Today’s post is by Troy Lowe; Vice President of Development at SafeSourcing.

There are many devices out that can help protect you and your home. One such device is a smart doorbell. There are several companies that make such a device. These devices can be attached to your WiFi network and setup to send you alerts when someone rings the doorbell. You can then view and talk to the person at the door using an application on your phone. Using this feature allows you to interact with whoever is at the door and gives the effect that you are home even if you are not.

With some of the devices you can view more than just your doorstep. With their 180 degree view you can set up zones that will notify you if any motion is detected within the zone at any time of the day or night. The video can be recorded and stored on the cloud for later viewing.

If you would like some help finding a smart device, we can gather all the necessary information for you and help you decide which device meets your needs. If you would like more information on how SafeSourcing can help you, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service representative. We have an entire team ready to assist you today.

We look forward to your comments.

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Todays post is from Ronald D. Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing.

According to Wikipedia, in general usage, complexity tends to be used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement.

Definitions are often tied to the concept of a set of parts or elements which have relationships among them differentiated from relationships with other elements outside the relational regime.

So how does one define a complex e-negotiation event? On the surface it may be an event with a large number of line items within a particular product set such as MRO or Fleet Maintenance in the distribution space or raw materials used to manufacture components that require special handling, shipping and standards adherence. The amounts of the total spend for an event really has nothing to do with the complexity of the event. The complexity is determined by the data points requiring management in order to drive the best possible value to the buyer and the supplier.

This author would suggest that any event including multiple market baskets, thousands  of  SKU’s all with different specifications, order quantities, delivery locations, multiple suppliers not bidding on each line item, a split award of business and the size of the spend and optimization scenarios qualifies as a complex event. Adding to the complexity may be the overall strategy required when sourcing the right mix of suppliers to compress pricing properly and drive early and consistent bid activity. This can be further complicated by trying to determine the correct decile based sourcing strategies for the event and including product affinities where they make sense. And that sometimes means they may not make sense. Think of the old examples of baby diapers and beer sales going up on Saturdays and being purchased by men. Do you know why? It’s an old example of big data. Think sports?

The above example would qualify as organized complexity where there is a non-random, or correlated, interaction between most of the parts. In order to support  complex events, your e-procurement solution provider needs to have an understanding of the specific market place, practices and processes in place that allow them to drive these activities in order to bring complex events to market  in the shortest period of time. Generally this should occur within less than three to five weeks from event notification to event completion.

Last year, this author tried to define the relative complexity of the retail environment and its potential impact on the use of e-procurement tools. Specifically we identified the following areas of interlocking complexity.

1. Supply Chain complexity.
2. Rate of change in the global supply chain.
3. Long term inherited supplier relationships.
4. Lack of Accurate data.
5. Dysfunctional ERP systems
6. Lack of retail procurement staff.
7. Lack of time.
8. Multiple sources of supply.
9. Limited view of new sources of supply.
10. Confusion as to who’s the customer and who’s the supplier
11. Sales People
12. Third Party Providers
13. Collaboration complexity.
14. Lack of an integrated view of the category spend
15. Not understanding the relationships or affinities of your products and services.

Being comfortable that your solution provider understands your market place and has a well defined process for hosting Complex e-negotiation events insures that they are not difficult to host and drive a well summarized and optimized result set.

If you’d like to learn more about sourcing complex categories, please contact a SafeSourcing customer services account manager.

We appreciate and look forward to your comments.

Today’s post is the SafeSourcing archives

In May’s 2014 Issue of Computerworld, the author, Howard Baldwin, makes a compelling case for the advantages of companies to use open source solutions in their business.  From business agility to improved quality and reliability the increasing adoption of open source technology has shown that its popularity will continue to grow.  Dictionary.com defines open source as “pertaining to or denoting software whose source code is available free of charge to the public to use, copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute,” so it is no wonder why this technology would be attractive.  Today’s blog will focus on some areas to keep at the forefront when evaluating open source applications.

Experience – Since there are dozens of new open source applications appearing every week, it is important to validate which companies have tools that will save a company as much time as they will money.  The only true way to uncover that is by digging into the companies that are currently using the technology and what they have to say about their experience.  New open source solutions without any major users aren’t necessarily solutions that should be automatically discounted but they are ones that will need to prove themselves even more during the Request For Information and Proposal stages.

Documentation – Open Source companies have been notorious for offering little to no useful documentation on how to implement and configure their solutions.  While this has gotten much better in the last ten years, it still has a long way to go to catch up with its mainstream “for resell” cousins’ polished user manuals.  Making it a condition of any Request For Information to review this documentation is critical.  Since these are freely available open source applications, this should easy and, in fact, evaluations of open source documentation can begin even sooner than an RFI might be issued.   Good documentation of the tool and the source code is key to evaluating how useful it will be for a company.

Evaluate the code – Besides the cost aspect of open source technology, it is the access to the source code behind the tool that makes open source such a popular concept.  Being able to use, manipulate and manage the custom changes needed is critical for most companies’ use of open source technology.  As mentioned above, because it is open source, the source code is generally available and ready for review any time an IT team is ready to evaluate it.  Verifying that code is annotated internally well and that its classes are also well-documented in external documentation is an important step in the decision to adopt it.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can assist you evaluating an open source solution or on our “Risk Free” trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.  We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

We look forward to your comments.