Category Archives: Supplier Management

It Doesn’t Matter Where You Start, You End with BoB in SXM!

In a recent article, we asked in the battle of Suite vs. BoB (Best-of-Breed), which do you choose, and ended up with the answer of neither, but potentially both, because, as indicated in our article we asked in our post on Where’s the Procurement Management Platform, you need a true platform (that enables the creation of a true source-to-pay plus ecosystem for the various workflows and processes that need to be managed).

As a result, we indicated you could start where you wanted, provided:

you could conceivably manage it (if you don’t have any reasonably modern e-Procurement applications, expecting you can dive into more than a couple, learn them, and incorporate them in your daily processes in a short-time frame is completely unrealistic, so you shouldn’t buy from a suite vendor unless you can activate modules over time as you are ready for them)
the vendor offers, and publicly publishes, a complete Open API that, at a minimum, can be used to import and export all data the platform supports and should support the execution of core functions (so that you can script in a related module a date/time-based import/refresh process, re-execution of a core function/calculation, and retrieval of updated results)
the vendor offers the necessary quick-start services (you need to be able to get going quickly — if it requires a 3 to 6 month onboarding process, you’re dead in the water before you begin from both a first year ROI and adoption perspective)

But where do you end up? It depends. On what:

the module (Spend Analysis, Sourcing, Contract Management, Supplier Management, e-Procurement, e-Invoicing/AP, etc.)
the organization’s biggest need for workflow/process management
the organization’s biggest savings/cost avoidance/value creation opportunities

And for some modules, like e-Procurement, standard sourcing (no optimization/automation), AP (accounts payable), it’s quite hard to make the case for one over the other for an average organization (as it’s not how many features, functions, bells, and whistles, but which of those will actually add value to the organization acquiring the solution).

But for others, it’s crystal clear. And the clearest case is Supplier Management. Why? As per our recent article in our Source-to-Pay+ Series, Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP Mash, and there’s no way that a suite, which is typically only average across-the-board, is going to be deep enough for the key functionalities needed by an organization (and the majority only address SIM reasonably well, with limited SRM-related capabilities). In fact, you’re not even going to find a single BoB provider that provides leading functionality in more than a few areas of what supplier management can encompass (especially if an organization needs quality, enablement/innovation, orchestration, or other specific direct or service support requirements, etc.). (So do you think you’re finding a suite that does everything? Not a chance!)

So you can start with a suite (that serves as a foundation for comprehensive SIM), or even a module from a BoB provider (that likely provides baseline Supplier Information Management as a Sourcing/CLM/Analytics add-on), but if you are serious about improving supplier performance (quality, compliance, cost of service), you will eventually progress to one (or, for extensive, different, Supplier Management needs, multiple) BoB solutions.

Kodiak Hub: A Supplier Relationship Management for Sustainability

Kodiak Hub is a relatively new Swedish solution for Supplier Relationship Management. Founded in 2015, it primarily served the Nordics for its first few years but began its expansion into the DACH and UK Regions during COVID (and even serves the NA market, although they don’t plan to tackle the NA market until the coming year).

A visit to its site might lead you to believe it’s a category management platform, billing itself as the starting point in a journey towards smart strategic sourcing, but that’s not quite what it is, or at least not where it’s found its niche and its true capability shines.

It’s true capability shines in sustainability, responsibility, risk assessments, and performance evaluations of suppliers, and their products, where those suppliers are creating (custom) (build-to-order) (manufactured) products where regulations need to be adhered to, carbon/GHG needs to be reported, and the organization needs to ensure they are acquiring a sustainable product (or service) as well as a sustainable supplier.

It’s primary platform is organized into three sections: Insights, Impact, and Intelligence along with a home dashboard that visually shows you the regions of all of your global suppliers and allows you to hover over those regions to see the number of suppliers, the regional economic rating, and the Country safe(SOURCE)^TM Rating.

