Category Archives: Supplier Management

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P16) … Time to Break Down the CORNED QUIP of Supplier Management, A-Side

So, we’ve implemented e-Procurement, adopted Spend Analysis, and identified Supplier Management as the next Source-to-Pay solution to implement. But it has as many aspects on its own as Source-to-Pay has, so finding the right solution is going to be tough. First we have to decide which aspects of the CORNED QUIP, as identified in Part 15, the organization needs, and then we need to make sure that the solution has the necessary features for each aspect the organization needs. What are those features? Let’s take the aspects one by one, starting with some of the classic capabilities first.

Information Management.

Supplier Information Management (SIM) is where it all began back in the early 2000s. Some would even argue that it began with the formation and launch of Aravo, one of the first pure Supplier Management solutions, and possibly the last surviving great granddaddy in the Supplier Management space. (Aravo was among the first to get big name clients, including Google, using a pure-play SIM platform.)

Almost every Supplier Management solution does basic Supplier Information Management because you can’t really do any supplier management without tracking basic information. (However, these solutions are not all equal in terms of depth and breadth, and the degree of differentiation is quite large.) The core, and the point, of a SIM solution was the centralization of all supplier information for tracking, access, and reporting purposes, which, long ago, was seen as the foundation for management. As a result, the core capabilities required are both limited and fairly obvious:

Extensible Schema
If the schema is fixed or has very limited extensibility, it’s not a modern SIM solution — every S2P system can store the supplier information the S2P system needs to function in a fixed, or limited extensibility, schema. A modern SIM solution has to support unlimited extensibility so that an organization can use it as the supplier master data management (SMDM) solution.
Fuzzy Search
More technically, full reg-ex (regular expression) search across all data fields for partial/like matches as well as weighted rankings (using customized similarity models) for finding the right suppliers (with existing relationships) to meet buyers’ needs.
Customizable Approval Flows
Just like every S2P solution contains a fixed schema that captures the supplier information it needs to function, any that require supplier interaction have a basic onboarding flow. As such, a modern SIM solution needs to have customizable onboarding flows with customizable approval rules.
Customizable Alerting
The platform should support configurable rule-based alerts that can be defined on any field, dimension, or derived dimension to alert a user when a threshold is reached or a value is detected, especially as a modern SIM solution should be the foundation for SMDM. This sounds vague, but the capability has to be very generic and flexible because neither a relationship, performance, compliance, or uncertainty solution will be able to detect everything on their own.
A relationship system that tracks active supplier relationships may not detect that a person just entered into the system as a rep is one that you dealt with in the past (at another supplier that consistently performed poor when you needed to interact with that rep). A performance solution will only detect performance for projects and suppliers actively being tracked, and may not be able to compare that to full historical benchmarks (or realize that the increase in performance correlated to a decrease in ESG activity). A compliance solution will detect compliance with regulations, but not necessarily with corporate goals designed to meet anticipated regulations, or how the compliance affects performance. The uncertainty solution will only be able to identify risks based on the integrated data sources and the integrated models, which won’t cover everything. Nor will it be useful to build risk models for situations that are currently irrelevant for the organization. However, the organization should be detecting whether it may need to build new, or augment, existing models — and that will often be if a value in the database exceeds a threshold. (E.g. The organization is not currently doing a detailed risk of financial failure predictions, but an OTD KPI dropping below a threshold is a signal to start, and that data is currently only tracked in the inventory management solution, and pushed to the SIM, serving as the SMDM, in the weekly cross-enterprise system synch.)

Relationship Management.

What’s the point of tracking information if you don’t do anything with it? The next major solution to hit the scene was Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), where the data was used to help manage the supplier relationship. The majority of modern supplier management solutions claim to be SRM platforms, even though they have wildly different definitions of what SRM is and wildly different functions. Most definitions considerably overlap with SIM and SPM, but we don’t agree with this. While such a system needs extensive data to be effective, and must track performance, it needs to focus on managing the relationship, not the data or the numbers.

A Supplier Relationship Management solution must provide functionality geared around managing and improving the supplier relationship. This must include functionality geared towards helping a buyer identify and implement best practices to manage and improve supplier performance and, in addition to functionality geared towards helping the supplier interact with the buyer, collaborate with the buyer to proactively identify and improve processes to improve future performance.

