Category Archives: Sourcing Innovation

Synertrade – Another European P2P Vendor Expanding Westward

While this vendor was effectively unknown in North America even a year ago, Synertrade has one of the broadest, and deepest, footprints in the S2P (Source to Pay) marketplace. And it has additional functionality, like innovation management, portfolio strategy, quality management, and a centralized supplier portal not generally found in most S2P platforms.

So while you might already have a dozen vendors on your P2P evaluation list, if your organization needs a solution that goes beyond the basics, this is one that should definitely be on your short list. Why?

As discussed by the doctor and the prophet over on the recent 3-part series that appeared on Spend Matters Pro (Part I, Part II, and Part III) [membership required], it has a number of strengths, including, but not limited to:

  • ease of use
  • role orientation
  • innovation management
  • risk intelligence
  • quick data integration

In addition, Synertrade is a well established with:

  • 16 years of P2P solution history
  • over 500 global customers
  • 15 global offices on 4 continents to support an international clint base
  • strong partner support

The Synertrade platform is a set of applications integrated across business processes to support an average enterprise in the full breadth of its Source to Pay activities. The 27 modules that are currently available (with another 6 coming by year end) can not only be configured as needed to support client requirements, but can be enabled or disabled as necessary, and the workflow adjusted accordingly, to customize the experience for each client, and each employee of each client.

The Source to Contract application contains RFX, auctions, and contract management capabilities with event (tender) management. The Procure to Pay application contains catalogue management capability (which supports the webshop), basic procure to pay, as well as order tracking and inventory management. In addition, the WebShop is comparable to any other web-based catalog purchasing solution with integrated EDI catalogs, custom catalogs, and free-form requisitions and checkouts. The Supplier Management application is built around a supplier database and supports supplier self-registration, qualification and assessment, certificate and document management, quality management, and development measures. The Purchasing Intelligence application, built around a harmonized data store that integrates all data from the platform and any relevant external applications (and pre-defined spend cubes), supports standard spend analysis, performance analysis, supplier scorecard analysis, and risk analysis.

There are a number of strengths to the platform, and major strengths include:

SynerConnect

The SynerConnect tool allows them to quickly map a client’s data to a common schema that has been developed using fifteen plus years of best practice data mapping and integration. With this tool, Synertrade can integrate just about any existing system or (real-time) (market) data feed that the organization wants to integrate in a manner of hours. Even obscure ERPs, custom-built supply management systems, and discontinued database products can be integrated quickly.

Risk Intelligence

The risk intelligence piece is quite powerful as it integrates supplier scorecards with Risk Methods and Ecovadis data and allows an organization, and a buyer, to evaluate supplier risk from multiple angles — financial, geographic, product/material availability, social responsibility, etc. The standard measurements and ratings can be overridden by the clients and the reports can be customized as needed. Plus, it is built on their analytics platform, which is built on Qlikview and extensive data cubes built up over years of platform extension (and cube definition).

Material Category / Supplier Portfolio Strategy

It’s great to know how much you are spending on a category, supplier, product, service, etc. and to be able to break it down across all of these dimensions, but if you do not know what to do with this data, that’s not that helpful. The Synertrade product helps buying teams and organizations overcome this by integrating the knowledge captured in the classic Kraljic matrix and the more modern AT Kearney Procurement chessboard and based upon this and extracted measures can recommended levers and strategies for categories, suppliers, and their intersection. This is extremely useful for organizations looking for a starting point in their strategic sourcing and procurement efforts.

For a deeper dive into Synertrade strengths, a full corporate SWOT analysis, a product selection guide, and an analyst commentary, see the in-depth three part series by the doctor and the prophet over on Spend Matters Pro (Part I, Part II, and Part III) [membership required].

Procurement is Complex. Is Your Platform Capable of Handling It?

