Category Archives: SaaS

Trade Extensions: Still No Rest for the Wickedly Powerful

In our last posts on Trade Extensions (No Rest for the Wicked-ly Powerful, Part I and Part II), we talked about how Trade Extensions (TE) added real-time decision optimization auctions, award management (that allowed a user to fix the award for part of a scenario and re-run a smaller model for what-if), built-in OLAP reporting, and supplier feedback mechanisms to their platform to increase the power, usability, and friendliness of their platform. Since then, as per our recent post on Optimization: Is it Time to Move Beyond Sourcing, Trade Extensions has been toiling away to increase the power, flexibility, and usability of their platform to take it beyond sourcing.

Trade Extensions has made significant improvements in the following three areas:

More Powerful Fact Sheets

Back in Trade Extensions Trades Up to a Fact Sheet User Interface, we talked about how Trade Extensions had built the capability for the end user to provide data in d-dimensional fact sheets, which include 2-dimensional spreadsheets and 3-dimensional workbooks, in order to allow the user to define models in a familiar format. Fact sheets could be used to define any model data element in simple row-column data format. In addition, a user could define certain values as simple formulas on other values in the sheet. Since their initial introduction three years ago, Trade Extensions has extended the capability to allow users to define more complex models with more complex formulas that can reference not only values, but formulas, and values and formulas in other fact sheets. Models can get as complex as they need to, and this is the foundation that allows Trade Extensions to define models that go beyond sourcing.

Formula Analyzer

The more complex the models get, the harder it is to pin down why they aren’t quite doing what you think they are supposed to be doing, why they are taking so long to solve, or what is driving the sensitivity. That’s why Trade Extensions built a formula analyzer that allows a user to analyze a formula and see how it is defined, how long it is taking to calculate with respect to the other formulas in the model, and what is affected by the formulas or changes to the formula. In addition, if they exist, it can suggest formula modifications that would allow the model to solve faster. However, just knowing where the problem lies is a great help if a model is solving slow.

Enhanced Browser-Based Reporting and Visualization

OLAP is good, but the ability to do real-time drill-downs, data segregation, reformulation, and graphing in the browser is even better. Noticing that a number of clients were exporting the scenario results and importing the results into a third-party reporting tool with more powerful data analysis and graphing capabilities, Trade Extensions built their own full-fledged rules-based data analysis package (like TS Insight and IQub and a host of others) that allows a user to do the real-time drill-down analysis required to understand complex models in the browser so a user never has to leave the Trade Extensions application. The ability to drill down and reorganize dimensions equals what you will find in the more advanced data analysis applications.

Put these new capabilities together, and a user is truly able to build, analyze, solve, and explore more complex beyond sourcing optimization models than they would have ever thought possible just a few years ago.

Nipendo: Bringing O2P and P2P to the Mainstream

Nipendo, which recently secured $8 Million in funding, a provider of order-to-payment automation software, recently released a new version of its order-to-payment (O2P) platform that includes automated rules-based end-to-end invoice reconciliation. Billing itself as the Supplier Cloud* solution, Nipendo has done an excellent job of making seamless supplier connectivity a reality for its customers.

By integrating with a number of platforms, providing a supplier portal, and by offering a print package that suppliers can download and install as a print driver on their PCs to print invoices to the Nipendo solution, Nipendo makes it easy for suppliers to e-invoice buyers without having to do any sort of complex integration with yet another platform. This is a powerful feature.

But what is really great about the Nipendo platform is the fact that they took three years to build a good understanding of customer fears as well as customer needs and built a solution that not only does what it says it does, but also addresses the main customer fear points, as outlined in our last post on points to ponder when people are pushing off procurement platforms.

Reality #5: It does save money.
A proper implementation of the Nipendo platform automates the full O2P/P2P (Procure-to-Pay) lifecycle, including invoice matching, verification, and payment subject to user-defined rules, allowing O2P/P2P to be managed on an exceptions-only basis. Once supplier onboarding is complete, all tedious tactical no-value-add manual processing or review time is required unless there is an exception, which allows 80%+ of the invoices and payments to just flow. This eliminates 80% of valueless tactical manpower effort, which can be redeployed to more strategic work, as well as all of the associated costs of sending, receiving, processing, and filing paper.

