Category Archives: Vendor Review

Introducing aThingz: A Logistics as a Service (LaaS) Provider that is providing an end to end Total Logistics Management Solution

Over the past three articles we have

  • outlined the importance of logistics management, especially with respect to cost management, supply management, and risk management
  • outlined the major steps in logistics planning and execution
  • outlined the major modules/solutions that are currently used
  • outlined the major problems with using separate systems for each major step

… and come to the conclusion that while this methodology and modular system worked good in its day, it’s no longer good enough for logistics management in the modern world where natural disasters are a regular occurrence, global pandemics are a reality, global instability and globalization chaos is the norm, and the chances of a large company not experiencing at least one major disruption a year is now essentially zero.

The solution a global organization needs to not only survive, but thrive, is a Total Logistics Management Solution (TLMS) that covers the end-to-end process from order planning through final delivery, payment, financial analysis, and, most importantly, closed loop feedback to improve the planning versus actuals over time.

Today we’re going to introduce you to a vendor that is creating this new generation of TLMS solutions: aThingz. Founded in 2015 to solve the global logistics challenges that other vendors were not addressing, aThingz has built a modular, composable microservices-based, total logistics management solution that can bought as an end-to-end management solution, or on a microservice-based activation format, meant to fill in the gaps between existing organizational solutions. Regardless of how little, or how much, is adopted by an organization, the platform will ensure that all of the solutions are properly integrated, data is pushed and pulled automatically as needed upon changes and updates, re-calculations across the platform (be it pure aThingz or an aThingz powered hybrid platform) are done automatically on updates and changes, and the loop closed to allow for learning from, and improvement in, plan vs. actuals over time.

Billing itself as Logistics-as-a-Service [LaaS], aThingz has a composable micro-services stack that allows it to address through software any or all of the following requirements (that the client needs addressed) while also providing services to manage the logistics planning needs required by the client (if the client wants a [strong] managed logistics offering):

Process Governance
it is a process, and you need to get it right, and process governance must address

  • transformation planning (upon implementation, New Product Introduction [NPI], etc.)
  • change management
  • iterative process improvement
  • process & regulatory compliance
  • performance and financial governance
  • operational governance

Network Master Data Management
as good, synched, data is key for process implementation, and this includes

  • classification, standardization, cleansing, rationalization and enrichment
  • ongoing quality management
  • metrics and improvement
  • rules management

Supply Chain Resilience
which encompasses a lot of the impacted functions (Inventory Management, Finance, Risk Management, Procurement, etc.) and includes

  • supply and demand sensing
  • shipment monitoring and traceability
  • risk factor / risk event detection and monitoring

Forward Looking Logistics Planning
(versus traditional in-week logistics management) which includes, and which can be done on a weekly basis up to a year in advance with real-time recalculation on changes in projections, assignments, etc.:

  • order forecasting and management
  • packaging management and optimization
  • carrier volume forecasting
  • quote and rate management for carriers
  • logistics / transportation planning
  • network optimization
  • (what-if) scenario planning
  • plan communication
  • cost savings identification and tracking; i.e. the ability to track forecast vs. plan vs. (initial invoice) vs. actuals by week by carrier by order over time

For clients wanting pre-packaged solutions, they have pre-composed stacks for:

  • Demand Forecasting
  • Logistics Spend Visibility
  • Logistics (Network) Sourcing Intelligence
  • (Autonomous) Logistics Planning
  • Real-Time Transportation Visibility
  • Supply Chain Resilience

But the power of the solution shines in its end-to-end integration of their six, integrated, modules of:

ADQTM

Their primary data management platform that allows an organization to work on a common set of validated and managed data across all stakeholders of each process and manages the rules for error detection and correction and data cleansing and enrichment to ensure that decisions are highly reliable due to higher quality. Manages the key attributes that influence the processes for the higher quality outcomes, namely, the routes, lanes, suppliers, plants, parts, packaging, docks, contracted rates, carrier, and material records and that reviews, corrects, and augments details as needed.

