Procurement and sourcing software suppliers make their case
By Paul Teaque -- Purchasing, 8/14/2008 2:00:00 AM
If you’re looking for the latest software to help you better manage your purchasing and supply-chain-management operations, there is a lot to choose from. We asked software suppliers to tell us the most significant and useful features of their products, and to state how their offerings differ from their competitors. Here is what they told us. A cautionary note: We did not test or analyze the software, nor did we research the claims here. But, the descriptions you’ll read will give you a good start on your own testing and analysis. And it’s your testing that counts.
Product: Ariba On-Demand Spend Management.
Latest release: 9S5, March 2008
Most significant features:
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Procurement content allows companies to access a single source of content for all commodities.
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Complex services procurement, which automates key steps in spend management, increases internal compliance to negotiated contracts in complex services, reduces costs and increases amount of spend captured and managed.
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Network-driven collaboration and financing, which gives direct access to third-party financing solutions through the Ariba Supplier Network.
Differentiators:
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Single, integrated platform
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Fast implementation
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Low-cost integration with ERP systems
Contact: info@ariba.com
Product: Basware Enterprise Purchase-to-Pay Software Suite
Latest release: May 2008
Most significant features:
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Ease of use.
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Business rules (such as buying from suppliers who maintain criteria like Green, compliance with bookkeeping standards, etc.) for automation of key processes.
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Visibility and control, including ability to drill down to find root causes of problems as well as opportunities.
Differentiators:
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Drill-down capabilities to find root causes.
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Recognized for strategy, offering and market presence for electronic invoice presentation and payment by Forrester Research.
Contact: www.basware.com/us
Product: Emptoris Core Solutions
Latest release: Emptoris 7, January 2008
Most significant features:
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Spend analysis provides procurement and finance real-time drillable analysis of all non-payroll expenditures to identify savings opportunities and monitor supply-management initiatives.
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Sourcing features automate all aspects of supply negotiations and supports all sourcing events, from reverse auctions to multi-stage negotiations.
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Contract management solution manages all aspects of contract lifecycle. Manages all types of contracts.
Differentiators:
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Spend analysis tool can aggregate spend data from over 25 different types of systems, including every major ERP platform, and analyze spend in up to 30 different dimensions.
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Sourcing-optimization technology considers elements such as switching costs, supplier risk and past performance.
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Contract-management features allow ability to auto capture, control and guide key elements of contract and manage contracts initiated by external parties.
Contact: info@emptoris.com
Product: ePlus Systems, Inc.
Latest release: Procure + for eprocurement, july 14, 2008
Most significant features and differentiators:
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Allows requisitioner to place all requirements on a single requisition and route individual items accordingly.
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Contract items can go directly to a supplier after approval.
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Any actions requiring buyer intervention, such as pricing or sourcing, go to a Buyer’s Workqueue for processing, so buyers only deal with exceptions.
Differentiators:
Buyers can review history, select suppliers, place orders or send items out for quote from the Workqueue, then set items up in the Workqueue so they don’t appear there in the future. Requisitioners don’t need to know if items are stocked, contracted or sole-sourced. ePlus also released Content + Advanced for propduct-data cleansing, classification and normalization; Suppler Enablement, a supplier portal; and Catalog +, that puts all product information into a single catalog environment.
Contact: systemsinfo@eplus.com
Product: Fieldglass InSite 5.0, for managing contingent labor, services and direct hires
Latest release: February 12, 2008
Most significant features:
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Work force listing, a baseline view of a company’s known talent resources and their associated skills.
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Talent searching, so recruiters can search for candidates based on initial job description or other criteria. Includes scoring capability. Recruiters can also do a reverse search to find job postings that match specific talent resources.
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Tagging, to allow recruiters to associate multiple searchable keywords to a candidate.
Differentiators:
Allows recruiters a panoramic view across all potential types of talent pools to better evaluate known resources for future hiring. Leverages retirees, alumni, former interns and former contingent workers as prospective full-time employees.
Contact: spietrzak@fieldglass.com
Product: Global eProcure APT*3.0 Procurement Transformational Suite
Latest release: 2008
Most significant features:
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Patent-pending compliance feature that allows buyers to input Level 1 and Level 2 purchasing data against negotiated contracts and presents savings by region, commodity and business unhit.
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Fully integrated solution, with single vendor master, item master, commodity schema and user master.
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Automated spend classification, using artificial intelligence and a rule-based engine to analyze and classify data from multiple systems.
Differentiators:
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Compliance tool is unique.
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Automatic classification is unique.
Contact: siddeharth.hegde@globaleprocure.com
Product: Iasta Smart suite of products
Latest release: 2008
Most significant features:
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Integrated platforms accessed through a single sign-on.
