Category Archives: Vendor Review

Decideware: An End-to-End Agency Lifecycle Management Solution Part III

In our first post, we re-introduced you to Decideware, global providers of an end-to-end Agency Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution, with offices on three continents (in Sydney, San Francisco, and London) and quickly overviewed the five core modules of the integrated ALM solution that they offer. Then, in our last post, we dived into the Capability and Scope of Work modules and quickly touched on the briefing module. Today, we are going to dive into the Evaluation and Dashboard Modules.

Evaluation

When it comes to cost, most Marketing agencies have a terrible grip on this issue. Generally speaking, they know what they were budgeted at the start of the year, and what they spent at the end of the year when the Controller or CFO tells them. They do a terrible job of tracking costs by project, and if you asked them budget vs spend vs results for any one Agency, you’ll get a blank stare as if you asked them to explain why the tentative confirmation of the Higgs particle by the Large Hadron Collider is important when it comes to the validation of the Standard Model. It’s not a good state of affairs.

However, if they had a proper Agency Lifecycle Management solution where they could enter all cost information at the desired level of detail, or force the Agency to (if the Agency wants to get paid), the state of affairs is completely different. After every phase, they can find out where they are vs. where they should have been and, possibly with Supply Management’s help, take corrective action.  In addition, they could track feedback and get an overview of the supplier’s running (balanced) scorecard (as this module grew out of their initial Supplier Performance Management offering).

The evaluation module, combined with the reconciliation sub-module (that is tied to the scope of work and collects the quoted cost data) allows an Agency (Relationship) Manager to dive into actuals vs. cost for any time period, at any level of detail, at any time and determine how spending is tracking according to budget. If costs are high, they can drill down into the primary components, and go right down to the resource level and, possibly, determine that Joe, the highly paid creative resource, who was budgeted to work 10 hours, worked 100 hours. They can then determine if this was a data entry error or a grossly inaccurate estimation on the part of the Agency, and use this data in the post-mortem Agency evaluation.

In addition, they can bring up the Agency’s (balanced) scorecard (history) and see (and compare) the Agency’s performance on each phase, for the project, and across all projects.  They can even compare Agency scorecard to see if an Agency is performing average, better, or worse than the other approved agencies.

Dashboard

As noted in our first post, the dashboard, another new module from Decideware, provides a unified interface to all of the modules and functionality contained in the system. From the dashboard, which is designed to work like the user interface to a web-based cube-based spend analysis system, the user can search all of the Agency data, retrieve lists of agencies by geographies, capability, scope of work, and other relevant criteria, and drill down into any data category until they retrieve the (fine-grained) data they are looking for. The best thing about it is, unlike the dashboard offerings of many spend analysis or Supplier Information Management (SIM) providers, it’s almost devoid of fancy graphs and charts. Decideware understands it’s the data that matters and focussed on building an easy-to-use, yet powerful, search, and saved the real estate to display the requested data in an easy-to-understand tabular view with as much drill-down support as you will need.

In addition, from the dashboard, the user can quickly get to all of the reporting functionality embedded in the system, which includes scope analysis reports that summarize resource and fee schedules; organizational analysis reports that summarize costs and actuals; comparison reports that allow the user to compare agencies, fees, capabilities, and functions; and contract generation reports that can generate scopes of work and supporting contracts. (The platform has embedded contract management functionality just like it has embedded SIM functionality.) All of the data can be exported to Excel, and the system can automatically generate work-grids and rate cards.

Overall the system is well-designed and so easy to use that even a Marketer can do it. 😉 So if you want a solution to bring to the Marketing table, make sure Decideware is on your short-list.

Decideware: An End-to-End Agency Lifecycle Management Solution Part II

In our last post, we re-introduced you to Decideware, global providers of an end-to-end Agency Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution, with offices on three continents (in Sydney, San Francisco, and London). We quickly overviewed the five core modules of the integrated ALM solution that they offer, and indicated that we would dive into them in the next two posts. So without further ado, here we go.

Capability

The capability module walks you through the six-step process of gathering appropriate information and approving the Agency as a potential supplier to the organization.

