Part and parcel of most purchase-to-pay solutions we deliver is a big piece around supplier adoption, collaboration and communication. From orchestrating tailored seminar programmes to distributing email broadcasts and hosting webinars, Wax Digital is often heavily involved in promoting the step-change in the way that buyers and suppliers work together as part of our wider solution delivery remit.

French supermarket giant Carrefour has recently taken this process to its ultimate conclusion with the launch of a new global supplier website, as part of a strategy designed to improve communication between the company and its 62,000 suppliers across the world.

It's exactly the kind of initiative that we promote, delivering a single central point not only of order to invoice management, but also for displaying KPI's, allowing participation in tenders and auctions, and delivering a channel for news, updates and information.

In a post last month I made the claim that “as with many things in life, talk is cheap and since green often equals more expensive few organisations are willing (or able in truth) to genuinely embrace a shift to eco-procurement.” 

It seems that the public at large share the same sentiment, with new research from BT has uncovered huge scepticism from consumers about the efforts being made by retailers to act sustainably.  

While 96% of companies in the sector believe that operating sustainably is important to their reputation, only 3% of customers think businesses are fully open and honest about their actions. What’s more, 33% believe they exaggerate what they are doing to become more sustainable in order to gain consumer favour.  

Perhaps even more worryingly, in the retail sector at least, even the staff display a similar scepticism. The research found that over 30% of them do not believe the organisation they work for is environmentally and socially responsible, while the same number believe that their employer only takes action when forced to by external pressures such as suppliers or customers.  

No doubt a significant contributor to the latter is the fact that, even where companies are actively involved in promoting sustainable sourcing across their supply chain, it is an activity that is largely hidden from the workforce. But this can easily be addressed through a purchase-to-pay solution that factors (and prominently displays) the green credentials of products and services to users across the enterprise, even going so far as to influence the buying decisions of requisitioners. 

It’s not enough to be doing the right thing, you have to be seen to be doing it too! 

One of the major selling points we go to market with is the ability to endlessly configure our solution set to meet customer requirements precisely – we call it ‘no compromise eProcurement’.

Most organisations of the scale that we deal with recognise that their needs – for which read their core business processes – will differ slightly from any other given organisation. Nonetheless, they still tend to believe that the vast majority of the solution they need is a ‘vanilla’ eProcurement system, identical in pretty well every respect to the industry best practice.

It’s a widely shared view that typically leads to one of two outcomes:

»       An in-depth business analysis by an expert team from an experienced vendor teases out the things that make a business different and plans to accommodate, even to enrich those differences by delivering a solution configured to suit.

»       An ‘industry standard’ solution is delivered that fails to accommodate these processes at the outset, and cannot easily or cost-effectively be re-engineered subsequently. At the end of such a contract we are often invited to pitch.

The ability to understand and respond to the complexities of real-world organisations – even where it seems on the surface that they are trying to achieve broadly the same goals by the same means - represents a fundamental difference between a successful enterprise eProcurement deployment and a failing one.

If you’re not convinced, we offer the analysis and specification stage of our work as a discrete project – we’d invite you to try it out, because it brings your business requirements under a powerful microscope and you might even be surprised by what you find.

The latest in Aberdeen Group’s Benchmark Survey’s for eProcurement, sponsored by Wax Digital, identified that many purchasing organisations are still struggling with supplier product data issues. 

Indeed, of the 3,987 suppliers that the average eProcurement enabled enterprise trades with for its indirect spend, only 274 (less that 7%) were found to have electronic catalogues available for users to search and select – this from a community of respondents more than 600 strong. 

Although enterprises have proven successful at driving more ‘spend under management’, they have not been nearly as successful in expanding the base of suppliers transacted through the eProcurement system. Only 27% of the catalogue spend of an enterprise is available to the requisitioning community in existing online catalogues, and nearly 34% of the requisitions generated in the eProcurement system are not based on a catalogue – i.e. the requestor simply describes the item to be purchased rather than including a part number, price and unit of measure.  

The real problem here tends to be one of resourcing. The Aberdeen study throws up a telling statistic here: ‘Best-in-Class enterprises, on average, with 69% of their catalogue maintenance done outside the enterprise, rely more heavily on external suppliers and solution providers to manage their existing catalogues and other supplier enablement activities than All Other enterprises.’ 

Trying to do it alone with supplier on-boarding, often with a relatively small and very busy team, invariably means a concentration on just top tier suppliers. This can accommodate the vast majority of spend, and is obviously the place to start, but purchasing organisations have to chase the entire community for the best possible results and that really means looking to a specialist adoption services team to drive the programme through the chain.