Category Archives: Technology

Is it Time to Get Hip with Hiperos?

Share This on Linked In

Hiperos is a relatively new entrant in the space focussed on what they call “Extended Enterprise Management”, which is their term for what you get when you amalgamate (what I call) Enterprise Contract Management, Compliance, Performance, and Sustainability into a single 360° solution platform.

The goals of the platform are to provide you with:

  • Supplier Information Central
    • collect all supplier information in one application
    • allow it to be entered and reviewed by suppliers, third parties, and internal staff, according to roles and permissions
    • allow for the creation of quick and easy monitoring reports that can be displayed in a dashboard
  • Cross-Enterprise Supply Chain Risk Assessment
    • allow risk to be evaluated against any supplier or service provider
    • allow risk to be evaluated by category / product line
    • allow risk management programs to be created based on whatever supplier / risk segmentation criteria you select
  • Supplier Performance Management
    • allow for the easy definition of surveys and scorecards
    • allow suppliers to be evaluated based on the type of product being delivered or service being performed
    • allow for internal and external feedback, subject to approvals
  • Regulatory Compliance Management
    • support any and all compliance regulations your organization is subject to (RoHS, HIPAA, ITAR, etc.)
    • allow requirements to be easily communicated to suppliers
    • monitor responses and flag non-compliance for exception based monitoring and resolution
  • Sustainability Initiative Support
    • allow sustainability guidelines to be captured
    • allow them to be communicated across the supply chain
    • monitor adherence to implemented programs

For those of you in a rush, I’ll tell you right now that the application (which is now on R3) does precisely what Hiperos says it can do, that it’s relatively easy to configure and use (and a couple of clients have self configured it without any help at all), and that it can be configured to report on precisely what you want it to report on, and display this information in real time on every login. Furthermore, if you use it’s capabilities to augment data collected internally with data in your other entprise systems and external data sources and integrate 3rd party risk and financial data, such as what you would get from Equifax, Lexis Nexis, or D&B (using their new “D&B Inside” offering), you can truly get a 360° view. Furthermore, if you define your risk assessment and monitoring metrics accordingly (and / or select the right templates for your vertical and organizational risk management needs), my assessment is that you can be just as confident in the risk assessments as you would be if you outsourced it to a specialist consulting firm (especially if you bring one of them in to help you define your risk assessment program and insure you set up the feeds, applications, and reports appropriately).

The application allows you to define what fields you want to track, what metrics you want to use, the calculations that define those metrics, and the reports the metrics appear in. It also allows you to define as many roles as you need (buyer, manager, approver, CPO, third party auditor, supplier, etc.) and define access permissions and capabilities based on those roles. In addition to the standard supplier, contact, contract, and (enterprise) program entities, it also allows you to define “relationships” and define the data you want to capture, track, and measure against those relationships. For example, a relationship will be with a supplier, managed by a local account manager and supplier account manager, against a program type and have it’s own status and risk measurements. Collectively, these measurements and statii can be rolled up to give an overall status and risk picture, which, of course, can be drilled into at any time. You can also define as many levels of details as you need in your surveys and scorecards, which, of course, frees you from the limited capabilities of a 3-dimensional spreadsheet workbook. And it comes with template libraries for standard compliance (HIPAA, RoHS, REACH), risk management, and sustainability (carbon tracking) initiatives that can be used to jumpstart configuration for your enterprise.

The one weakness is that while the application has been configured to be extensible and accept an unlimited number of external data sources, at this point in time, only RSS Feeds and a couple of 3rd party financial feeds are configured out-of-the-box. This means that you will have to do some integration with appropriate 3rd party data sources to get a 360° view, which is vital because, if you don’t have someone on the ground, or a good relationship with a 3rd party auditor you can trust, you can’t trust self-submitted supplier surveys alone. (And, these days, some of the best leading indicators are those you get from financial risk data consolidators like D&B — who acquired Open Ratings — and Equifax — who acquired Austin Tetra — and from import/export visibility companies like Zepol, Import Genius, and Panjiva.)

The application is one that is definitely worth looking at, because the only other providers offering integrated solutions of the same breadth are Aravo, CVM Solutions, and, if you’re in the health-care industry, Vendormate.

Share Ideas Through a Center of Supply Chain Excellence and Put Your Own Best Practices to Work

Share This on Linked In

Knowledge drain is simply not acceptable in today’s economy. I couldn’t agree more. The ability to identify, analyze, and quickly adapt to market changes — before your competitors do — can mean the difference between a profitable quarter and Chapter 11. Undoubtedly! Companies fighting for survival need to deploy every asset they have, including a highly valuable but invisible asset — best practices developed by employees. Assuredly. But these best practices are typically not documented, and even when they are, not effectively distributed or consistently implemented. Unfortunately. This means that companies can lose their best ideas. Disaster waiting to happen.