Synchronous and Asynchronous Messaging
In addition to the standard asynchronous messaging supported by every platform with collaborative elements, it must also support synchronous messaging and real-time discussion and collaboration through voice (with auto-transcript and storage) and screen-sharing and support saving, search, and semi-automatic/assisted work/change order creation from these sessions.
Collaborative Project and/or Product Plans
The system must allow for the collaborative creation of (improvement) project plans — with milestones, tasks, and owners — as well as checks, balances, notes, and sign-offs. If the solution is for direct/manufacturing, it should also support the creation, possibly through integration hooks to CAD/CAM systems, approval, and management of product (production) plans.
Integrated Best Practice Guides
A modern solution should contain a large library of standard improvement plans for common situations, as well as automated best-practice plan selection and guidance when key metrics (either computed internally or imported from an SPM solution) exceed threshholds or predictive metrics indicate likely problems. If the platform does not provide insight, at the end of the day, it’s no better than a SIM.

Performance Management.

At the end of the day, relationships are important, but you, as a buyer, get measured on performance, and you need that from your suppliers too. Relationship management should be the foundation for improved performance management. However, performance management is more than just relationship management. It’s measurable process, and product, management, and that’s the focus of a Supplier Performance Management (SPM) capability.

KPIs and Custom KPIs
Performance is all about improving KPIs, so it should be obvious that the platform should track KPIs. But not just a small set of standard “canned” KPIs! The platform should track standard, customized, and any specific KPIs you can think of to identify potential issues or opportunities for improvement. Just like there is no one set of reports that can uncover everything of relevance in a spend analytics project, there is no one set of KPIs that can guarantee everything is running smooth and that there are no opportunities for improvement. While the standard KPIs are critical, and display major issues that need to be addressed, you want to discover those KPIs that present leading indicators that allow you to sniff out, and deal with, a problem early (before it becomes significant enough to make a noticeable difference in a standard KPI).
Internal and External Benchmarks
KPIs are good, but only measuring against your own benchmarks only tells you how good each supplier is doing against the best supplier for your business, not the average performance other businesses in your industry get from their suppliers, or their best suppliers; you want those external benchmarks built from anonymized data for deeper insight from the KPIs you calculate.
Easy Data Ingestion
Product quality is going to be in the quality / PLM system. OTD (On-Time Delivery) is going to require promised dates from the contract/PO system and receipt dates from the inventory system, etc. It’s going to be critical to get lots of data from related systems to make the maximum use of the supplier performance management module.
Performance Improvement Management
Once you detect an issue from a KPI or a benchmark, you need to do something about it. It might be as simple as contacting a supplier to find out that the root cause was force majeure and outside of their control (a flood prevented transport for three days) or just the result of a miscommunication or it might be that the supplier is repeatedly delivering defective units and there is obviously an issue with their quality control. In the latter case, you will need to start a supplier development project, and the platform should allow you to define it, track it, and, hopefully, manage the interactions (possibly through the relationship management functionality).

In our next post, we’ll move onto the next set of the more classic capabilities: Compliance, Quality, and Uncertainty Management when we flip it to the B-Side in Part 17.

Tealbook: Laying the Groundwork for the Supplier Data Foundations

It wasn’t that long ago that we asked you if you had a data foundation because a procurement management platform, should you be lucky enough to get one (which is much more than a suite), generally only supports the data it needs for Procurement to function and doesn’t support the rest of the organization. Furthermore, when you look across the Source-to-Pay and Supply Chain spectrums, there are a lot of different applications that support a lot of different processes that have a lot of different data requirements that need to be maintained as different data types in different encoding formats.

Furthermore, as we noted in the aforementioned post, it’s rare enough to find MDM capability that will even support procurement. This is because most suites are built on transactions, most supplier networks on relational supplier data records, and contracts on documents and simple, hierarchical, meta-data indexes. But you also need models, meta-models, semi-structured, unstructured, and media support. And more. The need is broad, and even if you restrict the need to supplier data, it’s quite broad.

As you will soon garner from our ongoing Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive series, in which we just started tackling Supplier Management in Part XV, the supplier data an organization needs is extremely varied and extensive. Given that Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP mash with ten (10) major areas of functionality, not counting broader enterprise needs around ESG, innovation, product design / manufacturing management, and other needs tied to operations management, engineering, and enterprise risk management, among other functions, it’s easy to see just how difficult even Supplier Master Data Management can be.

Considering not a single Supplier Management solution vendor (as you will come to understand as we progress through the Source-to-Pay is Extensive series) covers all of the basic functions we’re outlining, it’s obviously that not a single vendor can effectively do Supplier Master Data Management today. However, Tealbook, which has realized this since their exception, is aiming to be the first to fix this problem. As of the first release of their open API next month, they are transitioning to a Supplier Data Platform and will no longer focus on being just a supplier discovery platform or diversity data enrichment platform. (They will still offer those services, and will be upgrading them in Q4 with general release expected by the end of 2023, but their primary focus will be on the supplier data foundation that enables this.)

