Category Archives: Vendor Review

Three Questions for Job Seekers in the Supply Chain Space


Today’s guest post is from Sudy Bharadwaj, who has been analyst extraordinaire of Aberdeen Group, a VP of MindFlow Technologies (who innovated the sourcing optimization space), CMO of Informance (who brought intelligence to the manufacturing floor), and a Sales Superstar at Inovis (who was one of the largest B2B eCommerce players). (Note that all of these companies made successful exits by way of acquisition.) Sudy is currently the CEO of Hound Technologies and JackalopeJobs.com, a new Web 3.0 job search start-up that is looking to revolutionize the job search process for the average job seeker (and not the average recruiter).

Since I have been involved in the supply chain industry for 20+ years, I thought I would share some observations for job seekers in this space. One interesting fact about supply chain jobs — they are all over the map in terms of qualifications and experience. Some high-end jobs require advanced degrees and lots of experience, while others can be entry-level positions.

Regardless of level, there are some common issues all supply chain job seekers should think about:

Are you a cost center or a profit center/revenue center?
Many supply chain professionals, while knowing they have an important role, do not do as good of a job of fully understanding and articulating their overall role in their ecosystem. Think of what revenue or savings you contribute to the company. By optimizing your supply chain, how have you contributed? Can you describe some customer satisfaction metrics? Cost savings metrics?
One famous example of where you fit in the supply chain: when interviewing an assembly line worker installing seat belts at an automobile plant, the line worker told an executive “I not only install seat belts, I save lives”. That’s a great way to look at the job.

How are you managing, building and maintaining your network?
In any job search, networking is crucial, however, in the supply chain space, it can really improve your chances. In addition to connecting to your former co-workers, how about customers, suppliers, partners, etc? You were part of a supply-demand web, which looks like a large network; treat it like your job seeking network. Rather than looking for roles within your exact industry, can you work with customers and/or suppliers?
When discussing his job with a job seeker in the demand-side of the supply chain (read: sales), the main points were selling of products. The first question I asked was “tell me about your customer”.
Job seeker: “They are a distributor of XXX products”
Me: “What else do they distribute”?
Job seeker: “Numerous products, including ABC and XYZ”
Me: “Can you sell those?”
Job seeker: “Of course”
It may not be so easy, but phone calls were made to the distributor, new introductions were made, interviews ensued, and a new job was started with very different products than the sales executive sold before.

Are you addressing your skills gaps?
If you are an aspiring supply chain professional, or returning war veteran, you can find help from your local workforce office or VA representative. A great example in the Dallas/Fort Worth area is what the Workforce Solutions of North Central Texas has done — they acquired funding to develop certification programs — Certified Logistics Associate (CLA) or Certified Logistics Technician (CLT). Don’t live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area?

Try hitting Google and searching for some common phrases. Just for fun, I Googled “supply chain certification program in north Dakota” and got some interesting hits. Some are online programs from out-of-state schools while others are state sponsored programs.

These are three different questions any job seeker in the supply chain space needs to ask themselves as they embark on a new job search.

Thanks, Sudy. And if you are looking for a new Supply Chain job, try JackalopeJobs.com.* It’s still in beta, so this means there are still some kinks to work out, but it’s the first site that combines the power of a meta-aggregator with the power of multiple social networks simultaneously. Not just a LinkedIn or Facebook app, it can utilize your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Plaxo social networks simultaneously to tell you who in your network might be able to help you with a job on all of the major job search sites. And, unlike most job sites that just do simple title search, it uses Natural Language Processing and Semantic Search to find other jobs that might be relevant to you. For example, if you searched for “inside sales” you would not find an “account executive” job at Oracle on other job sites, which is almost the exact same job, just titled differently in a different organization. And if you searched for Procurement, you might not find Supply Manager — but the Jackalope Jobs engine will. Of course, since NLP and Semantic technology are not perfect and still in refinement, not every result will be a 100% match**, but the majority of the results will be very appropriate matches and this approach furthers the the goal of the site which is to expose you to more opportunities that you might be qualified for and able to get as a result of your network than other job sites give you. And if you search different, you might get surprising results. Sudy’s next post will describe how you use the platform to search different.

 

* Full disclaimer: the doctor is currently serving as CTO of JackalopeJobs and has a vested interest in the site’s success.

 

* For example, the phrase “human resources” causes the platform no end of grief because not only does almost every job description mention it once (which is easy to filter out), but poorly written job descriptions mention the phrase more than once when the job is not a human resources (related) job, which leads the NLP keyword analyzer and/or semantic engine to sometimes believe the job might actually be related to human resources. So this search will often turn up more false positives than others. However, these jobs typically get weighted down as you will not likely have as many, or any, connections to jobs in a different industry if you are a HR professional.