Mergers and acquisitions, cost cutting, and senior employee retirements or resignations (because a bright competitor recognized their talent and offered them a significantly higher compensation package) all result in your hard-won knowledge, ideas, and insights walking out the door if you don’t have good knowledge management processes and systems that capture and share your best practices and knowledge.

That’s why I liked the recent article in the Supply Chain Management Review on how to “put your own best practices to work”, even though it did mention social networks when all you really need is the useful Web 2.0 tools they are built on (and not all the useless time-wasting add-ons found in the unproductive social networks of today). If you start with wikis and moderated discussion forums, you can build a useful knowledge network that will actually be used in an iterative and evolutionary way without a lot of hassle or up-front investment.

So where do you start? You can:

  • Design Across Internal Boundaries
    Make sure your forums and wikis are silo-free.
  • Recruit the Right People
    Recruiting Supply Chain Subject Matter Experts as content moderators is key to ensuring quality, validity, and program adoption.
  • Think About the Thought Process
    Manage information in a way that reflects a company’s culture and process patterns.
  • Design an Implementation Approach
    Tradeoffs between resource requirements, enterprise constraints, and implementation time are a few of the factors to consider. Make sure the initiative is owned by the business, and not IT. You don’t want the system that is technologically “the coolest”. You want the system that works for the people who need to use it.
  • Set Up for a Successful Launch
    Get buy in from a wide range of business users to use the center of excellence as part of their daily business routine.

An Enterprise Software Buying Guide, Part VIII: Contract Definition & Management

In this, our final post in this intial series on the successful acquisition of enterprise software, including e-Sourcing, e-Procurement, and other Supply Chain Software Solutions, we discuss the contract review and performance management steps.

7. Comb the Contract

The legal minds behind traditional software vendor contracts excel at including all kinds of seemingly benign terms and conditions that can turn out to be big cost gotchas if you’re not careful. My personal favorite is the mandatory maintenance clause that states if you stop paying maintenance, you lose the right to run the software. Sure you still own the perpetual license you paid big bucks for up front, but you’re not allowed to use it unless you pay maintenance, which usually has you paying the entire cost of the software every 4 to 5 years.

Other good examples of “gotchas” that you need to watch out for include:

  • The mandatory upgrade on the vendor’s schedule
    The vendor will usually try to insert a clause along the lines of “you must upgrade within 90-365 days or lose support” if you’re not careful, regardless of how long they say they will support an older version.
  • The free lunch
    There’s no free lunch. Someone always pays … and in enterprise software, that someone is YOU! Either the “free” training, support, or modules are included in the price or being offered as an incentive to lock you in for a long term that will ultimately increase the vendor’s margin and salesperson’s commission.
  • The toothless SLA
    The majority of SLAs are designed for one purpose — and one purpose only — to give you a false sense of security that causes you to overlook the fact that the wording was carefully designed by the vendor’s legal counsel to insure that the vendor gets to keep your money for the length of the contract, no matter what.
  • The Escrow
    You get the code if the vendor goes belly-up. Whoopee. Unless you have a large team of expert software developers in house that can quickly familiarize themselves with an application that contains (tens of) millions of lines of code and get you up and running again quickly, escrow is pointless. What matters is that you have guaranteed complete data access 24x7x365 and that the vendor is required to give you 30 days warning and a complete data export in a standard, product neutral, format before a material change in operations or ownership, so that you can shunt your data into another system and keep on truckin’ if, for some reason, the system stops working for you.

8. Manage Performance

You can do everything right up to the time you sign the contract and still have everything go to hell in a handbasket (and your costs go through the roof) if you don’t carefully manage vendor delivery and support throughout the contract lifetime.

It’s critical to create a project management team who will mange the implementation, monitor uptake, collect feedback, quickly identify issues, and work with the vendor to get those issues resolved in a timely manner. Otherwise, you might not get the uptake, utilization, productivity improvements, and savings you expected to get.

That’s it for this initial series on how to successfully buy enterprise software. I hope you found it useful. And remember, if you’re planning on acquiring RFX & e-Auction,
Spend Analysis,
Optimization,
Contract Management,
e-Procurement,
Supplier Networks & Catalogue Management,
GPOs & Marketplaces,
Market Intelligence,
Strategic Sourcing Services,
Trade Data Management,
Supply Chain Optimization, or
e-Payment platforms, a good starting list (that you can customize to your needs based on the outputs of Step 2) can be found in the X-emplification series. Have fun!

