Supplier Enablement

Supplier Enablement - Blog IDEA

As a new blogger I am keen to learn about the essence of a blog. At a recent seminar hosted by BASDA at the Chartered Institute of Marketing it was presented that a blog incorporated:

Issues
Developments
Education
Applications

Tough call to get all those elements in every blog!

Equally there is the challenge to blog regularly, even if that is just a few lines.

Here is my Supplier Enablement IDEA blog

Issues

Depends whether you have a buyer or supplier view?

Here is a buyer quote from the Office of Government Commerce; ““Suppliers are particularly important because their participation, or lack of it, is the one of the biggest potential barriers to the entire eProcurement process”. The issue is self apparent; suppliers can make or break eProcurement.

I don’t have a supplier quote but I do have a collection of conversations that I can refer to. What’s in it for me? I hear this all the time. This tells me that buyers must understand what motivates their suppliers to collaborate for electronic trading. The issue is that buyers should invest time in thinking through how to “sell” to the supplier just as they “sold” the internal business case for eProcurement.

Developments

The age old question; who is going to pay for this?

The view was the supplier will, actually, must pay. Those that consider they have a dominant “buyer position” will mandate their suppliers to do as they say or lose their business.

There is a change afoot that has the buying organization meet the costs that would before fall to the supplier. Enlightened thinking or expediency?

This gets interesting where a supplier may have to meet the cost to trade with one customer because it has been mandated and yet have no costs for trading with another customer. Will this affect a supplier’s decision to commence electronic trading with a customer?

Education

One of the few mainstream analysts covering Supplier Enablement is Aberdeen Group who have just published there 2006 Supplier Enablement Survey, see
http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/RA_SupplierEnablement_RS_2869.asp

Applications

Any buyer or supplier that wants to participate in electronic trading has to think in terms of how that is going to work and want level of collaboration is required of trading partners. Applications that require collaboration include:

Buying and selling of goods and services categorized as; eProcurement, Purchase to Pay (P2P) and electronic Invoicing (eInvoicing). This is applicable to both in-house and outsourced procurement.

Supply Chain/Logistics; in my language getting goods from supplier to buyer (customer) in the most cost-efficient way and on-time. This can be both in-house and outsourced to 3PL” (3rd Party Logistic) and “4PL” providers.

For an explanation of 4PL go to http://www.paconsulting.com/insights/supply_chain/4pl/

Job done!

posted by FrankB @ Monday, April 24, 2006