Supply Chain Visibility Content

Supplier diversity connects to many trends occurring in supplier relationship management (SRM) these days, including developments like the rise of digital transformation, supplier networks and supplier collaboration.

As a business trying to start the supplier diversity process, it can be a daunting task to wade through-diverse supplier certifications and classifications to help you find a certified minority-, woman-, veteran- or LGBT-owned vendor for your company. But it can be worth it.

The methods that have made supplier diversity successful over the years now apply to other areas of procurement as well. Find out how.

In the world of strategic sourcing, realizing 5 to 8% savings is considered to be impressive. After all, these are the high-spend categories and are supposedly already well-managed and frequently revisited for improvement opportunities. In contrast, when our clients work with Simfoni on tail spend management or low-value spend engagements, we witness savings that can easily exceed 20% from time to time. This article explains how — with the right combination of subject matter expertise, leverage and technology — such savings are achievable.

In the world of tail spend, we typically pursue the following sourcing levers: Demand Challenge, Specification Alignment, Volume Leverage, Competitive Bidding, Alternate Solutions, Supply Chain Optimization.

I’ll explain each lever and illustrate how savings can be achieved in excess of 20%.

Severe weather poses one of the greatest threats and the least predictable risks to global supply chains within our modern globalized economy. The summer hurricane season is a particularly problematic time because nearly half the planet, and a majority of the production capacity for many industries, are located in areas routinely struck by catastrophic weather — East Asia, the Northern Indian Ocean, and the Southeast and Gulf coasts of the United States.

DHL Resilience360 recently released Stormy Weather Ahead: A Global Outlook on the 2019 Season to compile information about the impacts that even small storms can have and discuss the short- and long-term implications of these systems on existing supply chains. And learn ways to mitigate that risk.

For many buying firms, the quality of goods and services are contingent on their suppliers. Suppliers can indirectly impact brand perception from business to consumer. While delivered goods can be inspected through quantitative metrics, there are a host of other metrics that firms should track related to their vendors, including risk and ethics.

Mid-market companies are at a significant disadvantage when compared to larger corporations — a key finding from Simfoni’s analysis of its customers’ procurement and savings delivery capabilities in mid-market companies.

It’s OK to obsess about top-line growth, but what lies beneath is a supply chain that eats into profit since it is not controlled and optimized. Mid-market companies are missing out on at least 5-10 percentage EBITDA points achieved through procurement effectiveness that their larger corporate peers routinely extract.

So why the disadvantage? Essentially the mid-market procurement challenge can be broken into three areas: resources, technology, leverage. Let’s look at each.

Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from John Callan, Senior Director at Coupa.

It’s no secret that businesses struggle with full visibility when it comes to spend management, with many still believing that it simply isn’t possible to find a comprehensive solution that is easy to implement but will also deliver value. Time and time again, we see the price that businesses pay when they lose control over the procurement process.

Spend that is fragmented across multiple categories and suppliers often leads to payments being incorrectly classified — or not classified at all — due to inconsistent and disjointed spend processes. This can render payments invisible, easily becoming the pocket where procurement fraud is concealed.

There are also many operational considerations. When spend is miscategorized, it results in poor, inaccurate data, potentially damaging the credibility of the procurement process. Business leaders need more comprehensive, effective and data-driven business spend management (BSM) solutions.

In Part 1 of AI in Supplier Management: Tomorrow, we began our discussion of some of the AI-enabled capabilities that you can expect to find in tomorrow's supplier management platforms, where we define AI as assisted intelligence (because, as we have discussed, there is no true artificial intelligence in enterprise platforms today and there won't be tomorrow either). AI is a buzzword, not a reality. But we don't need true AI to achieve software that can radically increase our productivity. Reaching assisted intelligence will add multiples to our efficiency and effectiveness.

In our last article, we discussed how tomorrow's supplier management platforms will offer smart, automatic, supplier profile update (suggestions) — taking the headaches out of profile maintenance that results in most profiles being out of date in a supplier management system shortly after they are created; market-based supplier intelligence that is more in line and reflective with reality — and not just the experience of an anomalous customer subset; and real-time relationship monitoring that paints a relatively full picture of the relationship, not just a point-based performance picture.

So what else will tomorrow's platforms do to help you focus more on the strategic side of supplier management? Let’s look at the next three areas:

— Automated resolution plan creation, monitoring and adjustment
— Automated risk mitigation strategy identification
— Optimized real-time resource re-alignment

Indirect spend often gets overlooked by businesses because the outcomes from buying those goods and services are not the company’s core product, which relies on direct spend. But the potential for lost money and increased risk is so great that businesses must find a way to manage indirect spend.

“The broad reach of indirect spend, coupled with a lack of visibility creates risk, so the key to gaining visibility and managing this risk is to prioritize indirect spend management within an organization and start assessing indirect supplier performance in a formalized way,” said EcoVadis, a risk mitigation provider that offers business sustainability ratings and intelligence.

EcoVadis joined us for a Q&A to explore the next steps to figure out how to identify weak points, prioritize areas to defend against and create a plan for mitigating risks.

As the digital transformation of procurement matures, relationships with suppliers are changing — in good ways and in challenging ways. To give us a close-up view of developments in supplier relationship management, we did a Q&A with Daryl Hammett, the general manager of ConnXus, a provider whose SRM solution helps buyers and suppliers work together to be efficient, responsible and sustainable.

Two speeches this week at Basware’s Connect 2019 customer event in Chicago gave glimpses into the future of how procurement technology can make businesses faster, stronger and more efficient — as well as make them better businesses for people and societies.

To do that, businesses will need to harness all the data that’s being generated by devices, apps, the internet of things (IoT) and other technology to offer unprecedented visibility into all transactions — a new concept called “visible commerce,” said Eric Wilson, senior VP and general manager of North America for Basware, a global leader in networked source-to-pay solutions, e-invoicing and financing services.

“Visible commerce is believing that technology and humanity are interdependent and not in competition with each other.”

EcoVadis, which provides vendor ratings and scorecarding for sustainability and broader CSR metrics as a component of an integrated “many-to-many” supplier network and platform, has an aggressive product roadmap to expand how users interact with and leverage the supplier intelligence, which is at the very core of its value proposition.

Today, in this final installment in this Spend Matters’ PRO series based on our analysis from the EcoVadis Sustain 2019 customer event, we turn our attention to the future direction of where EcoVadis is expanding its capabilities. We also include customer/prospect recommendations.

In previous Spend Matters PRO coverage on EcoVadis, we offered a recap and update on the provider’s most recent capabilities and solution footprint — and an analysis of where EcoVadis fits in the broader supplier management and supply chain risk management landscape.

With deadline questions looming about Brexit and high levels of uncertainty about U.S.-China trade negotiations still hanging over global markets, risks to supply chains may already seem well above average. As reported by Resilinc’s EventWatch 2018 annual report, however, some of the greatest risks to supply chain operation may be something that stakeholders don’t realize.