Making Sense of Web Stats: Hits, Page Views, Sessions, Unique Visits, and Unique IPs

What’s the most popular site? Is the most popular site the highest-ranked in Alexa? (Not likely.) The site that lists first in the search engine? (Not necessarily.)

Unless you have the traffic logs, and you know how to read them, you’ll never know.

This post attempts to explain the difference between the different types of web statistics out there. It’s important to understand which statistics, and which combination of them, are most relevant, and which statistics are least relevant. More importantly, it’s useful to know when a site is overestimating its audience (which is easy to do if the site’s owner doesn’t know how to configure or convey those stats correctly).

  • Hits

    Simultaneously the most popular statistic and the most misleading, a hit counter tracks every URL load, including accesses from spiders, bots, and reloads in a session. Depending on how your logs and/or statistics software is configured, it might even count every load of every css file, script, and image referenced by, and included in, the page. If it does, that could (falsely) give you a 10 for 1 reading on every site access. Although hits are a great gauge of bandwidth utilization, they are a very poor indicator of site popularity (especially if the site is the target of an overactive bot, a DOS attack, or a small group of loyal followers who like to reload it dozens of times a day to take part in chatter or gossip).

  • Page Views

    Probably the second most popular statistic. If used properly, this will represent the total number of times a page was (re)loaded from the site. It’s a better statistic than hits because, when used properly, references and includes are not counted and spider traffic is partially excluded as well. However, like hits, it can significantly overestimate the unique traffic experienced by a site.

  • Entry Views

    Used mainly with blogs, this counts the number of specific post accesses, as opposed to the number of times the main page was accessed.

  • Sessions

    One of the less popular statistics, and used mainly with portal and commerce sites that require login, it refers to the number of unique accesses of a site by a unique user identifier. It’s equal to the average number of unique visits times the number of unique visitors, and it’s a better indicator of site popularity than page views for a site whose visitors, on average, don’t visit more than a few times during the spanned time period.

  • Unique Visits

    Similar to sessions, except it refers to the number of unique accesses by IP. The difference is that if multiple visitors from the same IP access the site in the same time window (through a proxy server), the number of unique visitors could be under-represented.

  • Unique IPs

    Counts the number of unique IP addresses that accessed the site, and acts as a lower bound on the site’s popularity (since multiple individuals could access the site through the same IP address).

  • Combination of Page Views and Unique IPs

    Combined, one of the best, measures of a site’s popularity. You know the site has at least as many unique visitors as IPs and you know, based on the page views, about how many pages a unique visitor accesses in a given time period.

  • Combination of Unique Sessions/Visits and Unique IPs

    Combined, the other best measure of a site’s popularity. You know the site has at least as many unique visitors as IPs and you know, based on the sessions, about how many times a unique visitor visits the site.

So what are SI’s statistics? Over the past month:

Hits 149,030
Page Views 49,910
Entry Views 17,705
Visits 24,855
IPs *10,825

What does this mean? It means that at least 10,825 people visited SI last month, an average of 2.3 times each, visiting 4.6 pages each. Since about 34% of traffic is search engine traffic, which is mostly accesses of a page or two, we can exclude this traffic. Revising our statistics, we can then estimate that 7,145 people visited SI an average of 3.5 times each, visiting an average of 7 pages each. Furthermore, given that about 39% of traffic comes from external referrals (SI has over 10,000 incoming links from numerous sites all over the internet that link directly to it and redistribute its feeds), and that this traffic displays irregular patterns (and accesses SI approximately 50% as much as regular readers), we can estimate that, last month, there were:

  • 2925 regular readers who visited about 9.2 pages each in 4.2 visits
  • 4220 irregular readers who visited about 4.6 pages each in 2.1 visits
  • 3680 new readers who visited a page as a result of a search engine query

Finally, it is very important to justify the numbers. They must all be consistent. If the numbers don’t make sense, or if they are internally inconsistent, you are dealing with a site that really has no clue at all as to its traffic. The above numbers make very good sense since, while some readers will visit almost every day, my representative reader (who has no time to leave comments) is too busy to visit every day, but makes a point of visiting two (to three) times a week (often on Monday and Friday, which are the peaks of SI activity).

* Lower bound. This is one statistic I’m not able to retrieve by time period from the native blog stats tool, so it was extracted from one of the three third-party stats tools I also use, which rely on (java)scripts that can be cached or blocked, and therefore cause some hits/IPs to be missed.