Bruhas

Their logistics closed-loop planning, scheduling, and management solution that you can use to plan and manage rolling forecasts with detailed requirements. The solution provides flexibility in the planning horizon (e.g. 10, 20, 40 weeks) based on the organization’s needs. (Compare this to many classical solutions that might struggle to do more than few weeks out, or limit the organization to one planning horizon, which was difficult for the platform to manage when a change in week one requires rolling, compounding, changes and recalculations through the progressive weeks.) In addition, carrier forecasts and manifests are created during the planning process and are continuously updated in real time for each period based on product mix changes as well.

This module also has built in analytics and (cost saving) opportunity dashboards, transit time performance insights (to optimize inventory planning), actual truck/container (cube) utilization, and shipment (frequency) analysis dashboards. One of the great things about the planning capability is that it projects down to the container/truck by lane by week and identifies high and low variances to make sure that the buyer contracts a carrier that can increase (and decrease) capacity as needed. Another great thing about the planning capability is that the forecasting component can calculate optimal packing based on packaging options and even show you how to maximize container utilization with a 3-D visualization of the packing plan (boxes onto pallets into containers). Probably the greatest thing about this planning capability is that it walks you through the creation of the forecast to the realization of the operational (logistics) plan in a step by step process and ensures that the plan that is ultimately approved is complete, as accurate as possible, and distributed to the right people at the right time (as it forces the user through the forecast, validation thereof, operational plan draft, and operational plan review by key stakeholders, and only then does it allow approval and distribution).

Cubera

Their spend management and visibility solution allows a buyer to track and compare logistics financial performance — forecasts vs plans vs invoices vs actuals to see how accurate the forecasts end up being, how close the plans end up being, how the costs are tracking, and if performance is improving over time. In addition to highlighting variances to plan and budget, their solution provides diagnostic insights and helps the organization predict future spend.

Daksa

Their supply chain AI platform that ties it all together; that monitors, learns, corrects, and reports on the overall supply chain. On the main screen, a user sees an overall summary of the extent of their global and domestic supply chain — routes, lanes, suppliers, plants, parts, and costs; as well as high level insights into equipment, parts, packaging, plants, ports, and overall data quality – and they can drill into any area in which they need more details.

Veda

Their shipment visibility and supply chain resilience application that allows an organization to query the last reported location of any shipment at any time and all of the details associated with that shipment, track inventory in real time, and any red flags based on levels, criticality, and delays.

Integrations

Simple, fast and powerful integrations that handle a variety of data formats and file types including (rest) APIs, EDI, Excel Spreadsheets, CSV and more. Pre-built integrations and formats are available. The integration capability allows a user to manage the data streams and data files they use to define their network, suppliers, products, demands, etc., especially if they are using an ERP/MRP that doesn’t allow for API/direct integration and only supports integration by way of file exports (and imports).

With these six modules, or an appropriate subset thereof, integrated with any existing logistics modules the organization may already have, the organization will be able to

  • import demand history and initial demand forecasts
  • adjust the demand forecasts to a (rolling) order plan (40+ weeks out)
  • identify the optimal packaging, and palletization scheme
  • determine the viable shipping lanes and required (multi-modal) methods
  • collect the quotes from potential carriers
  • select the carriers
  • optimize the allocations among the appropriate carriers and plan the transport
  • communicate the plan and track the shipments
  • provide accurate costing and required cash flow forecasting

… and do so in an integrated logical, fashion that allows a buyer to holistically manage the end-to-end logistics planning and execution process in a single Total Logistics Management Solution (TLMS). Moreover, they will be able to manage their end-to-end logistics process in a solution that is continuously monitoring, suggesting, correcting, and presenting optimizations in the plans it presents for you, allowing you to go from large double-digit variances in your plan vs. actuals to low single digits over time. Taking 10% – 15% out of logistics costs through an integrated, holistic, methodology is significant, especially if logistics and inventory management collectively represents 30% to 40% of the total cost of goods sold.