Reality #4: It does integrate.
Nipendo integrates with all of the major ERP vendors — including SAP (Business One), Oracle, Microsoft Dynamix, Quickbooks Enterprise, and Sage; integrates with a number of third party supply management platforms — including IBM Cognos, Synertrade, BuyerQuest, Global Factoring, and TIS; has it’s own Print to Cloud solution (which, thank your deity, does not actually print to the cloud but allows a supplier to submit their invoice to the Nipendo platform in a common data format); and has a number of third party technology partners that can build you an integration point if you don’t have one. Nipendo realizes that in order to truly deliver O2P/P2P savings, you had to automate the entire process, which means automating it for ALL parties, which means you have to integrate with all parties and the platforms they use, and they have spent years building a multitude of integration points.

Reality #3: It will work for you – it has a customizable workflow.
You can define the exact O2P/P2P process that you use, and precisely how complex each step is. For example, where purchase orders are concerned, you can define each status and step, the approval(s) level(s) required, whether you want to be notified of viewings/approvals, actions the vendor can take, information required by the vendor for each action (comments, reasons for rejections or requests for corrections or clarifications, etc.), required attachments (such as insurance certificates, certifications, etc.), the validations executed against invoices, the variations allowed, rules for automated approval, etc. The system can be setup to match your current organizational workflow precisely.

Reality #2: Suppliers can use it. They can choose among a number of low effort solutions!
In addition to the ERP integrations, third party platform integrations, the Print to Cloud utility, and options for custom integration from a third party, the supplier also has the option to use a good old-fashioned web portal. The supplier can use the platform.

Reality #1: The solution is designed for efficiency. Not job elimination.

It’s true that if the primary reason for O2P/P2P automation is that you just want to outsource the function (using BPO – business process outsourcing) and make sure that the third party organization is actually capable of delivering cost savings (by way of reduced manpower), then jobs will be eliminated. But if the driver for paperless O2P/P2P automation is that your Procurement and Supply Management personnel are spending too much time on costly tactical activities and not value-add strategic activities, the solution will end up providing a much greater contribution to the organizational bottom line as your Procurement and Supply Management personnel will be able to focus on getting more spend under management (and through the system), which will identify cost reductions in addition to process savings.

With the recent release of their automated end-to-end invoice reconciliation functionality, Nipendo enables true end-to-end O2P/P2P process automation in an exception driven fashion. This is where O2P/P2P needs to be. Manual review of invoices adds no value, and manual payments when everything matches approved purchase orders adds no value either. Value is in the identification of issues; the creation of corrective action plans; the implementation of efficiency, service, and product improvements; and in the identification of areas for cost avoidance. Pushing paper accomplishes nothing.

* Presumably because, even though Nipendo knows it’s not true, too many people still think that the cloud is a fluffy magic box (which it is not).

Decideware: An End-to-End Agency Lifecycle Management Solution Part III

In our first post, we re-introduced you to Decideware, global providers of an end-to-end Agency Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution, with offices on three continents (in Sydney, San Francisco, and London) and quickly overviewed the five core modules of the integrated ALM solution that they offer. Then, in our last post, we dived into the Capability and Scope of Work modules and quickly touched on the briefing module. Today, we are going to dive into the Evaluation and Dashboard Modules.

Evaluation

When it comes to cost, most Marketing agencies have a terrible grip on this issue. Generally speaking, they know what they were budgeted at the start of the year, and what they spent at the end of the year when the Controller or CFO tells them. They do a terrible job of tracking costs by project, and if you asked them budget vs spend vs results for any one Agency, you’ll get a blank stare as if you asked them to explain why the tentative confirmation of the Higgs particle by the Large Hadron Collider is important when it comes to the validation of the Standard Model. It’s not a good state of affairs.