There’s been a lot of analysis of Brexit — Britain’s decision to leave the EU — an analysis that SI has pretty much stayed out of. There’s a lot to be said about the issue, pro and con, and a lot of fallout that will occur in the times to come. But when you get right down to it, this is just another example of the dynamic, ever-changing nature, of supply chains — which cannot be predicted.

Supply chains are full of risks. There are risks that can be easily predicted, such as raw material shortages, strikes, fleet breakdowns, and so on. There are risks that can not be easily predicted — such as embargoes on regime changes, riots, and massive shifts in trade and politics almost overnight (such as what happens when a country votes to leave a political union that manages trade).

All of a sudden, your costs are changing. Some of your supply lanes are changing (as some lanes will no longer be feasible or viable for your carriers). And some of your partners are going away (as they decide that they don’t want to do business with you anymore or you decide they are too expensive). And you do not know how these costs are going to change, which lanes will suddenly be unavailable (or what new options will materialize), and which partners are the most likely to leave, or what the new supply chain will look like.

With so much changing, how do you figure out what your new costs are? Which carriers, and lanes, are viable? Which partners you still want to do business with, and which partners will still want to do business with you when all things are considered?

In order to figure this out, you need big damn cost models. Complex, formula-driven, calculations. Breakdowns that include all components, energy costs, labour costs, other overhead costs, logistics costs, storage costs, and other costs. Modifications for expected changes based on recent and projected trends. What if analysis based upon potential cost concessions for volume or cost increases for lack thereof. And so on.

And, as you should be well aware by now, advanced cost modelling, bill of materials, and value-optimization is not a capability found in the majority of Procurement platforms. Is it in yours? If it’s not, there will come a point, possibly very soon, where your platform fails to serve you. This is not something you can afford.

As the doctor has said many times, a modern procurement platform can be your salvation, but it has to be the right one. Or at least the right one for the task. The reality is, you might need two. If your organization has a lot of high-dollar indirect with complex transportation requirements but also has a lot of simple indirect and MRO, or has a lot of complex direct with a lot of simple or non-strategic tail spend, you might need an optimization-backed sourcing platform with a simple e-Negotiation suite for the junior buyers or a sophisticated direct sourcing platform with a tail-spend platform for the day to day Procurement professionals.

Before you get blindsided by an occurrence that has the potential to totally decimate your supply main models and destroy your cost baselines, make sure you have the right platforms in place to adapt and get the best value no matter what. Start now while your not-so-bright peers are taking this strange thing called “vacation”. You won’t be sorry.

EC Sourcing: Getting Ready to Take the Mid-Market by Storm

When we last checked in on EC Sourcing, they had recently released an updated version of their basic e-Negotiation suite, Flex RFP, and their Supplier Corrective Action Reporting (SCAR) solution. Their e-Negotiation suite had straight-forward RFX, auctions, and a basic contract repository that was the 80% solution at the time. It couldn’t compete in the big leagues, but that wasn’t the focus — the focus was the majority of the market that the big players were ignoring (by selling overkill solutions the market didn’t need at a price point the market couldn’t afford).

The platform also had basic project management built in to allow customers to define projects — which include suppliers, users, RFXs and/or Auctions; message with users and suppliers — through integrated message boxes and e-mails; and define notifications in addition to standard project management features — such as timelines, state tracking, and document management. It also supported 4 languages, multi-currency, and formulas in auction and RFX weighting, it was a solid solution, which is further evidenced that about 1/3 of their client base are actually Global 3000s that realized that they didn’t need an overkill solution at an absurd price point to meet their daily sourcing needs.