This is significant, and illustrates how far they’ve come in the nine (9) years since their founding when their original focus was on building a community supplier intelligence platform that was reliable, scalable, extensible, and appropriate for new supplier discovery (via a large database of verified suppliers with community reviews). From these humble beginnings, where they didn’t even have a million suppliers in their platform after their third year of existence, they grew into the largest supplier network with over 5 Million detailed supplier profiles that is integrated with the largest S2P suites out there (Ariba, GEP, Ivalua, Jaggaer, and Workday, to name a few) and powers some of the largest organizations on the planet. As part of this empowerment, they can take in an organization’s entire supplier data ecosystem, transform it into their standard formats, match to their records, verify or correct existing data, and then enrich the organization’s supplier records before sending them back. In addition, they integrate with a multitude of BI tools, databases / lakes / warehouses (including ERPs), digital platforms, and so on.

To summarize, that’s a ten fold increase in suppliers and an explosion in global utilization and usage. At the same time, the platform has been augmented with over 2.3M supplier certifications, global diversity data, and the ability to track an organization’s tier 2 supplier diversity data. Quite impressive.

And while this meets most of an organization’s discovery needs, Tealbook knew that it didn’t meet all of an organization’s supplier data needs, especially when you think about all of the regulatory, financial, compliance, performance, sustainability, risk, contract, product/service, relationship, quality, and enablement/innovation data an organization needs to maintain on a supplier. As a result, they have been aggressively working on two key pieces of functionality. An extended universal supplier profile and a fully open, extensible, API that an organization can use to do supplier master data management across their enterprise with the Tealbook Supplier Data Platform. An organization can use the Tealbook Supplier Data Platform to classify, cleanse, and enrich supplier records; augment those records with third party data for sustainability, compliance, and risk; find new suppliers in the network; and so on.

In short, Tealbook is on a mission to be the organization’s trusted supplier data source, and to constantly improve their data offering both with their own ML/AI enabled technology that monitors over 400M+ public websites for supplier-related data (supplier web sites, business registries, certification providers, supplier data providers, etc. etc. etc.), maintains data provenance (when was it last updated, by what/who, etc.), and provides trust scores (in their proprietary framework that indicates Tealbook’s confidence in accuracy and correctness).

The real mission begins next month when they release their new Open API that will allow an organization to integrate, and interact with, Tealbook the way it needs to across its enterprise applications. Congruent with this release, they will also start releasing their enrichment data-packs that will, within the next year, allow the organization to plug-and-play the data they need to confirm firmographics, contact channels and key information, diversity, supplier offerings, financials, certifications, and basic risk data (which Tealbook will offer through partnerships with specialty supplier data providers, giving an organization a one-stop shop vs. having to license with multiple providers separately to build its 360-degree supplier profile).

Then, over the next year, Tealbook will enhance the usability of their data platform by first rebuilding their diversity and discovery applications and then building out new applications around sustainability, risk, benchmarking, and other areas that their customers would rather a data platform handle for them.

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P15) … And So Is Supplier Management! It’s a CORNED QUIP!

That’s right, Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP! And we’ll explain what we mean shortly, but first … how did we get here?

When we started this series back in Part 1, we noted that Source-to-Pay is extensive, your organization needed all of it, but your organization couldn’t implement it all at once. So we needed to give you advice on where to start, which, after a careful analysis, needed to be e-Procurement. Next came spend analysis because, in the hands of the right analyst, if your organization wasn’t sure what module was the next most valuable, spend analysis would help the organization identify which modules would likely bring the most (relative) value (based upon the opportunities spend analysis identified). Often, there will be a clear winner, and your organization will know what module to start implementing tomorrow, but sometimes there won’t be. So what’s the answer then? When you are dependent on suppliers, there is no value beyond the supplier. Thus, in this situation, Supplier Management comes next.

But why is Supplier Management a CORNED QUIP? A good solution preserves and maintains the data, like a good cure, but the marketing from most of the vendors with these solutions is more entertaining than enlightening (as they seem to prefer wit to wisdom). This, of course, is not at all helpful when there are literally ten (10) different types, or at least aspects, of supplier management solutions on the marketplace, no one vendor addresses all of the aspects in their solution, and, in many cases, doesn’t even address more than a couple of these aspects. Furthermore, depending on your organizational needs and the platforms your organization currently has in place, some capabilities will be much more important to your organization than other capabilities. Moreover, sometimes certain capabilities in a supplier management solution, already present in solutions already implemented by the organization, will be downright useless as these aspects will, thus, be completely redundant. So, if a vendor is just selling “Supplier Management” or “Supplier Lifecycle Management”, which theoretically includes every core type of capability (even though not a single solution on the market today comes close to materializing all the capabilities), how do you know what they are selling?

Just what might that vendor be selling when they are trying to sell you Supplier Management? One or more management aspects of the CORNED QUIP (but likely not all of those aspects, as every cure is different, and every message witty in its own way, but not exactly enlightening).

