Managing Services Procurement Categories

February 18th, 2010

New research by Spend Matters  suggests that organisations collectively spend over a trillion dollars per year on a range of services categories. From legal to marketing to print to outsourcing, organisational spending across a breadth of often complex and hard-to-manage services categories typically is large - significantly larger than most companies realise before analysing it - and decentralised. When companies first start to tackle complicated services categories, one of the major challenges they discover is that price is often just one component of many that factor into services spending decisions.

 

For a full look at the findings please log onto -  http://www.spendmatters.com/library/

Posted in E-procurement News, Industry Research, News, Procurement News, Sourcing News | No Comments »

Claritum to Launch “Claritum Connect”

February 16th, 2010

Claritum are pleased to announce the imminent launch of “Claritum Connect” a one-stop online resource for all of their  Clients and Partners, encompassing customer support, best practice guides, training manuals and Feature Request (Ideas) Board. 

Claritum Connect is a central online portal that customers can access with a single log-in.  It currently offers customer support, best practice guides and training materials.  Coming in Q3 of 2010 will be online communities to connect with other Claritum customers and to also facilitate customer branding of their portals. The available resources will include:

• Customer Support & Reporting – An enhanced customer support option that makes it easy for customers to create, update, track and report on customer support cases via the Web.

• Knowledge Library – A solutions library that includes enhanced searching capabilities on a wealth of knowledge including product information, and training manuals and materials.

• Best Practices – A library of best practice guides, webcasts, presentations, case studies, white papers and industry news that provide a clear map to ensure customers get the greatest value out of their solutions including the most advanced capabilities.

• Community - An online ideas board (feature enhancements module, where customers can post new feature requests and vote on existing feature requests), solutions tips, news and updates, as well as upcoming events.

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Saving Money With Software as a Service

February 3rd, 2010

In a time when companies are searching for new ways to save money, a thrifty solution has unexpectedly emerged from the IT department.

Not often equated with frugality, Information Technology (IT) departments are usually very expensive to keep and maintain. They require expensive equipment, software, and a well-trained staff to keep the software up to date.

Companies have traditionally viewed their IT departments as a necessary means to stay competitive and further business functions. However, a new business model is rethinking the relationship between businesses, IT departments, and software vendors. This model reduces the expense of establishing, maintaining, or upgrading important software.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a service delivery model that allows a company to purchase a subscription for the software it needs from a vendor. In turn, the vendor agrees to host the applications on their own servers and maintain it, including handling all issues at the site. The vendor also agrees to provide regular upgrades as part of the agreement.

This is in stark contrast to the traditional relationship held between business and vendor. It used to be that businesses purchased licenses for every computer that would use the software, in addition to paying for a separate contract to train IT staff to maintain the software and respond to programming defects that might arise. When a software upgrade became available, the business had to either pay for the new program or else risk losing ground in the market.

SaaS reduces the enormous upfront cost to IT development, which means a faster return on investment for the company, as well as a more informed decision making process based on real-time information.

As a hosted, monthly subscription service, SAAS allows a business to avoid the risk of making a huge investment with a single vendor. Instead, a company can make quick transitions to another vendor if something better comes around or the vendor cannot deliver what is needed. In this format, the vendor has to provide a quality product to maintain its relationship with the business. In the meantime, the vendor is responsible for providing security and backing up files, giving the business less to worry about.

SaaS has radically changed the business landscape by introducing a service that reduces risk, while saving time and money. It reduces the upfront cost of acquiring and deploying new software, giving small-sized companies and medium-sized companies a better chance to compete with larger enterprises.

Posted in Industry Research, SaaS News | No Comments »

SaaS BI will be big in 2010

February 3rd, 2010

Mounting evidence suggests that in 2010, the hottest segment in BI (business intelligence) software will revolve around offerings delivered from the cloud, thanks to increased product sophistication, strained IT budgets and other factors.

A new IDC report finds the SaaS BI market will experience triple the growth of the market overall, soaring at a compound annual growth rate of 22.4 percent through 2013, although actual revenue totals will remain small compared to on-premise BI applications.

There are plenty of good reasons to adopt SaaS (software as a service) BI, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

It can get BI tools to typically under-served users, such as front-office workers, a lot faster, analyst Boris Evelson wrote. “The model may also become more attractive as enterprises turn to on-demand software for other needs, such as CRM (customer relationship management).


“The more applications (and therefore BI data sources) are moved into the cloud, the fewer reasons there may be to build and operate BI applications in-house,”

 
Claritum has recently partnered with MicroStrategy software to provide support for improved decision-making through realtime business intelligence,

Under this agreement, Claritum’s users can seamlessly use the Best of Breed Business Intelligence platform including intuitive management reporting, interactive performance dashboards and powerful analytics.

Posted in Claritum News, Industry Research, News, Product News, SaaS News | No Comments »

Universities struggle with budget cuts.