Since we last checked in a few years ago, they have been developing steadily — improving both the base solution and adding new modules and capabilities, including some not found in the majority of e-Sourcing platforms (even when the big guys are included). They have added supplier management and workflow management and improved everything across the board (including, but not limited to, their internationalization with support for a dozen languages so far). The three biggest changes are:

Supplier Management

Their new supplier management module contains everything you would expect, including, but not limited to, self-registration, deep supplier meta-data management and search, and out-of-the-box Big ERP Integration. The supplier management module supports self-registration. When a supplier self-identifies, it will be presented with the default questionnaire(s), and upon initial review, the buyer can select the supplier for on-boarding, generate a full profile, and request that the supplier complete it. The buyer can define as many fields (across questionnaires) as they want, and each field can be tagged, filtered, and searched. Plus, the module, like the rest of the platform, integrates with JDE, Oracle, and SAP out of the box.

Workflow and Configuration

EC Sourcing has moved well beyond basic project management and now includes procurement request functionality (which can kick off a workflow outside of Procurement), deep approval and routing capability, customizeable status information associated with each task, and custom workflow definitions that allow a user to define a complete workflow for any sourcing project, with direct links into the relevant parts of the platform. All of these workflows are 100% configurable by the user, who can create them as templates, copy them, and customize them as needed for each sourcing project. Very few sourcing platforms have this capability, and no other mid-market solution has Procurement project management at this level of configurability and completeness.

e-Sourcing Automation Capabilities

It might sound trivial, but EC Sourcing’s new capabilities that allow the platform to:

  • automatically identify and invite all approved suppliers for a product/category
  • automatically attach specifications to an RFX on a line-item basis
  • automatically calculate advanced weightings and scorings (when the event is created from a template using advanced lots)

is extremely powerful, especially for large events and junior buyers.

Some categories (like office suppliers, MRO, etc.) have hundreds of line items and, for national (and international operations) that are collectively provided by thousands of suppliers. Even if each product or service specification (document set) can be located, uploaded, and attached in 2 minutes, for 210 items, that’s 6 hours of manual labour. And if there are 5 potential suppliers for each item, and no supplier can supply more than 50, it’s easy to conceive that there may be 1,000 different, pre-approved, suppliers. The manual time it would take to identify those 1,000 suppliers and then identify the lots they are allowed to bid on and configure that could be days.

However, with EC Sourcing’s auto-identification and auto-association capability, all approved suppliers in the SIM database can be automatically identified and invited to just the portion of the RFX/e-Auction they have been qualified to bid on and, if the documents follow a naming convention, all of the specification documents can be uploaded in a single zip file and the system will automatically extract the documents and associated them with the line, lot, or event as appropriate. This, as we noted above, can save days of a buyer’s time.

With the recent acquisition of classic mid-market leaders like Iasta (by Selectica, now Determine) and MarketMaker4 (by Xchanging), there are few providers that have been around since the noughts, fewer still with as mature a platform, and even fewer still with almost 2 decades of strategic sourcing advisory and consulting (which is how EC Sourcing started out before it realized that an organization could be much more effective powered by a proper platform as opposed to just a crack sourcing team with limited bandwidth). As a result, EC Sourcing is poised to make a big splash in the mid-market, and with the recent release of its newly upgraded solution, is sure to make one in the years to come.

How Do You Find the Right Platform for You?

In our last two-part series that asked “what is a platform”, we noted that whereas “suite” was pretty easy to define, as it is just a collection of related, and hopefully tightly integrated, modules that address the key steps of a process such as sourcing (or S2C, source-to-contract) or procurement (or P2P, procure-to-pay), platform is hard to define because you have to consider the competing definitions (development framework, enterprise application framework, hardware configuration, etc.) and delivery models (on-premise, hosted ASP, SaaS) and how they can be bundled and/or used to frame a solution space.

We also noted that in order to select the right platform, you needed to define what you needed the platform to do. And to add more confusion, you also need to define any constraints on how you need the platform to do it. Two tasks that are not easy to accomplish. But we can give you some advice on how you can get started.

First, define the problem you are trying to solve.

Not simply the business process at a high level, such as sourcing, procurement, or logistics, but the problems you are experiencing that need to be solved. Is it a paperwork nightmare in procurement, an inability to source efficiently, an inability to track organizational assets and services once requisitioned, an issue with inventory management on the sales side, etc. You can’t even select the right solution unless you know your major pain points, so how could you expect to select the right platform?

