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What should an SRM technology solution do? Information and technology solutions should enable core procurement goals and processes, ranging from supplier business reviews to formal audits and management reporting. However fundamentally, SRM technology should address the organisation’s business challenge. For example, whether that is regulatory within financial services or CSER / sustain- ability in FMCG, through to the drive for innovation in pharmaceuticals, the solution needs to enable procurement to achieve these organisational goals. Within this context, it needs to be able to evolve as the business evolves, being flexible enough to rapidly introduce new macro capabilities, as well as being nimble enough to fine tune individual KPIs and weightings. A successful SRM technology solution needs to be muchmore than an information repository. The solution should aimto provide an integrated solution thatmimics the organisation’s behavioural and process patterns, ultimately improving business wide performance. It needs to incorporate a number of key capabilities.
COLLABORATION Collaboration capabilities provide a shared interface where suppliers, buyers, business partners and subject matter experts can connect, jointly share information, and manage activities and events. These are supported by discussion boards, forums and groups, to enhance social collaboration and create virtual teams across functions – both within the buy and supply side of the organisations. Dynamic dashboards featuring live data which are tailored to the audience help to monitor the relationship and governance. Ultimately these collaboration features improve team productivity and performance. A 360 degree relationship assessment is another way to measure the quality of a relationship across a number of hard and soft metrics. It is particularly useful for highlighting areas of misalignment and identifying suggestions for improvement. PERFORMANCE Supplier performance improvement is at the heart of supplier management and should link to multiple aspects from the KPIs in the contracts through to the risk, innovation and CSER/sustainability capabilities. Data gathering, reporting, and KPI creation are auto- mated through flexible workflows which ultimately reduce administration burden, to enable teams to focus on improvement plans to address performance challenges. Performance is reported across multiple dimensions and suppliers to enable full visi- bility of performance across suppliers, categories, regions, projects / contracts, and provides a common basis of performance assessment. CONTRACT Many organisations suffer from inability to locate key contracts and ensure that key terms are being applied to suppliers in a ‘closed loop’ manner. The ability to link key contract metadata including durations, values and entities to documents, activities and events is important. Additionally, contract milestone tracking ensures that negotiated contract terms are leveraged throughout the contract lifecycle and actions are followed up by accountable stakeholders. Automated alerts ensure that appropriate resources are involved and sufficient reviews occur prior to key contract dates. Mass data upload or integration capabilities across the whole solution can be engaged to improve efficiency within contracts.
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