CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE: Allocation Network — industrial sourcing and supplier management for COVID-19

In response to the coronavirus outbreak, this Spend Matters PRO series examines selected technology providers that procurement, finance and supply chain organizations should explore to reduce and mitigate COVID-19 supply risk — and to recover faster on the upswing. The introduction to this series grouped the technology providers that we will cover into five specialty areas, with one vendor shown here as an example:

* Supply risk management (e.g., riskmethods)
* Sourcing and commodity management, including advanced sourcing, direct sourcing and commodity management to help dynamically plan and source (e.g., Allocation)
* Advanced procurement analytics to enable direct procurement and/or to perform “spend planning” when demand drops out or spikes (e.g., Sievo)
* P2P that emphasizes working capital, dynamic discounting, payment control and related finance priorities (e.g., Basware)
* Fraud, P2P and Vendor Management Safeguards (e.g., APEX Analytix)

Today, we profile the third essential COVID-19 procurement technology vendor: Allocation Network (Allocation). It is also one of the most capable solutions for procurement in the diversified manufacturing domain, based on our Q4 2019 SolutionMap ratings for Sourcing and Supplier Management. Allocation provides a direct-materials-centric platform that “grew up” in the automotive industry — arguably the hardest and most demanding for supplier identification, sourcing, first article testing and ongoing quality.

With COVID-19 impacting existing supply bases, especially in China, the rest of Asia and Europe (thus far), there will be numerous emerging needs for companies across manufacturing. These include: rapidly identifying new sources of supply, conducting complex sourcing events for materials, parts and components (which may be tied to broader bills of material), qualifying suppliers based on targeted requirements (e.g., for a specific line), and managing and tracking suppliers based on custom scorecarding.

After the pause button is lifted on production — in cases where one is put into place — these needs will become especially acute during the recovery phase in specific regions (which may be different from the recovery phase in other geographies). For European and North American manufacturers, Allocation is one of only a select few vendors who could become their “go-to” sourcing and supplier management specialist in the wake of COVID-19.

This PRO brief explains why.