Next, outline the preferred process you would like to solve it.

In particular, how should the process work. For example, does all procurement have to begin with a requisition, or is a purchase order from an approved individual enough? How is it flipped to an invoice, and how are the costs verified? In addition, how do invoices come in, how are they matched, and how is this process automated, especially if the organization receives tens of thousands of invoice a month? Does the comparison happen before or after goods receipt? And what is the process if a goods receipt doesn’t materialize x days before the invoice is due? And if the number of invoices are large, with an average error and incompletion rate of 15%, how are the gaps filled in and the errors identified for flip back to supplier with an explanation?

Then document all of the data inputs you need, the artifacts that you need generated, and the data outputs that are required by affected parties.

If you are primarily sourcing direct materials, you will need a bill of materials from engineering along with the cost breakdown that is required, the inspections and certifications that need to be captured, and the timelines that need to be met. If you are sourcing services, you need position descriptions, certification requirements, other validations that must be performed, on so on. Reports will need to be generated, audit trails maintained, and so on.

Follow this with discussions with IT, Finance, Engineering, or any other department that needs to support Procurement in the process.

You will need to find out if there are any restrictions or constraints on an adopted solution dictated by current technology, processes, or third party support … such as systems that need to be integrated with, data that needs to be collected, audit trails that need to be logged, and reports that need to be generated for compliance. Systems can be a big problem — do certain APIs need to be supported, are you restricted to certain technology stack, or do you need certain hardware?

Then go beyond the immediate problem and process to identify other processes and problems that could be impacted by any solution to the problem.

For example, where Procurement is involved, inventory, assets, and accounts payable are clearly impacted. These use different processes and systems which may or may not have been identified in previous steps.

While these steps on their own may not necessarily help you identify the right platform, it will definitely help you identify which platforms are not appropriate to the need at hand and zero in on those that need a closer look.

What is a Platform Anyway? Part II

In our last post we noted that many providers that were pushing suites, as well as many that want to compete with those vendors and push the envelope a bit, have stopped pushing suites and started pushing platforms as suites have started to show the cracks in their armour and everyone wants to sell the shiny, crack-free, solution. Hence the platform.

But what is a platform? Traditionally it is a raised platform for people, animals, and objects to stand upon. In the computing realm, it is commonly defined as a framework for software applications to run on. Which is a useless definition as “framework” is ill-defined and too vague to be useful.

So what is a framework? Traditionally, this is an enclosure or structure designed to support something, and the definition changes depending upon what you want to support. In computing, it could be a software framework — a collection of classes and libraries to support the development of applications with common functionality, an enterprise architecture framework — a configuration of software and communication protocols that support a pre-set class of applications and deliver models, and hardware frameworks that are pre-configured to support a specific software framework (OS, enterprise architecture, etc.).

And, as hinted in the previous paragraph, the problem is compounded by delivery models — on premise, hosted ASP (often disguised as SaaS), and SaaS (which could be multi-tenant at the application, database, or instance level, each with advantages and disadvantages), And then there is “the cloud” to consider and the extent to which the SaaS platform takes advantage of real-time scalability, fail-over, and back-up options.

When you get right down to it, there is not only no common definition of what a platform should do, but even what a platform is and what it should address!
And any definition that would be put forward by a vendor or analyst would likely need to change slightly depending upon what Supply Management processes are being supported.

So the answer is, at least for now, a “platform” is whatever the vendor wants it to be, and not necessarily what you need it to be. And while you might need a “platform”, you do not necessarily want the “platform” that any particular vendor is going to sell you.

And in order to figure that out, you are going to have to define what you need the “platform” to do, which will dictate some key requirements and help you select a “platform” that actually provides you with a solution versus just adding as many problems as it solves (like first generation suites).

So how do you do that?

Stay tuned.