Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

Purchasing Magazine, Bristlecone and SAP getting together to bring you very good discussion on supplier risk management. Webinar will be held on June 24, 2 to 3 PM eastern Time, USA. Contributors are - Paul Teague from Purchasing magazine , Jason Buch from spendmatters , Naresh Hingorani from Bristlecone - Supply chain leader company and Padmini Ranganathan from SAP. As we always talk about spend visibility, data issues, strategic sourcing - these distinguised speakers will bring out more strategic views to the table on how all this can be achieved to analyze your business risks better, upfront. You can register for event by accessing this link and register See you there.

This is the series that I would like to publish over this week - the big strategic confusion. The confusion within the industry managers, sourcing and procurement professionals and IT managers who deal with these systems. The confusion on "yes we want to save, we want to start a strategic plan, an approach to save money in longer term - but what is that plan? what should I look into? How to start, what to start, whom to approach, who are the vendors - what do I need at the end of the day" I know this is inherent confusion for customers as well as providers. As customers doesnt know what they need as there are too many service providers in different layers of the pyramid - including nische as well as end to end, service providers are also in a confusion as to what should they provide? to whom they should approach, should it be overall package on end to end solution or just one services on premium rates. This I call big Strategic confusion. So what is the industry space we are...

Recently I had a blog conversation with Phil Fersht from AMR research Supply Management BPO on the verge of overheating He was really having a good point on how the overall supply chain management market is heating up in a BPO space. More and more companies are transferring their supply chain jobs to offshore locations just like a IT support jobs and when there is no real process strengthning the things are failing down the line. He has a valid point there. In a bad time like this people may think that by just moving a job to offshore will save them money what they want right now. But when the job function is tighly coupled with the business process - if companies do not really look into changing the technology, look into the change within, just offshoring will add to the mess rather than helping out.

A good read by Jason Buch on spend matters on bristlecone SAP relationship on spend analysis. Though I dont agree with him that bcone is just "no ideas only low cost" statement. In todays industry low cost is more of "executing good quality work in a low cost manner" so its strength. But anyway i am curious to know industry players coming into this. Bristlecone has already gone through successful implementation of more than 10 customers in this space with more than 2 years of overall experience with the established team. So its hard to crack. Work watching.

This is a common question that I see people asking in the industry. The next question usually they ask - I already have my data in good shape - why should I pay for cleansing it. My question to all these answers is - YOU DONT KNOW HOW IS YOUR DATA. Why I say that? Because while I am playing with lot of enterprises data in last 5 years i come to know from interactions with customer or people who are maintaining the data this fact. Especially if there are multiple departments handling all kind of data and they dont have a cohesive mechanism to deal with the data as a single form of truth. Now whatever be the reason for your company - its indeed true that data is not in a good shape that it should be. How it effects - you dont have visibility towards your spend properly / by commodities / by supplier groups / by geographies or by negotiating power that you are carrying and last one is risk that you are maintaining. To get this visbility you need a dashboard which gives you analysis power....

Was ist Taxonomie? Wenn Sie das Wörterbuch nachschlagen, Taxonomie bedeutet „die Wissenschaft oder die Technik der Klassifikation ". Wikipedia gibt ausgedehnteren Informationen über - „Taxonomies oder taxonomischen Entwürfe“, bestehen aus den taxonomischen Maßeinheiten, die als Taxa bekannt sind (einzigartiger Taxon) oder den Arten der Sachen, die häufig in einer hierarchischen Struktur geordnet werden. Gewöhnlich werden sie durch die subtyp-supertyp Verhältnisse bezogen, auch genannt als Eltern-Kind Beziehung. In solchen einem subtyp-supertyp Verhältnis hat der Subtyp die gleichen Begrenzungen wie der Supertype, auch hat der Supertyp eine oder mehrere zusätzliche Begrenzungen. Z.B. Ein Auto ist ein Subtyp des Fahrzeugs. So jedes mögliches Auto ist auch ein Fahrzeug, aber nicht jedes Fahrzeug ist ein Auto. Folglich muß eine Sache mehrere Begrenzungen erfüllen, als ein Auto zu einem Fahrzeug zu sein. „ So jetzt kennen wir Grundlagen - es ist eine hierarchische Struktur, mit einer B...

We discussed taxonomies last time. Depending on your goal - whether its sourcing optimization or master data management or just spend analysis you can decide on what taxonomy you want to use - either global one like UNSPSC or your own or something available through service provider. Based on that taxonomy your service provide can run the engine and give you data classified. The delivery mechanism comes next. You need a dashboard kind of solution to slice and dice your data so your analysis give you information. So you got it. You can identify negotiable vendor set and go for savings. Thats one way of looking at it. If your goal is sourcing optimization and master data management then you need something additional - data attribute enrichment. What does that mean? You have material master with you at different plans, site and systems. Do you know whether its in good shape? Does it contain only 1 record for each material or there are many? Your system might be capable of doing search of s...