The safe(SOURCE)^TM Rating is one of the truly unique capabilities of Kodiak Hub and one of the capabilities that positions it as a strong Sustainable Supplier Relationship Management platform. Using indices and public data sources, it is able to create a regional risk assessment profile that allows an organization to quickly spot geopolitical, environmental, and sustainability risks even before sending out an assessment to a supplier, and to create a generic risk profile when specific information is (not) yet available. When this is combined with local economic indicators (to spot risks of [significant] currency fluctuations, increased bankruptcy, etc.) as well as the ability to pull in credit scores (from credit agencies) (with appropriate data feed subscriptions), it provides an organization relatively deep insight into what expectations it should have for a supplier even before analyzing its policies, practices, and external assessments.

The supplier profiles or scorecards that Kodiak Hub can maintain are quite extensive, allowing an organization to maintain all the compliance, performance, risk, and sustainability data it needs on suppliers, products, and services to power its supplier management, sourcing, and procurement. It supports all standard company profile data, including supplier type and spend totals, detailed (customizable) assessment data, detailed on-site audit data (which will override the existing data as necessary), (third-party) risk/ESG/CSR data/rankings/metrics, externally computed KPIs, and related company, product, and service linkages. It can also store any and all documents of relevance or interest (insurance, certification, specifications, contracts, etc.).

Insight is the entry point to the platform’s supplier, product, and services summary screens that capture, and allow a user to query, all of the data associated with a supplier, product, or service.

Impact allows you to create and dive into (data-driven) supplier assessments, (onsite) supplier audits, KPI-based evaluations, and identified actions (in progress).

Assessments are unlimited and can be on the supplier in general, specific products or services, and even restricted to specific category management or sourcing projects. They can cover quality, health and safety, compliance & governance, human rights, environmental, business, product, information security, and other areas of relevance to the organization and use pre-built (template) questionnaires, customized variants, or custom questionnaires.

Right now, even though they can be assigned a “type”, actions are essentially requests to the suppliers with an integrated messaging trail for asynchronous communication that allows suppliers to ask questions, buyers to provide answers, and action states to be recorded (pending approval, in progress, completed, etc.). Future versions of the platform will contain specific types to ensure necessary information is captured, processes and workflows are followed, interim checks and approvals are in place, and so on.

Intelligence is its integrated analytics platform that allows a procurement professional to analyze suppliers across campaigns, projects, KPIs, assessments, categories, products, capabilities, etc. Relationship managers and buyers can create custom dashboards and reports, and customize the pre-built dashboards as needed.

The UX is very clean, modern, broken into logical segments, and very easy to use. It’s intuitive where to go to get the information you need and how to update new information when it comes in. This reviewer finds it so intuitive that he believes you can jump in and be productive with it without any training whatsoever.

So if you’re looking for a great supplier relationship management platform to manage your sustainability efforts and assess your supplier risks, we recommend you include Kodiak Hub in your shortlist.

Sustainability Begins in SRM

We recently broke records in global temperature. RECORDS IN GLOBAL TEMPERATURE! If sustainability isn’t on your mind now, then obviously you don’t have a mind that is working because not only does it mean the planet is in very dire straits^*, but

the acceleration of natural disasters is going to intensify beyond anything that was predicted (and a five-fold increase was recently predicted)
natural resources (and food) are going to get scarcer faster as fires destroy our usable lumber and crops
hurricanes are going to drench and destroy coastal cropland, possibly long-term
rapidly melting polar ice caps are going to raise sea level, drown our richest coastal farmlands, and damage our coastal (shipping) infrastructure
rapidly heating equatorial zones are going to dry out our freshwater lakes and canals (like the Panama canal we rely on for shipping)

… and that’s just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. (There’ll soon be no more “dildo” icebergs for Dildo, and that won’t be a good thing. Canadians rarely get angry, and when they do, that’s bad. the doctor, who is about as Canadian as it gets, has never seen a Newfoundlander angry, and when that day comes, he’d rather not be one province away … so please make sure that day never comes!)

Unless we lower

fossil fuel energy production and utilization
clean water utilization
waste byproducts
dependence on non-renewable resources that are getting more expensive, and environmentally damaging, to mine

environmental and societal damage is going to only intensify. We need to be sustainable. But sustainability has to start at the source — and the consumer is NOT the source (it’s the sink, and anyone who’s studied networks will tell you that by the time you reach the consumer, the product has been produced, the service has been rendered, and there’s nothing consumers can do to undo the damage that has been done … sure we can do our best to consume less and waste less, but the damage starts at the mine or the farm and propagates through the supply chain).