So if you do not have a TLMS managing your global logistics network, we recommend that you check out aThingz at your first opportunity. The capability may impress you but, more importantly, they may be able to take 10% off your logistics spend and 3% to 5% off of your total organizational spend in a relatively short time-frame, and that’s worth it.

Supply Risk Solutions – Taking Transparency to Thwarting

Risk and Uncertainty should be front and centre in the mind of every buyer and supply chain manager these days. Natural disasters are at an all time high, we’re still feeling the impacts of supply chain slowdowns and shutdowns during the pandemic, and political instability globally is introducing new headaches into your already fragile supply chains.

You need to maintain a handle on what’s going on in your supply base, and extended supply chain. In the beginning, this was an SRM/SXM solution which maintained information on your tier 1 suppliers, the products they supplied you, their typical on-time performance, and basic financial information. Over time these added basic risk metrics / 3rd party risk data which was supposed to give you some insight into how risky your supply base was, but considering this was usually financial information, it wasn’t a very good solution.

Then we got transparency solutions — and you know many of the big names here, which include Everstream, Interos, Resilinc, etc. — which allowed you to track your supply chain down multiple tiers to the source. Over time, these added news monitoring and event monitoring so you could get indicators of potential issues from news articles (which could include labour issues, for example) and nearby natural disasters (hurricanes, cyclones, earthquakes, etc.). Properly configured and maintained, this gave an organization instant insight into a potentially disruptive event and allowed them to take immediate action if necessary.

This was great, at least before the pandemic, because if you had 2 to 3 months of notice that your supply was going dry for a while (due to a fire, flood, or major plant damage), or longer, you could instantly switch to your secondary supplier (if you were dual-sourcing for risk mitigation) or start looking for a new source of supply. But now that supply chains are still stretched thin, supply choices are limited, raw materials are in more limited supply than ever, and supply chain cycle times in many industries are still double to quadruple what they used to be, a warning is not enough.

You need to do more than monitor the supply base, you ned to mitigate risk of disruption IN the supply base. It doesn’t matter if your risk preparedness is A+ if your supplier’s risk preparedness is F. A disruption in your supplier is a disruption to you, regardless of what plans you do and don’t have. This is where Supply Risk Solutions comes in. Not only are they one of the oldest (and first SaaS) solutions in the supply risk monitoring space (dating back to 2007), and one of the first to offer full supply chain transparency, but the first to go from transparency to disruption prevention. By ensuring your suppliers do proper risk planning, mitigation, and preparedness, your disruptions can be reduced up to 60%. That’s right. Sixty Percent!

While you can’t guarantee a disruption free supply chain — since you can’t predict (or prevent) natural disasters, political embargoes from disturbed dictators (or global reactions against them), or significant economic events (such as bank failures) which send shocks through the system — you can eliminate preventable disruptions and minimize the impacts of those non-preventable disruption events with proper identification and mitigation planning.

This is where Supply Risk Solutions is unique — it’s deep focus on enabling suppliers to identify areas of risk that could cause disruptions and providing them education, training, and resources to address those risks. Supply Risk Solutions does this based upon 16 years of supplier data that they have collected and correlated to disruptions. Based on this long-term deep analysis, they have developed and optimized a list of key indicators, and standard supplier surveys for multiple industries that collect this indicator data.

In addition, as they directly serve over 23% of the global semiconductor industry and 36% of the US Healthcare market, they have very deep data on disruptions, mitigations, and improvements that can be generated in these supply bases and they do an exceptional job here. (Especially as they have been doing it for years and years, getting better every year as their database gets deeper and more extensive.)

