytics breaks costs down into accessorials, zones, and fuel surcharges so that an organization can see precisely how the spend is breaking down, where the bulk of the charges are, and where any overspend are.

SpendHQ was built for the sourcing organization that wants a best of breed spend analysis and visibility tool and support maintaining and interpreting it, with the option to engage the right expert at the right time in the right categories to maximize savings. Its more of a “savings as a service” offering than the majority of other spend analysis players, and the best results come from augmenting it with ISG’s sourcing expertise that can help identify the right category to source to maximize savings at any given time. It’s a vendor that should definitely be kept on your radar.

For a deeper dive into SpendHQ, keep an eye out for the upcoming in-depth Spend Matters Pro review [membership required] by the doctor and the prophet that will appear later this summer.