As a result, sustainability starts with the source supplier, and must be maintained throughout the entire supply chain.

And at the end of the day, for a Fortune 500 / Global 3000, it doesn’t matter if a CEO gives up the corporate jet — it matters only if they instruct their company to be sustainable in all aspects of operations and force their supply base to do the same.

Why? The aviation industry as a whole contributes 2.5% of worldwide CO2 pollution. 2.5% overall! So how much do you think one private jet contributes? Not enough to really matter. (On average, it’s like removing the emissions of 400 cars, and while that sounds significant, once you realize there’s over 300 million registered vehicles in North America that contribute to about 30% of GHG produced, it’s barely a drop in the CO2 bucket [giving it up for show while your factories pollute unhindered is not the solution]; and FYI, most of that vehicular CO2 production is NOT our private automobiles, its commercial transportation [as we have catalytic converters, there’s no laws that can be enforced mandating equivalent technology on ships in international waters].)

In comparison, a coal burning energy plant will generate about 2.26 pounds of CO2 per kWH, or about 7 Billion pounds of CO2 annually (which is over 3 Million Metric Tonnes) in an average 500 megawatt coal power plant. (In comparison, a private jet burning an average of 5,000 pounds of jet fuel per year at 7 pounds of carbon dioxide will produce only 35,000 pounds of CO2 a year. This is still a lot, but a supply chain that consumes the equivalent output in electricity in its manufacturing and shipping operations as that produced by a coal burning 500 megawatt power plant will produce 200,000 times the CO2. TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND TIMES. So don’t get distracted by the little things in your quest for improving your carbon footprint, which will soon be mandated in more and more countries globally. Your CEO should give up the jet, especially when he can still fly in those first class cabins no one else can afford, but that’s just the start of what your organization needs to do.)

And the only way to monitor and manage your supply base, require and track reporting from, and ensure improvements are made, is with SRM. It’s not just supplier development anymore, it’s supplier sustainability.

^* and not the good kind of Dire Straits, the bad, bad, kind

The 39 Steps … err … The 39 Clues … err … The 39 Part Series to Help You Figure Out Where to Start with Source-to-Pay

Figuring out where to start is not easy, and often never where the majority of vendors or consultants say you should start. They’ll have great reasons for their recommendations, which will typically be true, but they will be the subset of reasons that most benefits them (as it will sell their solution), and not necessarily the subset of reasons that most benefits you now. While you will likely need every module there is in the long run, you can often only start with one or two, and you need to focus on what’s the greatest ROI now to prove the investment and help you acquire funds to get more capability later, when you are ready for it. But figuring out how much you can handle, what the greatest needs are, and the necessary starting points aren’t easy, and that’s why SI dove into this topic, with arguments and explanations and module overviews, both broader and deeper than any analyst firm or blogger has done before. Enjoy!

Introductory Posts:
Part 1: Where Do You Start?
Part 2: Where Should You Start?
Part 3: You Start with …
Part 4: e-Procurement, and Here’s Why.

e-Procurement
Part 5: Defining an e-Procurement Baseline
Part 6: There are Barriers to Selecting an e-Procurement Solution (and they are not what you think)
Part 7: Over 70 e-Procurement Companies to Check Out

Interlude 1
Part 8: What Comes Next?

Spend Analysis
Part 9: Time for Spend Analysis
Part 10: What Do You Need for A Spend Analysis Baseline, I
Part 11: What Do You Need for A Spend Analysis Baseline, II
Part 12: Over 40 Spend Analysis Vendors to Check Out

Interlude 2
Part 13: But I Can’t Touch the Sacred Cows!
(including Over 20 SaaS, 10 Legal, and 5 Marketing Spend Management / Analysis Companies to Check Out)
Part 14: Do Not Stop At Spend Analysis!