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Access to optimization technology.
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Access to core functionality such as auctions, RFx, decision optimization, contract management and supplier management.
Differentiators:
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With integrated platform, users can access data without changing applications.
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Pull data from a sourcing event for analysis or upload external data.
Contact: info@iasta.com
Product: Ketera Supplier Connect
Latest release: June 21, 2008
Most significant features:
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Enables buyers to invite suppliers to join their trading network and use workflows to track and manage supplier-enablement process. Provides extensible supplier-information and profile-management capabilities.
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Catalog Manager enables online supplier catalogs.
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Supplier portal provides supplier invoiced management, order acknowledgement, visibility to purchasing transactions and history, self-service profile administration and a single window to manage all buyer relationships.
Differentiators:
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Ability to tailor and manage supplier information.
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Out-of-the-box support for supplier diversity information with capability to add certifications or attributes to supplier profiles.
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Tailor supplier-enablement campaigns for specific objectives.
Contact: ketera@ketera.com.
Product: Oracle Supply Chain Management
Latest release: January 2007
Most significant features:
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Open, integrated solution.
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Users can leverage real-time information to predict market requirements and risks, adapt to changing conditions and align operations across the value chains that maximize value creation by integrating and optimizing supply, demand and design chains.
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Drive growth through innovation.
Differentiators:
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Demand management, transportation management, procurement, product lifecycle management and sales and operations planning.
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Open, integrated and modular based on standards-based architecture.
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Embedded analytics with executive and operational dashboards.
Contact: sales@oracle.com
Product: SAP e-sourcing, SRM and Contract Lifecycle Management
Most significant features:
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Support for packaged master data and process integration between SAP E-Sourcing and SAP ERP.
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Integration with SAP Spend Analytics for creating E-Sourcing projects and events leveraging spend data.
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Ability to launch sourcing- and contract-related projects from user-defined forms such as intake requests.
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Supplier Relationship Management offering has “enhancement packs” that users can apply on top of the Business Suite platform and easily select individual features to enable. though a configurable switch framework. This will meet a critical customer requirement to be able to adopt innovations without massive and costly upgrades.
Differentiators:
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Enhanced services procurement process through the entire source-to-pay process. SRM 7.0 includes support for complex service hierarchies, source of supply determination such as a pre-defined supplier list or a global contract in ERP, demand aggregation for service bidding, with tighter integration between ERP and SAP SRM and with suppliers for online collaboration. Suppliers can collaborate on the service order definition during the bidding process by proposing changes such as substitute or alternate items and additional line items.
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Support for invoice creation from confirmed service entry sheet, credit memos based on pre-existing invoices, and ERS (evaluated receipt settlement) invoice posted to SAP supplier self service.
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Self-service procurement process is enhanced through team purchasing concept to increase efficiency. Team purchasing enables users to define substitutes who can then access and act on shopping carts and other procurement processes.
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Tight integration to ERP.
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Global Contract repository is supported in SRM 7.0 by consolidating contract definition and usage across multiple backend ERP systems. This allows for flexible usage of contracts as a source of supply in SRM system as well as ERP system.
Contact: lalitha.rajagopalan@sap.com
Product: SAS Demand-Driven Forecasting
Latest release: June 2008
Most significant features:
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Develops an accurate consensus forecast to aid sales and operations-planning process, which helps purchasing plan and source appropriate quantities of raw materials.
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Forecast at any level of product hierarchy for hundreds of thousands of data series.
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Reduces time to drive supply chain and realize savings in time and money.
Differentiators:
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Only statistical forecasting engine that automatically creates business/product/materials hierarchy on the fly.
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Provides interactive dashboard and balanced scorecard to share across an enterprise that disseminates forecast performance metrics and tracking reports.
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Integrated what-if scenario planning tests scenarios using preset parameters to determine the impact of the forecast.
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SAS also offers spend analysis software that optimizes price, quality, performance and supplier risk; Sourcing Data Quality software; Warranty Analysis software; and Service Parts Optimization Software.
Contact: ritu.jain@sas.com.
Product: Zycus Spend Analysis’ iSource
Latest release: June 2008
Most significant features:
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Ease of use. Requires almost zero training.
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Based on Web2.0 technologies that provide drag-and-drop creation of complex RFP/RFI/RFQ, graph-driven analysis and ability to execute multiple award scenarios.
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Global customer support, multi-lingual and around the clock via chat. Also, the Customer Tracking System online help for tracking problems at every stage until resolution.
Differentiators:
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Focus on ensuring user adoption and actual savings.
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Web 2.0 and Artificial Intelligence enable combination of technological sophistication and user friendliness.
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24X7 global, multilingual customer support.
Contact: anurag@zycus.com.
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