  1. Entity
    The first step is to gather the firmographic data, including the geography, the number of employees, the administrative and legal contacts, the revenues, the primary office locations, and vendor status information
  2. Type
    The next step is to determine the primary, secondary, and tertiary type of the agency. Is it creative, digital/interactive/social media, planning, relationship marketing, public relations, branding, investor relations, etc? An agency can only have one primary focus, and that focus must contribute to 50% or more of revenues to be primary. Similarly, it can only have one secondary focus, and that focus should contribute to 25% or more of revenues. Any additional focii are tertiary.
  3. Specialties
    In this step, a more complete picture of the Agency capability is created through the gathering of supporting data related to market segments, experience, media creation, etc. to fill in a more complete picture of the suitableness of the Agency for the company.
  4. Conflicts
    The next step is to determine if there are any potential categories of conflict for the company. If you’re in Pharma, and they are currently working on a campaign for a new heart disease prevention drug for your competitor, then you don’t want them working on a campaign for your heart disease prevention drug.
  5. Engagements
    What engagements for your company has the Agency worked on, and what engagements is the Agency currently working on? (It’s not uncommon to find out that another Marketing division in another geography is already using another office of the Agency for their campaign!)
  6. Approval
    Once all of the data has been gathered, and an individual with decision authority has decided that the Agency is qualified to work on (select) marketing campaigns for the organization (subject to no conflict), the Agency is approved as a potential vendor.

Scope of Work

The scope of work module walks you through the six-step process of creating a scope of work and approving the scope of work for execution by the Agency.

  • Scope
    Defines the scope of the project being undertaken – duration, geography, contractual details, and summary.
  • Objectives
    What are the objectives? More visibility? Market share? Better brand ratings? And how will they be measured.
  • Work
    The specific deliverables – tv commercial, print advertising, radio segments, etc.
  • Staffing
    The staff available to work on the projects.
  • Costs
    The costs, according to the costing model specified. This is one of the highlights of the Decideware Scope of Work solution. With a custom Excel-like spreadsheet interface, costs can be captured by resource, by function, by campaign, or by deliverable to the desired degree of detail. This not only lets the organization get a grip on what the main cost components are, but how one agency compares in fees and rates to another.
  • Approval
    Once all of the data has been gathered, and an individual with decision authority has decided that the scope of work is complete, a contract is cut and the work can begin.

Briefing

One of Decideware‘s newest Agency Lifecycle Management module, this module is designed to capture the day-to-day interactions with the Agency. It’s like a Community Communications Management and Balanced Scorecard rolled into one. Since this is still in beta with select customers, we’ll cover it at a later time once the first version is finalized and we’ve dived deeper into the nuances of Agency Relationship Management.

Tomorrow we’ll cover the Evaluation and Dashboard modules and talk about some unique capabilities of the Decideware platform.

Decideware: An End-to-End Agency Lifecycle Management Solution Part I

In our last two posts we discussed Agency Lifecycle Management (ALM), the criticality of such to Marketing, and the need for Supply Management to support (ALM) end-to-end if Supply Management wants to get the sacred cow Marketing spend under management. We also outlined the four fundamental phases of Agency Lifecycle Management, key requirements of each phase, and the capabilities that Supply Management has to bring to the table to get a seat at the table. We concluded the post by noting that if Supply Management doesn’t have the requisite processes and technologies at its disposal, it should get them and that there were solutions out there.

One of the leading solutions in Agency Lifecycle Management is Decideware. Decideware, which was first covered on Sourcing Innovation back in 2010 (in this post), started out with the goal of building a SaaS Supplier Performance Management system to allow organizations to get a grip on strategic supplier management. However, in the process, they discovered that Marketing, in particular, was significantly underserved. So they started to build specific features, and then modules, for Agency Performance Management. However, the deeper they went down the rabbit hole, the darker they found it to be. Marketing desperately needed an end-to-end Agency Lifecycle Management solution, but at the time, no one was offering it. So they built one. Then they discovered, now that they had a light to guide their way, that they rabbit hole was far deeper and far darker than anyone thought. So now they are extending their ALM solution, considerably. And Marketers are doing the dance of joy*.

