Grading performance: SaaS-based Emptoris 7 offers new supplier management capabilities
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/16/2007 12:00:00 AM
Emptoris became the latest e-sourcing vendor to embrace the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model when it unveiled Emptoris 7 last week.
“Companies new to supply and contract management want a quick on-ramp—and the flexibility to grow and eventually take on more advanced capabilities,” Avner Schneur, president and CEO of Emptoris, said in announcing the new release.
While acknowledging the SaaS model has become an attractive selling point for e-sourcing solutions, Schneur said Emptoris is more excited about the new supplier performance management capabilities the new platform offers.
Industry analysts have noted that manufacturers are interested in solutions that offer enhanced ability to monitor the performance of suppliers across global supply networks. Schneur said Emptoris 7 can support those objectives with the following features:
• Enhanced Monitoring Capabilities, including overall supplier performance scores; balanced scorecards by category and location; and trend analysis and formula-based alert capabilities that identify flagging vendor performance and issues before they can have a significant negative impact.
• Best Value Negotiation addresses a key deficit in most sourcing programs: the reverse auction format that injects a lowest price bias, without properly factoring business goals and constraints (e.g., supplier allocation, split awards, supplier diversification, or geographic constraints).
• Global Program Management delivers several new innovations to support global deployments and global program management. Sourcing organizations are increasingly trying to understand and document the impact they are having on their company’s overall profitability and growth. With this release, Emptoris provides a savings database and mechanisms to capture savings from sourcing projects, and executive roll-up reporting that includes visibility into the savings contributions by division, category, project, or event type.
