Category Archives: SaaS

Lavante Connect – Streamlined Supplier Self Management

Lavante, a provider of Supplier Information Management (SIM) and SIM-based Recovery, has just released a new version of Lavante Connect, their supplier self-management solution.

Lavante Connect is one of the more powerful, and more streamlined, supplier information self-management solutions on the market. In the Lavante Connect solution, the supplier is walked-through the 3 to 5-step process of completing their profile and is updated with respect to their progress, and percentage of work remaining, after each step. In the Lavante system, the supplier goes through the following easy to follow process:

  1. Company Profile
  2. Legal Identification
  3. Certifications
  4. Payment Information (may be optional)
  5. Specific Information (may be optional)

Profile information walks the supplier through the definition of headquarters information, address information (notices, payment, warehouse, etc.), references, ownership, diversity, business structure, and contacts.

Legal ID walks the supplier through entry of business numbers, tax numbers, and other government identification in the countries that the supplier operates in. It also makes sure that the supplier uploads the appropriate documentation required by the customer, such as W9s in the US.

Certifications walks the supplier through the insurance and certification requirements of the customer and makes sure that the supplier specifies all of the relevant information and uploads the appropriate documents.

Payment walks the supplier through the specification of the payment types they accept (pCard, check, EFT, wire, etc.) and the specifications for each payment type.

Specific Information, of which there can be more than one tab, walks the supplier through the specific information requests unique to the client, such as required product and service information, sustainability information, etc. and the documentation that needs to be supplied.

The ease of use comes not only in the easy to follow registration, and profile completion process, but the fact that the system:

  • validates everything that can be validated,
  • eliminates duplication of data entry whenever possible, and
  • forces e-signatures and verification for all legal documents.

Not only does the system validate that all data entered is in a valid format, but it integrates with as many third party systems as possible to verify that the entered data is correct. Business numbers and tax numbers are automatically verified against government databases, address information is validated against address databases, bank and p-card information is verified through penny-transactions, etc. The system makes it hard for a supplier to make a mistake and harder for any errors to persist for more than a few days. It also alerts the supplier as soon as certifications or registrations are about to expire or information has to be re-verified (according to the customer’s schedule, where such customer may require re-verification of contact information every six months).

All address, contact, and similar data is automatically indexed and can be mapped to any other information requirement that makes sense. So, if headquarters also happens to be the payment and legal notice address, it only has to be entered once. Same for contact information.

For the most part, SIM isn’t complex, and neither are supplier portals, but few master the usability and simplicity required to onboard even the technology unsophisticated supplier quickly and easily with complete profiles, no errors in critical information, and fresh profile data. Lavante Connect is in this group.

Intesource – A Strong Sourcing Solution for Mid-Market Supply Management

When we last covered Intesource almost three years ago in 2010 in this post about intelligent sourcing through Intesource, we noted that this full-service offering eSourcing provider had a fully-featured e-Negotiation platform with SIM, document/contract management, and a relatively unique integration with Microsoft Sharepoint for those clients that ran on a Microsoft back-office and wanted to use these solutions to collaborative author documents and track changes.

Besides integration with the Microsoft platform, which is very common in the mid-market that can’t always afford, and often doesn’t need, the massive ERP solutions found in the Fortune 1000/Global 3000, other unique differentiators at the time were their massive template library for e-Negotiation events, integrated feeds from over 160 market exchanges for up-to-date raw material and commodity price information, and hands-on experience running tens of thousands of events. This put them in a restricted group of providers.

Since then, they have continued development work on the platform and added additional functionality that not only enhances the end-to-end strength of the platform, but narrows the group of competitors that can say the same. Three particular enhancements stand out — award analysis, market price centre, and mobile interfaces. We will describe each in turn.

Intesource has added an award optimization component that, while not true strategic sourcing decision optimization, is a very useful analytic component that will allow a buyer to determine a near-optimal, if not optimal, award for non-complex sourcing events. In the new component, buyers can create multiple award scenarios based on pre-defined rules, such as low-quote (which selects, for each item, the supplier with the lowest bid), low-group (which selects, for each group, the supplier with the total lowest cost for a group, or bucket, of item), or low program (which selects the supplier(s) with the lowest cost based upon a program specification, which could be to select suppliers with the highest quality, shortest-lead time, or MWBE specification where possible); or by hand-picking suppliers for each item and/or group. Then, the buyers can compare each scenario side-by-side to see how the different scenarios compare and what is gained for each price sacrifice.