February 3rd, 2010

The Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) has been instructed to save £1.9bn, including £400m in 2010-11, mainly through making the research councils, universities and colleges “more efficient” as a result of the 2009 budget.

Universities are worried that the savings will lead to a reduction in their overall funding, particularly for teaching, and for widening participation to low-income families and ethnic minorities.

Universities have been hard pressed to “do more with less.” With this backdrop, it not surprising for the public sectors to follow the lead of private companies in using advanced Sourcing and purchasing technologies hitherto available only to large organisations to drive down cost and improve efficiency.
With an On-Demand deployment model, companies pay predictable fees to gets the results of efficient strategic sourcing and competitive bidding without worrying about managing software and hardware or stretching their already slim IT staff to manage the technology infrastructure.

More and more Education and public sector organisations are using the power of these new Spend Management delivery platforms to achieve significant savings that can then be put to work in other areas. And the added intangible is that it also makes the Sourcing process more transparent.

James Samuels, CEO of Claritum Said - “We’re seeing huge demand for our SaaS spend management application from both private and public sectors. The combination of spend analysis, sourcing, e-procurement, supplier network and catalogue delivers significant and measurable benefits.”

Our clients love the low upfront costs, small ongoing commitment leading to a quick ROI and significant hard cash savings. We have a number of leading Universities using the Claritum System, that have announced 17-25% savings and there’s more to come

Posted in E-procurement News, News, Procurement News, Public Sector News, Sourcing News | No Comments »

Claritum set for winter release

January 15th, 2010

Details of Claritum’s Winter 2009 Release have been announced. 

 
Service Hub
Service Hub ensures users maximise return on investment from Claritum and benefit from an increasingly wide range of fully integrated software capabilities and best of breed services. Within the Service Hub, key modules and configuration options that are available, Users can also explore additional features and assess whether they are suitable for their organisation.
Not only that, Service Hub is the place to go for professional and education services such as training and consulting services.

 
User Interface Improvements
As Claritum continues to focus on combining increasingly powerful capabilities with an improved user experience, the Winter09 release includes a series of User Interface improvements. Such as a new, simpler side menu, improved colour scheme and page layouts, more on screen alerts and prompts and better searching and filtering capabilities.

 
Process Optimisation
Claritum continues to focus on process improvements to help users deliver more value from their Claritum deployment. Additionally, our team constantly reviews and improved system performance to ensure the system will perform optimally leading to even better user experience and less downtime.

 
Internationalisation
As Claritum continues to grow its international client base, the system can be now deployed for use in most countries with Latin based alphabets.

 
Localisation
For organisations with users accessing Claritum across the world, we have improved the localisation capabilities. Now individual users can configure their system to their own time zones, use local date, number and address formats suitable to their location. ISO (metric) and imperial sizes can also be configured within the system.

 
Management Reporting (Stage 1)
Following a comprehensive review of Claritum’s management reporting, many users will be aware of Claritum’s powerful Business Intelligence capability is coming soon!
As an interim measure, or for users wishing to continue using the current reporting functionality, we have rationalised the reports available to dramatically improve data quality and data availability.

 
Supplier Management
In response to feedback from both buyers and suppliers, Claritum is providing more and more capabilities for suppliers. Not only will this approach deliver further process optimisation but ensure supplier realise tangible benefits from Claritum to their business.

 
Powerful User Education Resources
From the Winter09 release your users will have access to a comprehensive range of Quick Start Guides, Webcasts and a Knowledge Bank of useful information.

 
Enhanced Security
Security of data is always paramount to Claritum, so we’re increasing the level of security that comes as standard within the deployment. From the point of release onwards, all usage of the system will be secured using the highest industry-standard encryption available - this is the same level of protection offered by online banks and financial institutions.

 
Looking Forward - Spring 2010 Release

Enterprise Level Business Intelligence - Coming Soon!
From the Spring 2010 release, users will have the option to add powerful and real time management reporting and onscreen dashboards to the Claritum system.
With Claritum’s improved BI capabilities, users can analyse your data, build their own reports and dashboards and publish information in powerful onscreen reports or timed emails.
This will provide a unique and granular insight into organisations print spend, system usage and supply chain to ensure compliance to best practice, streamline operations and empower your users and executives to make informed business decisions with real time data.

Posted in Claritum News, News, Product News | 1 Comment »

Manufacturers should address indirect spend.

January 12th, 2010

Many Manufacturing organisaions need to focus more time and energy into Indirect spend areas.
 Large organisations typically focus on Direct Material sourcing activities as these are much easier to measure though Purchase or Material Price Variance (PPV or MPV). More mature sourcing organisations need to focus on “indirect” areas to continually drive savings impact.