However, if they had a proper Agency Lifecycle Management solution where they could enter all cost information at the desired level of detail, or force the Agency to (if the Agency wants to get paid), the state of affairs is completely different. After every phase, they can find out where they are vs. where they should have been and, possibly with Supply Management’s help, take corrective action.  In addition, they could track feedback and get an overview of the supplier’s running (balanced) scorecard (as this module grew out of their initial Supplier Performance Management offering).

The evaluation module, combined with the reconciliation sub-module (that is tied to the scope of work and collects the quoted cost data) allows an Agency (Relationship) Manager to dive into actuals vs. cost for any time period, at any level of detail, at any time and determine how spending is tracking according to budget. If costs are high, they can drill down into the primary components, and go right down to the resource level and, possibly, determine that Joe, the highly paid creative resource, who was budgeted to work 10 hours, worked 100 hours. They can then determine if this was a data entry error or a grossly inaccurate estimation on the part of the Agency, and use this data in the post-mortem Agency evaluation.

In addition, they can bring up the Agency’s (balanced) scorecard (history) and see (and compare) the Agency’s performance on each phase, for the project, and across all projects.  They can even compare Agency scorecard to see if an Agency is performing average, better, or worse than the other approved agencies.

Dashboard

As noted in our first post, the dashboard, another new module from Decideware, provides a unified interface to all of the modules and functionality contained in the system. From the dashboard, which is designed to work like the user interface to a web-based cube-based spend analysis system, the user can search all of the Agency data, retrieve lists of agencies by geographies, capability, scope of work, and other relevant criteria, and drill down into any data category until they retrieve the (fine-grained) data they are looking for. The best thing about it is, unlike the dashboard offerings of many spend analysis or Supplier Information Management (SIM) providers, it’s almost devoid of fancy graphs and charts. Decideware understands it’s the data that matters and focussed on building an easy-to-use, yet powerful, search, and saved the real estate to display the requested data in an easy-to-understand tabular view with as much drill-down support as you will need.

In addition, from the dashboard, the user can quickly get to all of the reporting functionality embedded in the system, which includes scope analysis reports that summarize resource and fee schedules; organizational analysis reports that summarize costs and actuals; comparison reports that allow the user to compare agencies, fees, capabilities, and functions; and contract generation reports that can generate scopes of work and supporting contracts. (The platform has embedded contract management functionality just like it has embedded SIM functionality.) All of the data can be exported to Excel, and the system can automatically generate work-grids and rate cards.

Overall the system is well-designed and so easy to use that even a Marketer can do it. 😉 So if you want a solution to bring to the Marketing table, make sure Decideware is on your short-list.

Decideware: An End-to-End Agency Lifecycle Management Solution Part II

In our last post, we re-introduced you to Decideware, global providers of an end-to-end Agency Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution, with offices on three continents (in Sydney, San Francisco, and London). We quickly overviewed the five core modules of the integrated ALM solution that they offer, and indicated that we would dive into them in the next two posts. So without further ado, here we go.

Capability

The capability module walks you through the six-step process of gathering appropriate information and approving the Agency as a potential supplier to the organization.

  1. Entity
    The first step is to gather the firmographic data, including the geography, the number of employees, the administrative and legal contacts, the revenues, the primary office locations, and vendor status information
  2. Type
    The next step is to determine the primary, secondary, and tertiary type of the agency. Is it creative, digital/interactive/social media, planning, relationship marketing, public relations, branding, investor relations, etc? An agency can only have one primary focus, and that focus must contribute to 50% or more of revenues to be primary. Similarly, it can only have one secondary focus, and that focus should contribute to 25% or more of revenues. Any additional focii are tertiary.
  3. Specialties
    In this step, a more complete picture of the Agency capability is created through the gathering of supporting data related to market segments, experience, media creation, etc. to fill in a more complete picture of the suitableness of the Agency for the company.
  4. Conflicts
    The next step is to determine if there are any potential categories of conflict for the company. If you’re in Pharma, and they are currently working on a campaign for a new heart disease prevention drug for your competitor, then you don’t want them working on a campaign for your heart disease prevention drug.
  5. Engagements
    What engagements for your company has the Agency worked on, and what engagements is the Agency currently working on? (It’s not uncommon to find out that another Marketing division in another geography is already using another office of the Agency for their campaign!)
  6. Approval
    Once all of the data has been gathered, and an individual with decision authority has decided that the Agency is qualified to work on (select) marketing campaigns for the organization (subject to no conflict), the Agency is approved as a potential vendor.