Intesource’s award optimization module is not true optimization in that there is no underlying model, it doesn’t support cross-item / group rebate / discount bids, specification of capacity is currently limited to the event level and the specification of macro-qualitative constraints is limited, and you can’t yet re-run a scenario to see what would change if a supplier increased/decreased prices/quality/etc across the board by 5%, but as SI pointed out five years ago in it’s post on (Spend) Analytics vs. (Decision) Optimization, if your organization had a spend analysis product that allowed you to build a spend cube any time you wanted – on any data you wanted – on any dimensions you wanted – and then throw it away when you’re done then there would be nothing to stop you from building a cube on your RFP or Auction data, building cross tabs and tree maps, and then changing the cube to look at the data a different way. You’d find that you wouldn’t need optimization or a plethora of deterministic reports to find out who the lowest cost supplier was, who the highest quality supplier was, who the lowest cost supplier was relative to your quality metric, or any other query that can easily be answered by rank and cross-tab queries. And, as a result, you’d be able to solve many simple scenarios without optimization — and this is what this tool is attempting to do. Intesource realizes that many supply management organizations, especially in the mid-market, don’t have the advanced sourcing and modelling skills required to build complex optimization models and is endeavoring to build a tool appropriate to its user base. And while it’s not perfect, the reality is that, for an average (smaller) mid-size organization, continued development will allow Intesource to approach an 80% solution as many sourcing events and models of a (smaller) mid-size organization aren’t that complex and this type of solution will get such an organization much further than just e-Negotiation alone.  And on those 80% of events, the results will be near-optimal, if not optimal.

Intesource has centralized all of its raw material and commodity price feeds into a market price centre that integrates the feeds with additional graphing and reporting functionality, monitoring and alerts, and statistical modelling capabilities. In the market price center, users can view historical trends and price fluctuations, focus in on any particular period of time, extend trend projections into the future, monitor prices, cash, and futures contract specifications, set watch lists to monitor key categories, set alerts to immediately inform the user if a price threshold is reached or a price fluctuation exceeds a certain threshold, and even pull up all of the information associated with the exchange(s) a commodity or raw material is associated with.

Finally, like a few other providers, it is tackling mobile, but it is doing it in a smart way. The reality is that, while you might want mobile access because it sounds really cool, in practice it’s typically not very cool because you can’t do really do anything useful on a 3″ to 4″ screen, and what you can do is limited on even a 9″ to 10″ screen. Realizing that all you can really do is retrieve critical pricing and status information, Intesource is building a customized read-only interface that will allow you to determine current event status, bid information, and whether or not there is anything you need to to do or respond to when on the go.  And it’s working with its customer base to develop an appropriate interface that they can use effectively.

Other improvements since 2010 include an improved contract centre with more (user-defined) meta-data, search, and alert functionality; an improved vendor management (SIM) capability with embedded Q&A, enhanced search, attachment management, compliance, and watch-list capabilities; more milestone and scorecard management capabilities; an RFI question library with thousands of questions indexed by category, commodity, and other attributes (built on an analysis of 12 years worth of RFI data) to allow for quick definition of templates and RFIs; and a roles-based public event calendar. Intesource is constantly developing new modules, functions, and features with a roadmap largely driven by its user community as all requests are reviewed quarterly by an advisory committee and prioritized based upon overall demand and usefulness.

Intesource is a solid player in the eSourcing mid-market that should be included in the candidate pool by any company that does most of its business in North America.

DropShip Commerce Brings Drop-Shipping and e-Commerce Enablement to the Distributor and Retailer Masses

On Monday, we announced that BizSlate Just Released its ERP for Mid-Sized Distributors and Retailers that gave the masses a useable, and affordable, ERP solution with exceptional supply chain support — especially where inventory and order management were concerned. With the BizSlate ERP, it’s a breeze for a retailer to order hundreds of variants of dozens of SKUs with a few mouse-clicks and keystrokes and to see inventory requirements at any point in time in the future. And this is great for inventory and storefront management, but what about the e-Store?