What are these ten (10), core, aspects of modern supplier management? (Which dictate the core capabilities that such a solution should offer.)

  • C: Compliance (+ Government + Regulatory)
  • O: Orchestration (or Onboarding + Multi-Tier/Multi-Supplier capability)
  • R: Relationship
  • N: Network
  • E: Enablement (+ Engagement)
  • D: Discovery
  • Q: Quality
  • U: Uncertainty (+ Risk)
  • I: Information
  • P: Performance

Now, before we continue, we know you’re saying “what about ESG” and “what about diversity“? Well, at least as of today, most of these providers are data services that you use to augment your central supplier records (in your Supplier Master Data Management [SMDM] Solution, which could be your SXM or could be the ERP that the SXM extracts data from), and not standalone SXM products, so we will tackle those separately at some point in the future (especially since diversity is literally just data enrichment on a supplier record in any current solution).

Thus, now that we know what we are implementing, our next step is to decide how to evaluate the solution. Thus, in our next post, we’ll begin to break down the ten core aspects of the CORNED QUIP and define not only what they mean, but what capabilities are critical to the cure.

On to the A-Side in Part 16.

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P14) … So Do Not Stop at Spend Analysis!

As we discussed in Part 8, once you have your eProcurement baseline, that’s just the beginning. The very beginning. Even though not all modules are equal, and not all modules will return equal results, you, and your organization, will need all of Source-to-Pay eventually. However, since you can’t implement it all at once, you take it one module at a time.

After eProcurement, if you aren’t 100% sure where the most value will come from, you go on to spend analysis and use it to help you identify the best opportunities, and those opportunities may indicate the next best module to implement (for your organization at the current time). After that, you may have a clear answer, or, you may not. Sometimes the analysis indicates almost equal opportunity between sourcing and contracting, between contracting and supplier management, or between sourcing and supplier management. (Or, you might not have the manpower or expertise to do the analysis you need to get the right answer.)

So if it’s unclear as to which solution to choose next, it’s back to arguments and logic in an effort to determine which of the three aforementioned solutions to choose.

How about Strategic Sourcing? It’s the one technology proclaimed to identify the most savings and deliver the best results. The truth is that while it almost always identifies the most savings, it doesn’t actually deliver those savings, or even guarantee them. The savings are guaranteed by the contract, delivered by the (new) supplier, and captured by the eProcurement system.

So how about a Contract Management System? In order to guarantee the cost reductions, you need the contract. Or it’s just a quote that’s given today, denied tomorrow. But, as we indicated in a prior post, you don’t need a contract management system for a contract. You need (e-)paper, (e-)ink, and a pair of (e-)signatures. The right contract management system makes it easy to author, negotiate, manage, track, and enforce a contract. But the contract itself is up to people, and if they don’t agree, there’s no contract, and, thus, no need for a contract management system.

This just leaves Supplier Management. But is this where we start? If we think about the value sourcing identifies, it’s generated by the supplier. So it’s critical that the supplier perform. If we have a good supplier management solution, it will track the supplier’s progress, alert us to issues, and assist us in managing the relationship if intervention is required. It will enable performance management, which is critical because if the supplier doesn’t perform and/or doesn’t adhere to the contract, then it doesn’t matter how great the sourcing event was or how good the contract inked was.

And so, because suppliers, and relationships with them, are key, when all things are about equal, or when it’s hard to identify where to go next, we go with supplier management.

Start the dive in Part 15.

Are You Effectively Using Your “Extended Enterprise”?

For many businesses, more than 50% of their workforce is employed by their suppliers. It is their suppliers who make and provide the crucial products and services upon which their own business depends. So, it makes sense to consider how they can best manage those suppliers as part of their ‘extended enterprise’.

Greater connection and collaboration with your extended enterprise can bring multiple benefits. Among them better access to specialised products or market knowledge; process efficiency improvements; a rise in innovation; reduced risk; improved quality control; boosted surety of supply; and additional flexibility.

The introduction to the 2023 Supplier Management Survey

How well do your run, or should I say orchestrate*, your supply base that constitutes your extended enterprise? Do you maximize their productivity? Capability? Innovation? Shouldn’t you know? Shouldn’t you find out?

The answer is, yes, you should be taking steps to better understand the capabilities of your supply base and use them to your advantage. The first step is to benchmark how well you are doing now. The best way to do this is with the State of Flux 15th annual 2023 Supplier Management Survey which will allow you to benchmark your organization’s maturity and performance against hundreds of your peers for free.

State of Flux is the global leading provider of supplier management research and benchmarks, as evidenced by the fact that this is their 15th year and they have been doing it longer than anyone else.

The survey is only open for a limited time, don’t miss your chance!

* keep reading the Source-to-Pay series!