Open Up Your Supply Chain With E2Open

Today is the official launch of E2Open‘s new Collaboration Center, E2Open Version 8.0. The focus of this release are their new supply dashboards with real-time KPIs, predictive analytics and exception notifications designed to allow an organization to manage its global trading network across multiple supply tiers.

E2Open was founded in 2000 with the vision to provide supply chain managers visibility into their entire supply chain network — beyond just the first tier of suppliers because problems often start with your suppliers’ suppliers and your suppliers’ suppliers’ suppliers. Getting visibility into a late shipment or raw material shortfall as soon as it happens gives an organization time to find an alternate supply or alternate go-to-market strategy, as opposed to finding out the day after your supplier was supposed to ship. Since then, E2Open has gone through multiple versions of its platform and its E2open Business Network (8 to be precise) and now offers solutions in Collaborative Supply Planning, Demand Management, Logistics Visibility, Order Management, Inventory Management, and B2B Managed Services with a customer list that includes Blackberry, Dell, FoxConn, Hitachi, Motorola, and Seagate to name a few.

However, today we are only going to focus on its new collaborative platform and its supply management dashboards to be precise. Why would I do such a thing, especially since I repeatedly claim that Dashboards are Dangerous and Dysfunctional in full agreement with Robert D. Austin? Because the reason they are dysfunctional is that they lull you into a false sense of security when you see a lot of green. As I said in SI’s now classic post:

a dashboard can not tell you how well you’re doing … the best it can do is capture the data it’s been programmed to capture, roll-up the metrics it’s been programmed to roll up, and do the built in calculations of efficiency based on those roll-ups.

As a result, even if it tells you that 90% of spend is “on contract”, that doesn’t mean it is. It won’t tell you that 10% of spend has been misclassified under the wrong code and is being reported as on-contract when it’s really, really not. The truth is that:

a dashboard can only provide an upper bound on how well you’re doing, and this is useless. Reporting that my efficiency is at most 98% when it is in fact 92% is useless and unactionable.

However, if the goal is reversed from trying to tell you how well you are doing, and giving an inaccurate upper bound, to how poor you are doing, and give an accurate, minimal lower bound, it becomes useful. And if you can then define metrics such as inspected orders, reviewed invoices, verified shipments, etc. and report on the uninspected orders, unreviewed invoices, and unverified shipments (etc.), then you not only know everything that’s wrong but how many dark corners could be holding problems waiting to materialize but where to look when the problems you know about have been solved.

And that’s why E2Open’s new dashboard, developed in HTML5 and available through your browser, is useful. Not only does it provide deep, near real-time insight into your global supply network, with data aggregated across the multiple tiers of your supply network as fast as the platform can get access to it (which is real-time if the suppliers are using a modern supply management system with real-time query / export capability or once a day if the supplier is still on an old ERP/MRP that does a daily export in CSV to a secured FTP directory), but the drill-down dashboard can be configured to display whatever KPIs and metrics you want, however you want.

You can choose the standard indicators that show that 98% of your orders are expected to ship on time, based upon tier-1 and tier-2 suppliers shipping their components and raw materials on time, or you can invert it and show that 2% of your orders are late. Every metric can be reversed and you can filter what is displayed. So, if you want, you can set it up to show ALL RED and just show you

  • all the problems the system has identified that need an investigation and/or resolution and
  • how many records, products, shipments, etc. have not been manually reviewed, tested, verified as this will tell yo exactly where problems could be lurking and, if the count is high, where more oversight might be required to prevent new problems.

It’s not the standard configuration, but it is supported — and the ability to razor sharp focus into issues two levels down into your supply chain within 24 hours of your supplier’s supplier reporting a delay is fantastic. And, unlike most “dashboard” products, they support the creation of multiple public and private “dashboard” pages, at different levels of visibility and granularity, to allow each user to track all KPIs, metrics, and issues relevant to them. It’s not trying to be a one-size fits all solution because E2Open recognizes that, in supply chain, one size does not fit all.

Furthermore, 90% visibility at each tier is possible very quickly as they have done over 400 ERP / MRP / Supply Chain system integrations to date and can on-board suppliers on all of the major platforms very quickly. And they even have the ability to do trending and predictive analytics to identify where problems might occur — which is useful when you know that somewhere in a certain data blackhole there is likely an issue but are unsure where to start.

E2Open’s new release is worth checking out. The platform strives to give you a single version of the truth across your supply network and does a good job at doing it. And the inventory management / collaborative forecasting drill down capability is just as detailed as some of the best inventory solutions on the marketplace.

GoTradeLive: A LinkedIn eBay on Steroids for Small Business Procurement to Groupon To.

GoTradeLive is launching its new, global, trading platform targeted at small and medium businesses in the US today. Its new free social commerce and commercial trading platform is poised to be as disruptive to the small business Procurement market as Coupa (Cabana) was when it was launched back in 2007 on Procurement Independence Day. This is not something the doctor says lightly.