As more and more retailers need to turn to online sales to compete in the new marketplace where a consumer can get almost anything she wants online — and do so within two days, as the bigger retailers, following Amazon’s lead, are now packing and shipping same-day if an order is received by the cut-off time — the mid-sized and small retailers have to offer the same convenience or get pushed out of the market. Also, sometimes the only way to survive is to create a unique shopping experience for a niche market and offer all of the products, and only the products, related to that niche through a single, customized storefront. (For example, maybe the way to survive is to cater to the fantasy gaming enthusiast and provide a unified storefront for all of the relevant card games, board games, video games, RPGs, and spin-off/related novels and/or movies when the shopper might normally have to go to a local comic/game shop, book store, and online DVD store to find the items of interest.)

However, this need to both integrate (live) inventory (feeds) from dozens, and sometimes hundreds of suppliers (like Amazon) does, and then parse a customer order into separate orders for each vendor that is supplying an item to you and sending it direct to the consumer through its drop-shipping capabilities poses an integration nightmare for the average e-tailer. The reality is that every supplier will have a different database format / taxonomy and every other supplier will have a different access method. One (group of) suppliers will provide access through an FTP site that will contain inventory exports (in a multitude of raw or compressed file formats), another (group) will provide database access through a secure tunnel, the more technical will provide a web API, and the non-technical will e-mail spreadsheets. Some will use (a variation of) CSV format, some will be on an (old) version of EDI, the more techie will have an XML format, etc. Nightmare!

But this is only a quarter of the challenge. The inventory files need to be processed and the relevant data pushed to the live site, after a human has selected or verified what items need to be pushed. Then, the orders need to be pulled from the live site, parsed, and the proper data pushed back to the suppliers for (drop) shipping in the required time-frame — in the format required by the suppliers.

In other words, today’s small-and-mid-sized e-tailers need a solution that makes it trivial to get inventory manifests (if you will), process those manifest, select (groups of) product(s) for the online store, (create a schedule to) push those products to the store, define rules for parsing orders and pushing them back to the appropriate suppliers (on a schedule), create the requisite e-documention, and push the documents to the vendors and the order management systems.

This is the system that DropShip Commerce provides, and it’s the first solution that the doctor has seen that solves the round-trip mid-market problem in a manner uniquely tailored to the specific needs of retailers and their drop-shipping suppliers. And like the other modern SaaS solutions on the market, it’s slick, quick, and very easy to use. By targeting a specific, relatively unaddressed, problem for a specific vertical (consumer-oriented retail), like BizSlate, they were able to create a unique solution that is just what the average mid-sized e-Tailer needs. The DropShip Commerce solution is definitely something the average mid-size e-Tailer that sources from multiple suppliers needs to check out if they haven’t already.

Got Cloud? I Got Mail. Your Mail!

And that’s just the beginning. I’ve warned you before that you can’t control the clouds and that they are inherently insecure. But did you listen? Nope. Clouds are gaining in popularity, and, consequently, every day more and more data is there for the taking, by experienced AND novice hackers alike.

As per this recent article in the (MIT) Technology Review, on “How to Steal Data from Your Neighbour in the Cloud”, a recent study (by researchers at the Universities of Wisconsin and North Carolina) has proven that software hosted in one part of the cloud can spy on software hosted nearby.

This study conducted an experiment in which malicious software was run on hardware designed to mimic the equipment used by cloud companies such as Amazon. The software was able to steal an encryption key that was used to secure e-mails from software belonging to another user. This allowed the researchers to decrypt e-mails sent by the user (which are easily captured by packet sniffers on a compromised machine attached to the cloud).

As per the article, the new attack undermines one of the basic assumptions underpinning cloud computing: that a customer’s data is kept completely separate from data belonging to any other customer. This separation is supposedly provided by virtualization technology. However, because virtual machines running on the same physical hardware share resources, the actions of one can impinge on the performance of the other, an attacker in control of one virtual machine can snoop on data stored in memory attached to one of the processors running the cloud environment (that is used as a cache in a trick known as a side-channel attack).