The solution, which is always free for suppliers and their suppliers, allows a supplier to define their employees who need access to the system as well as the suppliers they use as tier 1 inputs. When a supplier is added by a customer, they get an invitation to complete or share a standardized risk assessment with the customer for every site they will be using. Since the solution was designed to be single sign on for the supplier and give them complete access to, and control over, all of their data, if they have already completed the survey (for the categories they are supplying), they can share their existing survey. If they have not for one of more sites they are using, they can complete it for those sites and just share just the data the new customer needs.

But the real power of the platform is that once a supplier fills out the survey, that captures the key risk and disruption indicators for that type of supplier, the platform computes a risk of disruption profile and identifies key actions and mitigations the supplier should take to considerably decrease the chances of disruption in the future. And the actions and mitigations work. With almost two decades of data, they know what works and what helps.

This is why we’re covering them and why you should know about them. The providers we referenced above all do transparency, news monitoring, and event monitoring — like Supply Risk Solutions — and some have deeper operational resilience, cyber-monitoring, or other unique capabilities — but none are as focussed on reducing the risk of disruption in the supply base by providing you, and your suppliers, the insights, guidance, and monitoring your suppliers need to reduce your disruptions.

The reality is that it doesn’t matter how operationally resilient you are, how much insight you have into your supply chain, or how prepared you are for a disruption — if you are entirely dependent on your supply base for the products you sell or the services you need for continued operations, your resilience is ultimately their resilience, and, even worse, the supplier with the lowest resilience you are dependent on.

So you need to focus on your suppliers’ resilience, not yours. We know you don’t have the time, and that’s where SRS is also somewhat unique in that they also offer supply chain disruption monitoring and prevention as a managed service where they work with the suppliers and help them to maintain their data, understand their risk assessments and mitigations, access the necessary training and best practices, and create plans to address them. By identifying, and addressing, potential root causes of disruption before a disruption happens, many disruptions can be prevented, and those that can’t (like natural disasters), can be mitigated to the extent possible. And that’s how, for their clients, they reduce supply base risk by up to 60% (depending on the maturity of your suppliers).

Also, they have one of the best handles on what external events are likely to affect a given supplier site of all of the providers. Their database contains every natural disaster that’s ever been recorded back to 1850, and they’ve been maintaining deep data on relevant events since their formation 16 years ago. For a given event, they can predict the likelihood of occurrence and the likely impact and, based on that, recommend the most appropriate mitigation.

It’s very affordable, and if you are a US healthcare provider, you can even check out Supply Risk Solutions, and use it, for free on your top 10 suppliers to get deep insight into what it can do for you. (Since they, indirectly through partners like Vizient and HIRC, serve over 50% of the US health care industry, they likely already have all of the data on not just the top 10 suppliers for a hospital, but most of the top 100.) It’s definitely worth checking out, and when you see the value, upgrading to at least the first tier solution.

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.

Do You Have a Procurement FocalPoint?

Last month we asked where’s the procurement management platform primarily because we now have a plethora of procurement-centric applications but very little integration between them. However, once you tackle that issue, you have the secondary issue of all these applications, but often no clear starting point and, even worse, no way for an average organizational employee outside of Procurement to interact with Procurement beyond an inbound email to “please get this for me” and the eventual, possibly many months later, outbound email to “we got it, it’s finally here … it will be on your desk tomorrow“.

This is a big problem, even in organizations that supposedly have market leading source-to-pay suites. While all the modules are connected, and the integrated workflow will guide a buyer from project selection to sourcing to supplier selection to award to contracting to supplier onboarding to order creation to receipt creation to invoice confirmation and payment approval and loop back to the order creation until pending contract expiration when the contract can be renewed, renegotiated, or
revoked and the sourcing process started all over. This is great, but for predefined sourcing projects on encoded categories only!

It’s not great for any category not already encoded and typically strategically sourced, and it’s atrocious as new product and service needs arise within the organization, as new hires need new assets for onboarding, as customer requirements change and the organization needs to adapt rapidly and source new products or services to meet new, or one-off, needs. There’s no intake, and no collaboration with the organizational stakeholders Procurement is there to serve.