So what is GoTradeLive? It is, simply put, a power-auction platform for small businesses on steroids. And what’s so great about that, you astutely ask because there are dozens, and dozens, of auction platforms out there ranging from free to seven figures in cost? It’s social. It’s networked. It’s mobile. It’s easy to use. It’s global (and multi-currency). It’s Free. It can be branded. And it’s proven — as it’s already been tested in Australia, New Zealand, China, and the UK, where they have offices.

Let’s take the benefits one-by-one.

  • It’s social
    You can create your own trading networks using a Facebook / Linked-In type interface and these can be public or private for public or private sales or trades.
  • It’s networked
    While the build-your-trading network ability of the Ariba or Ketera networks are not yet there, the building blocks are and you can see it’s coming. But the ability to define custom trading networks is unique.
  • It’s (a) mobile (platform)
    Like the consumer social networks and e-Commerce platforms, they have a mobile app that allows you to monitor your trades and bids from your mobile device.
  • It’s easy to use
    It’s as easy to use as Facebook, eBay, and other consumer sites.
  • It’s global.
    It has already been launched in Australasia and the UK and further global launches are already planned. It supports automatic currency translation for global buying and selling.
  • It’s Free.
    It’s using the Freemium model pioneered by sites like LinkedIn, DropBox, and BaseCamp. It literally costs nothing to use. No registration or account fees. No listing fees. No transaction fees. (However, if you don’t pay, you are subjected to ads and there is nothing to prevent an advertisement for a competitor’s product or auction appearing on your listing page.) Given that the cost of some platforms include transaction fees of up to 15%, this is a great deal.
  • It can be branded.
    For as little as $15 a month, which gives you one-user access, you can brand the site into your own trading platform (with your logo, colour scheme, etc.) and eliminate advertisements. Small Business Pricing is coming soon, and will start at less than $100 / month.

It’s a great social commerce platform for quickly moving slow, excess, or end-of life inventory and a great platform for many small businesses, especially those in retail, construction, and similar goods-based verticals, for spot-buying product needed at irregular intervals. And it has a lot of promise. This is one platform the doctor will be watching closely.

Lavante Recovery – A Risk-Free Way to Segue Into SIM

Yesterday, I was the first to get a sneak peak into the live-beta of Lavante’s new Recovery Audit solution that is being built on top of the brand-spanking-new Supplier Information Management solution that they released earlier this year (as showcased in this February post). Given it’s unique foundation, and the decade of recovery audit experience that has been baked into it, it is no surprise that Lavante is finding ten (10) times the savings of an average recovery audit, and up to fifty (50) times for select clients — even though the product is still in Private Beta and full (seamless) integration (with SIM) won’t be available until next year.

The great thing about the solution is that the first thing it does is identify omissions, errors, and inconsistencies in your supplier data. Using phone number, fax, address, web site, e-mail, and TIN checks, the software is able to find duplicate, erroneous, or incomplete records that need attention. Once these are fixed — either through automated import of up-to-date data from it’s network of over 2 Million companies, or from a multi-channel reach-out that seamlessly integrates telephone, fax, and snail-mail reach-out as well as e-mail reach-out — the software automatically applies a suite of rules and checks to find duplicate payments, overpayments, and potentially fraudulent payments that you have not yet identified. And once these are verified as accurate, provided you have a decent agreement/contract in place, you can go after the vendor for credits.

The benefits of good supplier data and multi-channel reach-out cannot be underestimated where recovery audits are concerned. For the latter, they have average reach-out response rates of over 50% (and as high as 80% for some customers), which are eight (8) to ten (10) times the response rates of providers who just do e-mail / web-based reach-outs. With respect to the former, cleaner supplier data makes for more complete transaction data, which not only increases the chance of finding a duplicate, incorrect, or fraudulent transaction — but improves your follow-on spend analysis efforts (and results). As a result of its supplier data cleansing effort, Lavante is typically able to process at least 95% of spend through its recovery audit solution, which maximizes the chances that it will find the majority of your recovery opportunities.

The SaaS solution is quite simple to use — consisting of four main components: the dashboard, claims management, invoice management, and reporting. The claims management section allows you to review each claim found by the system, which includes complete information about the claim — type, reason, organization, supplier, status, supporting documentation, etc, and take appropriate actions, which can include additional review, processing, or reassignment. The invoice section lets you manage your invoices from Lavante for recovery services. If you choose the fixed fee option, you will get one invoice on the agreed upon invoicing cycle for access to the software. If you choose the risk-free contingency model, then you will get an invoice for each valid claim made to a supplier that results in a credit or repayment. The reporting section consists of a suite of audit, cash-flow, claims, invoice, non-compliance, OFAC-SDN, and Vendor reports that give you pretty much any piece of information correlated with any other piece of information any way you want to look at it. The dashboard allows you to see your claim and invoice summary data at a glance, and to select the four most important reports to you — which can be viewed in (multiple) chart form(s) or in tabular form, and exported to csv or pdf. And while it’s a basic solution at this point, the only obvious weakness, given that the one goal of the platform at this point is to find all payments eligible for recovery, is that they do not yet have a custom report builder.

