Updated: Three sections of information were added on analytics solutions that provide help with indirect procurement analysis — as well as information on the challenges that the vendors can address. Read the italicized passages and the new sections to learn more about Rosslyn Analytics, SpendHQ and Simfoni.
In our response to the coronavirus outbreak, this Spend Matters PRO“Coronavirus Response” seriesis continuing its mission to examine categories of relevant solutions (and example providers) that professionals in procurement, finance and supply chain organizations should investigate to reduce, and even mitigate, coronavirus supply risk. And even if the solutions are only addressing a subset of the issues, the ability to respond intelligently in the short term can also help set organizations up for the future when sanity returns to the world.
Today’s brief focuses on solutions foradvanced procurement analytics— the third category shown below in the seven solution categories that we’re covering:
1.Supply risk managementsolutions that include supply chain risk, CSR risk, supplier financial risk, etc. (Read this category’s PRO analysis and solution recommendationshere.)
2.Sourcing and commodity management, including advanced sourcing, direct sourcing, automated supplier discovery, and commodity management to help dynamically plan and source. (See this category’s recommended solutions for direct sourcinghere.)
3.Advanced procurement analyticsto enable direct procurement and/or to perform “spend planning” when demand drops out or spikes. (Its profile for this series ishere.)
4.Procure to Pay (P2P)that emphasizes working capital, dynamic discounting, payment control and related finance priorities to help inject cash into the P2P process — especially for many cash-starved suppliers. (This category is discussed in-depthhere.)
5.Fraud, P2P and vendor management safeguardswhen new suppliers need to be set up quickly, and also when lowlife fraudsters try to use the pandemic as a way to steal money and IP. (Its profile for this series ishere.)
6.Providers with deep contract analyticsthat can analyze a contract portfolio for affected contracts from suppliers (and customers) for not just force majeure clauses, but other related clauses that tie to the multiple risks popping up at once in the pandemic.
7.Contingent Workforce and Servicessolutions that are able to, at a minimum, help rapidly ramp up on-demand workers to deal with massive resource shortfalls. We are looking at four categories of solutions: forsourcing remote/online work; solutions for sourcing and managingmobile-first contract workersanywhere you need them; solutions to “direct source” and manage contract workers; and solutions for data management and analytics.
Owing to the magnitude of the crisis, Spend Matters recently made the series introductionavailable for freeto all readers. PRO subscribers can see our follow-up pieces that profile the other categories and their solutions in that market. We will include a lot of information on each category PRO brief that readers can see without hitting a paywall, but since we also draw heavily from our existing deep-dive analysis of the providers from our乐动体育 database, some information will be available only to our PRO subscribers.
In our first installment, we began our coverage of advanced procurement analytics and three solutions from LevaData, Sievo and Suplari with particular strengths in direct material and commodity analysis — because shortages of direct materials and components will have the most immediate effect on your supply chain.
Now we continue our coverage of advanced procurement analytic providers with three more solutions — from Rosslyn Analytics, SpendHQ and Simfoni, who not only have particular strengths in general-purpose spend analytics, but deep capabilities in getting organizational data into the platform for analysis, defining appropriate categorizations for analysis, opportunity analysis, and spend analytics service support for your organization. This is especially key for an average organization without a strong analytics or data science team. SpendHQ, backed up by ISG, and Simfoni are very service-oriented in their approach, and Rosslyn has the size and the experience in supporting global organizations with dozens of ERPs and source systems that need to centralize and classify the data for proper analysis.
While it is the case that all of the vendors covered in Part 1 are also great choices for indirect spend as well, we should point out that LevaData and Suplari have limited services teams, whereas Rosslyn and SpendHQ in particular have large services / support organizations to back you up, and Simfoni has a GPO model where they can take certain categories off your hands (and a scale up model to support growth in this GPO).
We still believe that long-term unavailability of certain direct materials and components will in turn produce unavailability in indirect products down the line, but stage one of any crisis response must be to keep critical production lines running and focus on direct. Similarly, if an unavailability of supply looks to be permanent, you will need to do some supply chain redesign, and we’ll cover that use case in an upcoming sourcing and commodity management piece in this series.
We will likely still cover other analytics categories at a later time with respect to financial planning & budgeting, insourcing/outsourcing decision support, and so on — but our focus now is on keeping your direct, and then indirect, supply chains running in our cross-platform Coronavirus Response series coverage.
The initial three vendors we profiled are all unique in the spend analytics space in that they have deep capabilities in the analysis of direct material and commodity spend. The three vendors we chose to profile in indirect are all unique in that they have very strong, and proven, services offerings / support compared t0 many of the newer entrants. Rosslyn and SpendHQ serve a large number of Fortune 500/Global 3000 organizations, and Simfoni is proving to be a mid-market leader with its services offering.
If any other practitioners, providers or consultants would like to contribute to this coverage, pleaselet us know亿旺资讯公司相关解决方案,是有帮助的ed procurement analytics and the coronavirus crisis.如果您的组织没有一个先进的酸cing and procurement analytics platform, one of these three platforms could be the most fit-for-purpose, off-the-shelf platforms to help your direct material/commodity-heavy organization analyze its way through the COVID-19 crisis.
每个范畴特定专业在本系列will have three sections:
*Problems and Use Cases.We’ll highlight the problems in force (which will vary through different phases of the crisis) and the various scenarios where solutions can provide deeper insights, intelligence and scalable workflows.
*Solution Rationale and Value. We’ll outline how various solutions can help solve the problems and the specific questions that they’ll help answer.
*Example Providers.We’ll highlight the solution providers that can support the problems and deliver some value.
Some providers are offering COVID-specific programs and “freemium” commercial offers, and we’ll note those whenever we update this piece. We’ll also start the series with providers that we already have deep knowledge on, but we’ve been seeking information from other vendors too.
OK, let’s dive into advanced procurement analytics.