And that’s a huge problem. That’s why you’re seeing a few companies talking about “intake”, “orchestration”, or “PPM” (which stands for either Procurement Performance Management or Procurement Process Management, depending on who is talking about it) because, without this capability, a Procurement platform will never be complete or support the organization.

Following the introductory post on the procurement management platform, we lamented and celebrated that Per Angusta was going away and being integrated into SpendHQ as the foundations of a new PPM. It’s a great start, but today the focus of SpendHQ is on managing the existing workflows and creating visibility into existing projects — and savings tracking is limited to integrated projects. However, when it comes to intake support and project tracking for arbitrary organizational needs, that’s not there yet.

However, there are other players which are strong here, and one of those players is Focal Point, which was built from the ground up as an intake-to-orchestrate solution that is capable of

  • capturing all organizational requests for Procurement and Procurement-related activities,
  • assigning those requests to customizable workflows using either built in automation rules or manual (re-)assignment,
  • allowing an end-user to see exactly where any request is in the process at any time,
  • allowing for in-platform communication between the stakeholder and Procurement,
  • integrating with any external tool through jump-out/jump-in to support the process, and
  • supporting whatever approval chains are required, among other intake and orchestration functions.

The tool was built to solve the most significant problem the founders repeatedly saw as CPOs and implementers of various leading sourcing solutions — little to no intake management or general purpose procurement process orchestration. And it does it incredibly well. The visual workflow construction is extremely usable, and the wizards that power both the process, form construction, and form completion automatically extend and compress the form as needed based upon user selections and actual needs, making for a very smooth flow.

All of the workflow elements and steps support deep conditional logic, allowing the organization to create as many branches as possible but ensuring that the end user making a request, and the end buyer assigned to deal with that request, only see the relevant paths and only need to enter the relevant information to be guided by the platform.

There can be as many intake types, with associated branching workflows, as the organization needs, each can have the appropriate level of automation, and, most importantly, each can have as many milestones as needed to walk the process through at a high level, allowing the requester to easily see at a high level where the process is, and then, if interested, dive into the detailed workflow within the current milestone to get a more accurate picture of where the process is.

The only thing the platform doesn’t do is actual sourcing, supplier management, contract management, analytics, procurement, or payment management. It expects the organization to have tools for this already and integrates into the appropriate modules in those tools as needed to accomplish the workflow in progress.

In terms of getting up and running, Focal Point typically has a fully fleshed out, functioning, and integrated instance that captures all of the organization’s workflows up and running within 90 days, even if the organization is a multi-(multi-)billion dollar organization, which is Focal Point’s target market size. This is because it’s typically the 1B+ organizations that have a lot of tools, and a lot of stakeholders, but no way to manage those tools effectively or to give stakeholders any visibility into where their requests are and how their spending is being managed.

The reason it typically takes 90 days is that, unlike many sourcing suite providers, who just flip a virtual switch and drop an empty SaaS suite on you and say “good luck“, Focal Point fully configures the platform as part of their statement of work. This includes:

  • working with the organization to understand all of their requirements and current workflows
  • encoding all of those intake workflows with milestones, task-breakdowns, and existing platform jump-outs
  • integrating any existing procurement system you need to complete the workflow
  • creating a UAT instance and allowing for at least one iteration and approval before it goes live
  • training your team on how to use the system and maintain the workflows

So even though Focal Point has obviously achieved efficiency in terms of workflow creation and customization, external platform integration, and implementation project management, it takes time for an average organization to collect and document their existing processes and requirements and for FocalPoint (or a third party consulting organization if that is the customer’s preference) to fill in the gaps, so it’s not possible to get it much below 90 days. But when you think about the fact that they have fully implemented a 10B+ organization in that timeframe, when some major suite players will take 18 months working with a consulting partner to fully implement those solutions, that’s an incredible time to value, which is generated day one when every request flows into the tool; gets tracked, assigned, and executed; and stakeholders have full visibility into the process and can intervene if necessary.