I’m sure they’ll get there. They shared with me their 2012+ roadmap for the solution, and it’s quite impressive. They have a vision to build on the solution to extend it first to a contract compliance solution, then to a fraud prevention solution, and finally to a risk management platform that will also integrate with their supplier management platform which will include compliance management. They understand that, done right, recovery is a one-trick pony (because, if you do it right, you also identify the source problem and fix it) and that the real value is not in recovery, but duplicate, overpayment, and fraud prevention — and monitoring transactions in such a way that they can be used to judge supplier, and supply chain, risk. I expect it will take them a few years to get there, but it will also take an average company one to two years to identify the majority of reasons for duplicate and over-payments and fix their processes, so Lavante should be able to grow in lock-step with their customer base. Regardless, Lavante is a company to watch and a solution to investigate for any Fortune 500/Global 3000 (want-to-be) that has never done a recovery audit. At the very least the included supplier data analysis service will add value. And when your data is in order, you can take your transaction analysis to the next level. And given that good data enables good spend analysis, and that a spend analysis will typically uncover 10% savings opportunities, what have you got to lose?

Trade Extensions: No Rest for the Wicked-ly Powerful – Part II

As per yesterday’s post, it’s been less than five months since we last checked in with Trade Extensions, who had traded up to a Fact Sheet User Interface and added a slew of new features, including improved RFI support, multi-dimensional rankings in e-Negotiation, Google Earth integration, new incumbent rules, and an OLAP foundation to reporting, including the implementation of a new n-way comparison report. Since then, Trade Extensions has been on a tear to add new functionality as fast as it can to make the platform not only one of the most powerful expressive bidding optimization platforms on the planet, but also one of the easiest to use — listening to its users (which include the Fortune 1000) and adding features and functions that make an average buyer’s life easier, taking usability to a whole new level yet again. And while earth-shattering technology improvements are cool, it is usability that is the ultimate key to to adoption, use, and, ultimately, cost avoidance and reduction in your sourcing organization.

Scenario Creation & Analysis

Not only are there new rules that allow partial awards to be fixed based upon existing scenarios, but the number of constraint categories has doubled. While there were only general and incumbent constraints in the past, there are now an entire category of scenario reference rules and post processing rules. With respect to scenario reference rules, not only can allocations be kept, but bids can be favoured or penalized as well. The post-processing rules are also quite useful. Allocations can automatically be rounded and allocations that don’t meet a minimum number of units can be removed (or re-assigned to the supplier who meets a minimum allocation with the lowest total cost).

Feedback Mechanisms

The buyer now has fine-grained control over what the supplier sees, and can even mix feedback types. For example, if the buyer only wants the top three suppliers to know they are top three, but suppliers four to six to know their exact rank, they can specify that specific rank starts at bidder four, and the top bidders default to “top 3”. In addition, if the supplier does not meet a minimum bid increment, which can be defined in a number of ways (including, minimum dollar or % decrease over last bid), the supplier gets a nice red error that the bid is not acceptable AND a message indicating the minimum increment required. Finally, and this is really cool, the user can define custom color-coded bid feedback fields based on dynamic formulas that now only let the user know where they rank, but how competitive their bid is (against the current bids from the competition) in English using a buyer defined scale such as “Competitive”, “Slightly Competitive”, “Not Competitive”, and “Not Acceptable”.

Plus, the buyer can now chat with users online in an integrated IM client, and immediately see who is online when they log in as it is a widget on their project management dashboard.

Odds and Ends

The “dashboards” for RFX and auction phases have also improved. The summary, bidder summary, and lot summary are now completely customizeable by the user, support custom fields, and user-defined colour codings in the rankings. In addition, there is integrated show/hide, drill-down functionality, and customizeable pop-up (bid, trend, and bidder activity) charts where a user can select one, some, or all of the rows in each report.

They have also added a basic workflow engine that allows buyers to initiate rate requests, lot requests, and allocation publishing requests of project managers / administrators when new needs arise during a project. This allows managers and supervisors to maintain control and a complete project history to be maintained. The workflow is fairly basic at the present time, but I suspect it will mature and fill out quickly given Trade Extensions’ track record of rapid application development over the past two years. (Especially since the feature is being used by a couple of very large companies.)

All and all, it’s a lot of new functionality in a short time frame that makes the tool extremely useable by an average buyer.