Currently, the Decideware solution has one module for each of the core phases of Agency Lifecycle Management plus a dashboard. The core modules are:

  • Capability
    which acts as the main interface to the underlying AIM (Agency Information Management) system that underlies all of the modules and allows information on Agencies to be entered, maintained, and searched
  • Scope of Work
    which is used to capture the complete scope of work in a methodical process that can support multiple workflows depending on the fee type (function, resource, deliverable, or agency) and project
  • Briefing
    which is used to capture the interactions with the Agency during each phase of the relationship
  • Evaluation
    which is used to record actuals, cost details, and approvals

and

  • Dashboard
    which provides a unified interface to all of the modules and functionality contained in the system; from the dashboard, the user can search all of the Agency data and retrieve lists of agencies by geographies, capability, scope of work, and other relevant criteria

The system is tightly integrated and fits together quite nicely. From any point in the SaaS solution, a user can drill into the information at hand and quickly get to the information she needs. And if she doesn’t know what to do next, each module has a well-defined step-by-step workflow that will guide the user to optimal results. In the next two posts, we will dive into the Decideware solution in more detail.

* and I’m told it’s a sight to see 😉

Lavante Connect – Streamlined Supplier Self Management

Lavante, a provider of Supplier Information Management (SIM) and SIM-based Recovery, has just released a new version of Lavante Connect, their supplier self-management solution.

Lavante Connect is one of the more powerful, and more streamlined, supplier information self-management solutions on the market. In the Lavante Connect solution, the supplier is walked-through the 3 to 5-step process of completing their profile and is updated with respect to their progress, and percentage of work remaining, after each step. In the Lavante system, the supplier goes through the following easy to follow process:

  1. Company Profile
  2. Legal Identification
  3. Certifications
  4. Payment Information (may be optional)
  5. Specific Information (may be optional)

Profile information walks the supplier through the definition of headquarters information, address information (notices, payment, warehouse, etc.), references, ownership, diversity, business structure, and contacts.

Legal ID walks the supplier through entry of business numbers, tax numbers, and other government identification in the countries that the supplier operates in. It also makes sure that the supplier uploads the appropriate documentation required by the customer, such as W9s in the US.

Certifications walks the supplier through the insurance and certification requirements of the customer and makes sure that the supplier specifies all of the relevant information and uploads the appropriate documents.

Payment walks the supplier through the specification of the payment types they accept (pCard, check, EFT, wire, etc.) and the specifications for each payment type.

Specific Information, of which there can be more than one tab, walks the supplier through the specific information requests unique to the client, such as required product and service information, sustainability information, etc. and the documentation that needs to be supplied.

The ease of use comes not only in the easy to follow registration, and profile completion process, but the fact that the system:

  • validates everything that can be validated,
  • eliminates duplication of data entry whenever possible, and
  • forces e-signatures and verification for all legal documents.

Not only does the system validate that all data entered is in a valid format, but it integrates with as many third party systems as possible to verify that the entered data is correct. Business numbers and tax numbers are automatically verified against government databases, address information is validated against address databases, bank and p-card information is verified through penny-transactions, etc. The system makes it hard for a supplier to make a mistake and harder for any errors to persist for more than a few days. It also alerts the supplier as soon as certifications or registrations are about to expire or information has to be re-verified (according to the customer’s schedule, where such customer may require re-verification of contact information every six months).

All address, contact, and similar data is automatically indexed and can be mapped to any other information requirement that makes sense. So, if headquarters also happens to be the payment and legal notice address, it only has to be entered once. Same for contact information.

For the most part, SIM isn’t complex, and neither are supplier portals, but few master the usability and simplicity required to onboard even the technology unsophisticated supplier quickly and easily with complete profiles, no errors in critical information, and fresh profile data. Lavante Connect is in this group.

Intesource – A Strong Sourcing Solution for Mid-Market Supply Management

When we last covered Intesource almost three years ago in 2010 in this post about intelligent sourcing through Intesource, we noted that this full-service offering eSourcing provider had a fully-featured e-Negotiation platform with SIM, document/contract management, and a relatively unique integration with Microsoft Sharepoint for those clients that ran on a Microsoft back-office and wanted to use these solutions to collaborative author documents and track changes.

Besides integration with the Microsoft platform, which is very common in the mid-market that can’t always afford, and often doesn’t need, the massive ERP solutions found in the Fortune 1000/Global 3000, other unique differentiators at the time were their massive template library for e-Negotiation events, integrated feeds from over 160 market exchanges for up-to-date raw material and commodity price information, and hands-on experience running tens of thousands of events. This put them in a restricted group of providers.