Focal Point solves the problem it was built to solve, fills the hole the vast majority of sourcing and procurement solutions make, and does it incredibly well. If any part of this post resonates with you, the doctor encourages you to check them out.

Services Struggles? Get Zivio. It’s Apropos!

In Friday’s post we told you not to use a sub-standard sourcing solution for services sourcing because, in the end, you won’t realize the value you expect or collect the data you need to make better awards in the process. And we know that left you with questions because all the big platforms you know don’t do services, or at least do not do services well.

So, today, we provide one answer to that problem — Zivio, a relatively new player that specializes in complex services sourcing, that is Best of Breed, and that meets the requirement of being able to integrate into an existing platform or ecosystem that contains open APIs and that can accept all of the data it can capture, generate, and exchange, with its complete, open, APIs.

Zivio was designed to manage the entire process from initial project creation through supplier onboarding, selection, and approval to milestone tracking and management to close-out, final bill-out and reporting. Each step of the process is designed to be easy to use and efficient and makes use of any existing templates and knowledge in the tool, using AI where (and only where) appropriate.

Their new project definition wizard, called ScopeIQ, is designed for quick Statement of Work (SoW) creation and all a requisitioner has to do is enter a few short sentences with the most relevant keywords and the solution will suggest a title based upon similar projects in the past, which the user can accept or edit, and then, using past project descriptions (from the company and publicly available datasets), it will use AI to assemble a project description and statement of work that the user can then review and edit. If the organization does a number of similar projects, it works exceptionally well and the starting statements of work and project descriptions are quite good and often need little editing (comparatively speaking).

Once the user has accepted the SoW, they can complete the project definition by defining the appropriate metadata (category, subcategory, budget, milestones, project release date, bid closing date, award criteria, etc.) and send the project out for bid. The system can automatically identify the best suppliers based on project categorization, milestones, and past performance on similar project and the user can select these suppliers and invite them to bid with just one click.

When the bids are submitted, the users can see an overarching summary and select a sub-set for side-by-side comparison. At any time before award, the buyer can easily modify the project description and add or modify milestones. Milestones can also be added and modified after award with the right approvals and agreement from both parties.

The product has good supplier management, performance management, and approval management, especially around supplier onboarding, milestone approvals, and payment approvals. By default, the platform tracks on time performance, operational best practice, and on budget metrics by supplier, but can be configured on implementation to track more. It also computes an overall score for easy ranking purposes (which can also be customized on implementation). When it comes to reports, there are a large number of project, milestone, supplier, and financial reports out-of-the-box, and more can be easily configured on implementation. Plus, as the platform was built to integrate with your existing S2P/ERP platform / ecosystem, it can push all of the data out to an external tool where you can do additional reporting and analysis.

But the best part about the tool is the ability to define complex services projects to any level of detail needed, with as many milestones, tasks, and approvals as required, customized for the project, with breakdown costing and interim payments as needed. And then to log into the system at any time, see where a project is, see where all projects are with a supplier or where all suppliers are with a set of related projects. And the ability to quickly bring up summary reports of relevance to the appropriate level of detail at any time. It’s project based sourcing and it works great, especially when you’ve defined your first few projects and the system can use (and learn) from those templates and suggest SoWs, suppliers, and steps for you. It’s what general services sourcing should be.

Now, before we sign off, we should make it clear that we are not saying that Zivio is the only solution (especially as we’re sure we will see more in the months and years ahead as more people realize how critical proper services sourcing is), or the solution for every business (as there are custom solutions for Legal, Marketing, and SaaS, that we will be covering in our Source-to-Pay is Extensive series), but that Zivio is a solid general purpose solution for an organization with a wide array of services needs that should be considered if the organization does not have a services sourcing solution. It could be the right solution for your organization and, if it is, given the typical overspend in services categories, that means you should have been using it yesterday!