Spend Matters

H7N9 Under Control, Apple to Build Factory in Texas, Best Buy Cuts Costs, Google’s Conversational Search

Sydney Lazarus — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:23:06 +0000

The H7N9 virus appears to be under control, according to UN experts. The epidemic has led to roughly $6.5 billion in losses. Apple, Inc. plans to invest $100 million in building a factory in Texas, where a line of Mac computers will be built. As part of its turnaround plan, Best Buy is pursuing more aggressive cost-cutting strategies, aiming to slash $400 million of overhead by the end of the fiscal year. Google’s new version of Chrome incorporates “conversational search.”

Transactional Data Interchange: The Large/Small Company Disconnect

Jason Busch — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:01:46 +0000

KPMG’s 2013 Global Manufacturing Outlook features a diagram that immediately caught my attention when I saw it. It shows the variance of how large (companies over $5B in revenue) and smaller companies (companies under $5B in revenue) transact and share information with supply chain partners. Note: the data contained in the study is based on a survey conducted with The Economist with a decent sample size (300+ companies). KPMG’s findings suggest that the dominant form of data-sharing for large companies are web-based partner portals (coming in at 40%) when it comes to transmitting information across the supply chain. 39% of [...]

Supplier Network Fee Modeler: A Q-and-A With the Inventor (Part 2)

Jason Busch — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:09:21 +0000

Please click here for the first part of this interview. Spend Matters: Ariba’s fees look inexpensive compared with p-cards. What’s the difference for suppliers? Purchasing Insight: This is a good point. Anyone who wants to criticize Ariba should look at merchant fees. But it is fair to say that merchant fees are based on a percentage of the value of a sale where there’s a margin that is also proportionate to value of the sale. This logic doesn’t apply with invoicing. Spend Matters: How do supplier network fees compare to the process improvements savings companies realize through A/P automation and [...]

Hackett’s P2P Performance Study: The Best Freemium P2P Benchmark in the World

Pierre Mitchell — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:04:28 +0000

My alma mater, The Hackett Group, has launched their bi-annual Purchase-to-Pay benchmark study. Unlike other free “benchmark studies” in the market which are 20-30 minute survey polls with sketchy data quality, the Hackett P2P benchmark study is in fact a “freemium” version of its full P2P process benchmark that uses the same general methodology as the flagship Hackett procurement functional benchmark that generates the venerable Hackett “world class” benchmarks, except that in this case it’s a “top performer” peer group that is essentially world class for just P2P performance. What this means is that you get: A true apples-to-apples comparison [...]

E-Sourcing: What’s Changed in the Past Five Years?

Jason Busch — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:14:52 +0000

This post discusses the capabilities and mentions vendors like MyBiz, Ivalua, Pool4Tool, Zycus, Fullstep, b-pack, CombineNet, BravoSolution, Trade Extensions, Ariba, and more! We’re knee deep in our e-sourcing deep-dive analysis of over thirty vendors: Thomas has been sitting through 90-minute demonstrations during most waking hours. I’ve been talking with all of the references provided (and some additional ones as well). Pierre, our head of research, is helping us stitch it all together as we all wade through the large RFP we sent out that kicked off the research phase of our analysis. In June, it will all come together. [...]

Supercharging Procurement’s Buying Leverage

Guest Post — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:09:49 +0000

Spend Matters welcomes a guest post from Jim Kiser of GEP. In today’s competitive business environment, companies are under pressure to increase their profit to achieve higher shareholder value. Companies can raise prices and risk losing market share or cut costs and become more competitive. It is imperative to find ways of increasing buying power to leverage greater value and reduced costs from suppliers. Organizations can develop internal negotiation power by having various departments collaborate on key supplier spend projects that benefit the whole company. Sharing employees and best practices of various departments allows a company to potentially reap benefits [...]

Apple the “Tax Dodger,” Your Donated Clothes, Global Brand Supply Chain Woes

Sheena Moore — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:44:05 +0000

Tim Cook was questioned by a US Senate subcommittee about Apple’s offshore cash, after being accused of “dodging” paying taxes in the US. What really happens to your clothes after you donate them? NPR takes a look. Global brands are still under fire: H&M says orders for clothing made in the Cambodian factory where 23 workers were injured on Monday were placed without its knowledge. Steelwedge announces their latest offering: “The world’s leading manufacturers are recognizing that increasingly complex, interdependent businesses—and the plans built to manage them—will only survive with better agility and resilience built into them,” their CEO says.

Kimberley-Clark on Metrics and Adoption with Ariba

Jason Busch — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:18:43 +0000

Earlier this month at Ariba Live, Kimberly-Clark’s Richard Roe (Project Lead for e-Invoicing and Ordering) gave some background on his company’s supplier enablement and connectivity program. Kimberley-Clark’s goals are pretty much in line with industry norms – improve cycle times, reduce errors, avoid unnecessary human involvement in the A/P and invoicing process, reduce supplier inquiries when self-service code suffices, etc. From a metrics perspective, Roe noted that their goals are to drive 90% e-invoicing and 98% electronic purchase order adoption by 2015. In terms of scaling their volume with Ariba during this time frame, the company is hoping to put [...]

Technology Gives Fresh Take on Supplier Performance Management

Thomas Kase — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:35:08 +0000

Join us for Good Data: Spend Analysis Tactics to Attack Supplier Performance Management on Thursday, May 30 from 10-11am Central. FMC Technologies is an oil and gas industry company with over 18,000 employees, $6.5B in revenue, and a $13B market cap. Like most businesses, they stand and fall with the performance of their key strategic suppliers. The company’s major headache comes from lack of consistent data, terms, SLAs, etc. across the globe: how can they accurately benchmark anything? How do you uniformly define concepts like quality and on-time delivery, for example? The question is as much centered on process and [...]

Invoiceware and Tradeshift Partner: E-Invoicing Goes Global

Jason Busch — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:12:54 +0000

Last week, Invoiceware and Tradeshift announced a partnership agreement to cross-sell and integrate each other’s solutions in the e-invoicing market. For those that do not know Tradeshift, the provider is somewhat of the e-invoicing and supplier network industry trouble-maker. They are upsetting the status quo with a model that threatens disruption through a platform-based approach to connecting different players in the supply chain and allowing third parties to build their own applications on top of their connectivity services. Invoiceware could not be more different – it is a highly focused specialist in Latin American e-invoicing enablement that is tightly integrated [...]