Benchmarking is getting a lot of attention in the e-sourcing world. Ariba Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. is working with the Center for Advanced Purchasing Studies (CAPS) to develop some new benchmarking data that e-procurement adopters can use to track their savings versus other companies' savings in their size and industry brackets.

CAPS and Ariba developed the eC3 program (eC3 for Collect, Compare and Collaborate) where they evaluate the companies' performance in e-procurement adoption and use a series of metrics to establish a company's success in its e-procurement implementation. The participants in the program have data pulled out of their internal systems and compiled with the data from all the other companies. Then median values are broken out based on industry, deployment age, company size, amount of spend and number of POs put through the system. When the program started there were 18 different metrics used. Today there are 70 and the number is growing.

"We've been able to segment out a tier of what we think are the important things for early-stage companies," says Randy Joss, director of customer metrics at Ariba. "Previously, people measured the number of enabled users or the number that had the capability to use an e-procurement system. Now they focus on the active users that actually submit POs." The data is presented to the customer in a spreadsheet with definitions, semi-raw data with details and a formatted output with graphs and hyperlinks to show the top six variables.

Joss says the results sometimes surprise the participants. A large adopter may be confident it has pushed the envelope in its use of e-procurement, but when compared to other companies of similar size and experience, it may find itself lagging behind the others in its industry.

"We were working with one company that felt their deployment was advanced but the top companies in their segment were well ahead of them. It opened their eyes to how they could use this tool to work with senior management to broaden the scope of the program." Joss estimates at least 40% of the companies have used the new data to get more buy-in from senior management for the types of strategies they want to pursue in the e-sourcing area.