Supplier Management
Part 15: Supplier Management is a CORNED QUIP Mash
Part 16: Supplier Management A-Side
Part 17: Supplier Management B-Side
Part 18: Supplier Management C-Side
Part 19: Supplier Management D-Side
Part 20: Over 90 Supplier Management Companies to Check Out

Contract Management
Part 21: Time for Contract Management
Part 22: Contract Management is a NAG: Let’s Start with Negotiation
Part 23: Contract Management is a NAG: Let’s Continue with [Contract]Analytics
Part 24: Contract Management is a NAG: Let’s End with [Contract] Governance
Part 25: Over 80 Contract Management Vendors to Check Out

e-Sourcing
Part 26: Time for e-Sourcing
Part 27: Breaking Down the ORA of Sourcing Starting With RFX
Part 28: Breaking Down the ORA of Sourcing Continuing with e-Auctions
Part 29: Breaking Down the ORA of Sourcing Ending with [Strategic Sourcing Decision] Optimization
Part 30: Over 75 e-Sourcing Vendors to Check Out!

Invoice-to-Pay (I2P):
Part 31: Time for Invoice-to-Pay
Part 32: Breaking Down the Invoice-to-Pay Core
Part 33: Over 75 Invoice-to-Pay Companies to Check Out

Orchestration:
Part 34: How Do I Orchestrate Everything?
Part 35: Do I Intake, Manage, or Orchestrate?
Part 36: Over 20 Intake, [Procurement] [Project] Management, and/or Orchestration Companies to Check Out
Part 37: Investigating Intake By Diving In to the Details
Part 38: Prettying Up the Project with Procurement Project Management
Part 39: Deobfuscating the Orchestration and Fitting it All Together

Source-to-Pay+ is Extensive (P20) … And Supplier Management Very Extensive … So Here Are Over 100 Supplier Management Companies to Check Out!

And now the post you’ve all been waiting for! A partial, starting, list of over 100 supplier management companies that may (or may not) meet some, or many, of the core baseline capabilities we outlined in the last four parts of this series (Part 16, Part 17, Part 18 and Part 19) as we discussed the A, B, C, and D sides of Supplier Management today (with more sides emerging, as we still haven’t discussed ESG and Diversity, to name a couple of topics, as those providers are mainly data providers today, which you integrate into your SIM, SCM, SUM, or SRM solution today).

As with our lists of e-Procurement Companies (in Part 7), Spend Analysis Companies (in Part 12), and Sacred Cow Companies that do, or support, customized “spend” analysis on Marketing, Legal, and SaaS (in Part 13), we must again give our disclaimer that this list is in no-way complete (as no analyst is aware of every company), is only valid as of the date of posting (as companies sometimes go out of business and acquisitions happen all of the time in our space), and does NOT include any companies that just (or primarily) do ESG data collection (or carbon calculators), diversity data enrichment, or other emerging areas of supplier management not in the ten (10) areas we’ve covered so far (for which there are actual solutions that do more than just supplier record data enrichment) in our expository on the CORNED QUIP mash of Supplier Management.

Furthermore, as we’ve said before, not all vendors are equal, and we’d venture to say NONE of the following are equal. The companies below are of all sizes (very small to very large, relative to vendor sizes in our space), cover the baseline differently (in terms of percentage of features offered, the various degrees of depth in the feature implementations, and differing levels of customization for a vertical), offer different additional features, have different types of service offerings (backed up by different expertise), focus on different company sizes, and focus on different technology ecosystems (such as plugging into other platforms/ecosystems, serving as the core platform for certain functions or data, offering a plug-and-play module for a larger ecosystem, focussing on the dominant technology ecosystem(s) in one or more verticals), etc.

Do your research, and reach out to an expert for help if you need it in compiling a starting short list of relevant, comparable, vendors for your organization and its specific needs. For many of these vendors, good starting points might be found in the Sourcing Innovation archives, Spend Matters Pro, and Gartner Cool Vendor write-ups if any of these sources has a write-up on the vendor.

Finally, a second reminder that inclusion on this list DOES NOT imply Sourcing Innovation is recommending the vendor.

COMPANY

LINKEDIN
Employees

HQ (Country)
State