SRM for the Real World
The Real World
In the real world, suppliers manage the bulk of your costs and outsourcing is increasing that trend. In the real world, person-to-person interactions determine pricing and service levels between buyers and suppliers. In the real world, supplier relationships are managed across an array of stakeholders that generate millions of communications annually. In the real world, the purchasing department doesn't have a mandate to force these millions of interactions into a simple approval system.
Short of waiting for financial distress to create a purchasing mandate, how do you create an environment that makes it easy to source the right way and generate sustainable performance improvements?
Frictionless SRM
Frictionless SRM is the only solution built from the ground up with the real world as its design principle. Frictionless SRM is a pre-integrated suite of software modules developed to manage all of your person-to-person supplier interactions from proposal, negotiation, contracting, and ongoing performance management.
- CPO Central - an executive dashboard that enables portfolio management, business process management, and performance analysis, so that executives can monitor all supplier activity;
- Spend and Compliance - a full analytic capability to analyze past and forecasted spend to identify savings opportunities and track spend against contract to capture savings;
- Enterprise Sourcing - a complete negotiation tool kit including demand aggregation, RFx, auctions, and constraint-based optimization;
- Contract Management - manages the contract lifecycle, enforces internal policies to eliminate maverick spend and ensures compliance;
- Vendor Management - offers a complete view of vendor activity and performance within an organization, including a supplier portal, supplier scorecards, and supplier self-registration; and
- Print XPress and Workforce XPress - funnels all demand to preferred suppliers, makes it easy for internal customers to source, provides purchasing with complete visibility, and reduces the total cost of supply.
Degrees of Freedom to Manage Your Reality
At its core, its DNA, Frictionless SRM gives you the degrees of freedom to manage your reality. Through Frictionless DNA (Dynamic, Networked, Adaptive), you are able to model the unique needs of your organization, without any custom coding required. Frictionless DNA enables "on-the-fly" changes to the system structure, mass customization to model business processes, and a highly adaptive structure that can be changed even after deployment.
Move Up the Curve
As with any business software, the greatest benefits come when combined with process and policy change. To address this, Frictionless' strong customer community, a free service to all customers, provides a forum to discuss lessons learned and best practices. What are the benefits of an effective SRM program? Savings delivered against the total cost of supply - not just reducing suppliers' profits; greater cost savings; repeatable, auditable processes; reduced cycle times; and enhanced supplier relationships are just a few. As a greater percentage of the process is managed in a common system with purchasing's leadership, the organization moves further up the value curve.
Frictionless customers move up faster than anyone else. For example, a Fortune 500 financial services firm has increased its spend under management in two years from $100 million to $2 billion since implementing our platform.
What companies have implemented Frictionless? Customers include: Bristol-Myers Squibb, Telewest, KPMG LLP UK, United Utilities Plc, MetLife, Pantellos, Alticor, TDS, Prudential plc, CIGNA, Wachovia, and Philip Morris USA.