Since then, they have continued development work on the platform and added additional functionality that not only enhances the end-to-end strength of the platform, but narrows the group of competitors that can say the same. Three particular enhancements stand out — award analysis, market price centre, and mobile interfaces. We will describe each in turn.

Intesource has added an award optimization component that, while not true strategic sourcing decision optimization, is a very useful analytic component that will allow a buyer to determine a near-optimal, if not optimal, award for non-complex sourcing events. In the new component, buyers can create multiple award scenarios based on pre-defined rules, such as low-quote (which selects, for each item, the supplier with the lowest bid), low-group (which selects, for each group, the supplier with the total lowest cost for a group, or bucket, of item), or low program (which selects the supplier(s) with the lowest cost based upon a program specification, which could be to select suppliers with the highest quality, shortest-lead time, or MWBE specification where possible); or by hand-picking suppliers for each item and/or group. Then, the buyers can compare each scenario side-by-side to see how the different scenarios compare and what is gained for each price sacrifice.

Intesource’s award optimization module is not true optimization in that there is no underlying model, it doesn’t support cross-item / group rebate / discount bids, specification of capacity is currently limited to the event level and the specification of macro-qualitative constraints is limited, and you can’t yet re-run a scenario to see what would change if a supplier increased/decreased prices/quality/etc across the board by 5%, but as SI pointed out five years ago in it’s post on (Spend) Analytics vs. (Decision) Optimization, if your organization had a spend analysis product that allowed you to build a spend cube any time you wanted – on any data you wanted – on any dimensions you wanted – and then throw it away when you’re done then there would be nothing to stop you from building a cube on your RFP or Auction data, building cross tabs and tree maps, and then changing the cube to look at the data a different way. You’d find that you wouldn’t need optimization or a plethora of deterministic reports to find out who the lowest cost supplier was, who the highest quality supplier was, who the lowest cost supplier was relative to your quality metric, or any other query that can easily be answered by rank and cross-tab queries. And, as a result, you’d be able to solve many simple scenarios without optimization — and this is what this tool is attempting to do. Intesource realizes that many supply management organizations, especially in the mid-market, don’t have the advanced sourcing and modelling skills required to build complex optimization models and is endeavoring to build a tool appropriate to its user base. And while it’s not perfect, the reality is that, for an average (smaller) mid-size organization, continued development will allow Intesource to approach an 80% solution as many sourcing events and models of a (smaller) mid-size organization aren’t that complex and this type of solution will get such an organization much further than just e-Negotiation alone.  And on those 80% of events, the results will be near-optimal, if not optimal.

Intesource has centralized all of its raw material and commodity price feeds into a market price centre that integrates the feeds with additional graphing and reporting functionality, monitoring and alerts, and statistical modelling capabilities. In the market price center, users can view historical trends and price fluctuations, focus in on any particular period of time, extend trend projections into the future, monitor prices, cash, and futures contract specifications, set watch lists to monitor key categories, set alerts to immediately inform the user if a price threshold is reached or a price fluctuation exceeds a certain threshold, and even pull up all of the information associated with the exchange(s) a commodity or raw material is associated with.

Finally, like a few other providers, it is tackling mobile, but it is doing it in a smart way. The reality is that, while you might want mobile access because it sounds really cool, in practice it’s typically not very cool because you can’t do really do anything useful on a 3″ to 4″ screen, and what you can do is limited on even a 9″ to 10″ screen. Realizing that all you can really do is retrieve critical pricing and status information, Intesource is building a customized read-only interface that will allow you to determine current event status, bid information, and whether or not there is anything you need to to do or respond to when on the go.  And it’s working with its customer base to develop an appropriate interface that they can use effectively.

Other improvements since 2010 include an improved contract centre with more (user-defined) meta-data, search, and alert functionality; an improved vendor management (SIM) capability with embedded Q&A, enhanced search, attachment management, compliance, and watch-list capabilities; more milestone and scorecard management capabilities; an RFI question library with thousands of questions indexed by category, commodity, and other attributes (built on an analysis of 12 years worth of RFI data) to allow for quick definition of templates and RFIs; and a roles-based public event calendar. Intesource is constantly developing new modules, functions, and features with a roadmap largely driven by its user community as all requests are reviewed quarterly by an advisory committee and prioritized based upon overall demand and usefulness.

Intesource is a solid player in the eSourcing mid-market that should be included in the candidate pool by any company that does most of its business in North America.