Remember this before you go for a full-fledged cloud solution. SaaS from a private data centre run by a single vendor is probably okay if they maintain separate database instances for each client (with their own, separate, encryption keys). But shared services on a cloud are probably not a good idea. At least not from a security perspective.

Hiperos – It’s So Hip To Be Square with 3rd Party Management! Part II

Hiperos provides a SaaS platform that allows an organization to manage the entire 3rd party lifecycle, which consists of registration, data collection, segmentation, control automation, assessment, management, and collaborative issue resolution.

Hiperos includes your standard SIM (Supplier Information Management) functionality that allows for supplier self-service registration and profile maintenance and data integration from third party sources. On top of that it implements a user-configurable rules-based workflow that allows third-parties to be segmented into different buckets that represent the different programs that they need to be subjected too – be it FCPA, REACH, WEE, HIPPA, or some other type of compliance or monitoring program. Each bucket has its associated monitoring rules that notify the third party when more information is needed and that automatically alerts the user when a violation is detected or when information is not provided by the third party in a timely fashion. Assessments are automatically run every time new data becomes available and can be run by a user at any time. The fact that all relevant third party information is available at all times allows users to pro-actively manage third parties, and associated risks, and then either work with third parties to mitigate risks, if the potential infraction can be corrected, or cut them loose if the risk of association is too great (because they showed up on a denied party list or use child labour in their supply chain).

The application, which loads the default user-defined dashboard, allows a user to manage third parties, engagements, relationships, products, and programs and to define programs, vendor communities, reports, and analytics.

The dashboard is multi-tabbed and allows a user to define relevant views on each of the application areas defined above, as well as a default dashboard that allows the user to see the information most relevant to him or her. At the top of the dashboard is a link to current action items that allows a user to quickly see what needs to be done in third party management, engagements, programs, etc. The dashboards can be configured using hundreds of pre-defined (reporting) widgets or the user can define their own widgets by defining appropriate reports in the reporting module. And the user can bring in real-time news and data feeds from sites of interest.

The application can track any compliance, performance, sustainability, or risk data elements of interest and, like any good SIM platform, is preconfigured to track hundreds of relevant data items, depending upon the programs you define as relevant for a given compliance, performance, or risk program (which minimizes the amount of configuration required to track custom fields). And not only is all relevant data available from any view that is program or user defined, but it’s all interlinked so a user can click on a third party included in a program, see the relevant report(s), and then dive into the third party data management screen to examine the raw data elements, and then run a report on just a data subset.

Program definition is flexible and allows for any type of compliance, risk, sustainability, or performance program you can think of. In addition, the fact that Hiperos also supports contract meta-data and third-party data feeds allows financial impact reports to be generated. That way, a user always knows what the impact of a third-party falling out of compliance is to the organization. Knowing that a tier-one supplier might be buying from a tier-two supplier that might be using child labour is one thing, but knowing that the organization is spending 20 Million across 5 categories on that tier-one supplier is something else. In the first case, the supplier is put on the “investigate” list and someone gets around to it when they get around to it. In the second case, the user knows that it is a high priority and an investigation has to be started immediately as the public backlash will be extremely damaging to the organization if it gets out that 20 Million is being spent on products and/or services that were partially produced by child labour.

Hiperos has also included extensive color-coded geo-mapping capabilities so that you can quickly see, for any program, where the highest risk areas are globally and dive in. While Hiperos is not the first company to do this, they have latched on to the fact that the visual representation of risk or non-compliance by region allows one to quickly see what regions have to be monitored. This allows resources to be properly applied, especially since proper monitoring will typically require subscriptions to appropriate data feeds for those regions.

The Market Intelligence capabilites are quite extensive too, and they have pre-configured watch-lists, diversity monitoring, parent-subsidiary monitoring, subcontractor monitoring, REACH/WEE monitoring, and dozens of other feeds of interest which can be enabled as required by the client.

And the analytics piece supports the full suite of slice-and-dice capabilities found in most sourcing products today, so that you can dive into the data and find out which suppliers, categories, or programs represent the highest risk to your organization.

There’s quite a bit of data, and the application can be quite busy at times, but Hiperos has one thing right, where compliance is concerned, it’s Hip to be Square.