Infosys ProcureEdge – Transforming Procurement

Procurement, as a strategic enterprise function, can do more than just cut costs. Despite this, the CPO is still struggling to bring a big part of spending under management, largely due to the procurement of services still being a very complex process.

However, best-in-class business platforms are helping to revolutionize procurement to bring spending under management - an unthinkable outcome in the era of "standard issue" platforms founded on cloud computing, Software-as-a-Service, and Business Process Outsourcing.

Continue reading "To CPOs: Unthink procurement" »

The innovation game is changing. Delivering great products is no longer sufficient for success; what matters is delivering great solutions. This shift from products to solutions matters to everyone. The software companies seizing the lead are those that can best align ecosystems of offers and partners.

Continue reading "Ecosystem - Extended Enterprise Network" »

In a world where labor cost arbitrage has become commoditized, companies are progressively looking at technological transformations to help streamline business processes while keeping an eagle's eye on managing risks.

Business Platforms provide businesses with the most prominent dual benefit:

·         Man power reduction

·         Better quality through automation and hence through minimal human intervention

 

Business Platforms are expected to bring in greater compliance and thus help the management team in better governance by allowing them to concentrate on the core business issues.

Continue reading "Quest for an Optimum Commercial Model for S&P Platforms" »

The foundation of data model is one of the most critical factors contributing to the success of any enterprise software system. A well define and extendable data model will greatly improve the evolution and maintainability of the system.

       

Continue reading "Semantic Source to Pay System - The Holistic Approach to Enterprise Software" »

Automotive industry has always been on the forefront of innovations and fascinates almost all of us in terms of new vehicle models and cool features. During school days my Auto professor used to scoff at industry's R&D  - citing auto industry hasn't really innovated anything significantly after 'automatic transmission' contribution by GM to its oldsmobile model, and that time the focus now just on styling and looks of the vehicle. I still remember one of my close pals in college actually decided to make a career in auto product design in the early part, and eventually became a known name.

Continue reading "Amazonization and Googlization of eProcurement" »

It's a known fact that procurecment practitioners have a penchant inclination for business acronyms. Few months back we were doing an Analytics tool presentation, and the customer suddenly asked - 'There are so many analytics solutions in the market, and while analytics aspect of your solution is impressive, how this is different from other solutions in the market'. And our reply was that - while other solutions have good analytics capability, none of them are providing in-depth collaboration and actionable aspects - the way we do', and this is in fact is very important for procurement professionals. And that's when we started thinking about our idea and articulation around AAA (Automated Actionable Analytics). While this idea is not new, it's a very neat and powerful way of communicating your product roadmap to your customers and internal stakeholder.

Continue reading "AAA - Automated Actionable Analytics" »

Not long time ago most of the outsourcing contracts were viewed as a long term steady business with adequate stickiness - But not anymore. The general perception was - once service provider permeates into customer's organization and becomes its integral part as an extended organization coupled with inherent cost arbitrage, any chances of service discontinuity was unthinkable. This dependency in fact gets increased exponentially over the period of contract duration in the form of additional outsourcing work and collaboration. However the current slow recovery has taken its toll on this illusion also especially for the customers who have for long reaped the cost arbitrage benefits and are looking towards next avenues of cost savings.

Continue reading "Is incumbency an adverse factor in Outsourcing Contract Renegotiations?" »

State water control board in US has recently partnered with a cloud provider to improve water quality by monitoring thousands of miles of creeks and streams in their jurisdiction by watching water quality & problem alert data feed by community through a mobile application.  This is an innovative way to involve community for monitoring the health and conservation of water without requiring any special skill and time. This is also a win-win situation by harnessing the crowdsourced data for a cause society really cares about.

Continue reading "Cloud based Crowdsourcing. Will it be the next paradigm?" »

An IT failure disrupted travel for 50,000 customers of airlines in Australia due to disruption of reservation and distribution software platform. The IT service provider in this case hosts the platform on its own server infrastructure at a data centre in Sydney on a cloud based model.

While there was a service agreement between Airlines and the IT provider, which requires the mission critical system outages to be remedied within shorter period of time, it didn't happen in this instance. This clearly demonstrates that merely having a contract and SLA's agreement in place don't protect any business against downtime in a cloud environment, and it's important to evaluate & construct a robust failover and disaster recovery mechanism in the NEW cloud environment. You need to clearly know that in such case of such eventuality what you need to do for resuming operations through another data centers? How much data you will you lose by the time you resume your operation? How long will it take to resume operation? What's the acceptable level of performance in such instance?

Continue reading "Have you considered disaster recovery in your cloud based service model?" »

Recently I had an interesting discussion with Head of supply chain shared service center (incidentally was also an old acquaintance) of a global organization. While we had difference in thoughts towards captive model approach, I picked something very interesting from him on the approach towards supply chain shared service center. His view was - simplistically, most organizations take a holistic view on shared services around three fundamental parameters:

 

1.      Optimal structuring by resizing the staff and align them to the changing business needs with improvised skills and knowledge. This provides a recurring savings depending on the maturity and efficiency of the current processes.

2.      Optimal location by sourcing the staff from the right place or country which provide the right skills or talent at a lower price - basically labor arbitrage. This also provides a recurring savings depending on the cost of living. Of course other points of considerations are business friendliness, quality of life, infrastructure quality, and currency fluctuations.

3.   Optimal tasking by introducing the right tools, process improvement, service metrics and governance. Over a period of time this provides sustainable savings with relatively less change management issues.

Continue reading "Are you able to balance between process efficiency and effectiveness in your supply chain shared services?" »