There are a few obstacles that organisations need to overcome to address their Indirect Spend and a few ways to address them:

 

1. Unknown Spend- Because Indirect categories are usually not managed centrally, it is challenging for organisations to get their hands on the data. To solve this, they need to reach out to key suppliers for data collection. Most indirect suppliers will have good systems and can readily provide information on who (from an organisation) buys what from them.

 

2. Resistance to Change- Just because a supplier has been a supplier for a long time does not necessarily mean they are the best supplier in terms of price and other service requirements. Testing the market and potentially forcing a change may be in the best interest of an organisation.

 

3. Hard to Track Savings- Direct Material Savings are easy to track through PPV or MPV. Indirect savings are usually not as straight-forward to track. In addition to comparing old invoice price to new invoice price, organisations also need to take into consideration other factors such as demand management.

 

4. Lack of Procurement Influence/Control- Again, because savings are harder to track it may be tough to show Procurement’s value. Relationship building in the indirect area will need to happen gradually over time.

Posted in Corporate News, Procurement News, Sourcing News | No Comments »

Recovery forces firms to change approach to supply risk

December 22nd, 2009

The global recovery is ushering in a new business climate that will permanently change the way organisations think about and manage supply risk, experts predict.

The global financial crisis has taken supply risk to a new level. More than 75,000 businesses in the US have filed for bankruptcy since the beginning of 2008 and the number is expected to rise again this year. Credit remains extremely tight. And inventory and capacity reductions, layoffs and hiring freezes have reduced suppliers’ abilities to respond to fluctuations in demand.

Companies that take these issues head on and attack risk now will gain not only a valuable insurance policy against disruptions to their business, but also competitive advantage and substantial bottom-line savings. But doing so requires a new approach.”

Firms should not to be fooled that supply risk is receding because the economy is improving. Companies will face more supply risks and challenges than ever before

Organisation need the right tools and processes in place to effectively manage and overcome them such as Including risk management in sourcing strategys. Increasing the frequency of supplier performance reviews. And automating supplier management process.

Traditional, manual, spreadsheet-driven approach traditionally used to manage supply risk “will no longer cut it”. Instead Organisations need to use flexible, technology-based solutions and processes that allow them to respond quickly to changes in market conditions and business needs.

Posted in Corporate News, News, Procurement News | No Comments »

Local Councils expect their efficiency savings to fall short of the government target.

December 18th, 2009

Councils expect their efficiency savings in the current financial year to fall short of the government target - after comfortably exceeding last year’s goal.

Latest figures from the Communities and Local Government department (DCLG) show that local authorities expect efficiency savings to reach £3.1bn by March 2010 - the end of the second year. The expected total was £3.2bn.

Councils surpassed their targets in 2008-9 by registering £1.76bn worth of value-for-money savings.
Local government has an overall target over three years of £5.5bn - increased from an initial figure of £4.9m.

Communities secretary John Denham told MPs: “I want to ensure that councils are performing as efficiently as possible and making the best possible use of every pound of council tax.

I am pleased to be able to confirm today that councils have forecast efficiency savings of over £3bn by March 2010, making good progress towards the target of £5.5bn by March 2011”

The recent economic turmoil not only forced many small and large companies in the private sector to rethink their cost management strategies, but also prompted governmental bodies and not-for profits to emphasise agility and be more efficient.

The current climate has meant local authorities have been hard pressed to “do more with less.” With this backdrop, it not surprising for public sectors to follow the lead of private companies in using advanced Sourcing and purchasing technologies hitherto available only to large organisations to drive down cost and improve efficiency.

More and more public sector and governmental agencies are using the power of E-procurement delivery platforms to achieve significant savings that can then be put to work in other areas. And the added intangible is that it also makes the Sourcing process more transparent.

James Samuels, CEO of Claritum Said - “We’re seeing huge demand for our SaaS spend management application from private and public sectors. The combination of spend analysis, sourcing, e-procurement, supplier network and catalogue delivers significant and measurable benefits.

Our clients love the quick ROI and the significant hard cash savings. Clients such as the London Borough of Enfield, Ealing and Greenwich have announced 17-25% savings and there’s more to come”

Posted in Claritum News, News, Public Sector News | No Comments »

Claritum win UKTI export competition.

December 15th, 2009

Claritum are pleased to announce they are one of ten winners of the UK Trade and Industry’s Trade Month competition which was run in the Daily Telegraph during October, and offered the winning businesses a chance to win export advice and support packages. The Overseas Market Introduction Service (OMIS) is specially designed for ambitious companies keen to develop their business overseas.

A Spokesperson from the UKTI said “We have been delighted by the high standard of entries which truly reflects the ambitious and entrepreneurial spirit of British businesses.

A UKTI International Trade Adviser will sit down with each of the winners to determine the level of service most appropriate to their strategy for diversifying their business”

Posted in Claritum News, Corporate News, News | No Comments »

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