Scope of Work

The scope of work module walks you through the six-step process of creating a scope of work and approving the scope of work for execution by the Agency.

  • Scope
    Defines the scope of the project being undertaken – duration, geography, contractual details, and summary.
  • Objectives
    What are the objectives? More visibility? Market share? Better brand ratings? And how will they be measured.
  • Work
    The specific deliverables – tv commercial, print advertising, radio segments, etc.
  • Staffing
    The staff available to work on the projects.
  • Costs
    The costs, according to the costing model specified. This is one of the highlights of the Decideware Scope of Work solution. With a custom Excel-like spreadsheet interface, costs can be captured by resource, by function, by campaign, or by deliverable to the desired degree of detail. This not only lets the organization get a grip on what the main cost components are, but how one agency compares in fees and rates to another.
  • Approval
    Once all of the data has been gathered, and an individual with decision authority has decided that the scope of work is complete, a contract is cut and the work can begin.

Briefing

One of Decideware‘s newest Agency Lifecycle Management module, this module is designed to capture the day-to-day interactions with the Agency. It’s like a Community Communications Management and Balanced Scorecard rolled into one. Since this is still in beta with select customers, we’ll cover it at a later time once the first version is finalized and we’ve dived deeper into the nuances of Agency Relationship Management.

Tomorrow we’ll cover the Evaluation and Dashboard modules and talk about some unique capabilities of the Decideware platform.

Decideware: An End-to-End Agency Lifecycle Management Solution Part I

In our last two posts we discussed Agency Lifecycle Management (ALM), the criticality of such to Marketing, and the need for Supply Management to support (ALM) end-to-end if Supply Management wants to get the sacred cow Marketing spend under management. We also outlined the four fundamental phases of Agency Lifecycle Management, key requirements of each phase, and the capabilities that Supply Management has to bring to the table to get a seat at the table. We concluded the post by noting that if Supply Management doesn’t have the requisite processes and technologies at its disposal, it should get them and that there were solutions out there.

One of the leading solutions in Agency Lifecycle Management is Decideware. Decideware, which was first covered on Sourcing Innovation back in 2010 (in this post), started out with the goal of building a SaaS Supplier Performance Management system to allow organizations to get a grip on strategic supplier management. However, in the process, they discovered that Marketing, in particular, was significantly underserved. So they started to build specific features, and then modules, for Agency Performance Management. However, the deeper they went down the rabbit hole, the darker they found it to be. Marketing desperately needed an end-to-end Agency Lifecycle Management solution, but at the time, no one was offering it. So they built one. Then they discovered, now that they had a light to guide their way, that they rabbit hole was far deeper and far darker than anyone thought. So now they are extending their ALM solution, considerably. And Marketers are doing the dance of joy*.

Currently, the Decideware solution has one module for each of the core phases of Agency Lifecycle Management plus a dashboard. The core modules are:

  • Capability
    which acts as the main interface to the underlying AIM (Agency Information Management) system that underlies all of the modules and allows information on Agencies to be entered, maintained, and searched
  • Scope of Work
    which is used to capture the complete scope of work in a methodical process that can support multiple workflows depending on the fee type (function, resource, deliverable, or agency) and project
  • Briefing
    which is used to capture the interactions with the Agency during each phase of the relationship
  • Evaluation
    which is used to record actuals, cost details, and approvals

and

  • Dashboard
    which provides a unified interface to all of the modules and functionality contained in the system; from the dashboard, the user can search all of the Agency data and retrieve lists of agencies by geographies, capability, scope of work, and other relevant criteria

The system is tightly integrated and fits together quite nicely. From any point in the SaaS solution, a user can drill into the information at hand and quickly get to the information she needs. And if she doesn’t know what to do next, each module has a well-defined step-by-step workflow that will guide the user to optimal results. In the next two posts, we will dive into the Decideware solution in more detail.

* and I’m told it’s a sight to see 😉